Quintet.net

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Quintet.net client component

Quintet.net is an interactive networked multimedia performance environment , which was invented and developed by the composer and computer musician Georg Hajdu . It enables up to five performers to make music under the direction of a conductor over the Internet or in local networks . The environment, which was programmed with the graphic programming language Max / MSP , consists of four components: Server , Client , Conductor and Viewer Add-on for the client component, which is operated by a video artist.

Working method

The players interact with each other by exchanging musical control data ( streams ) via the Quintet.net server. Various inputs can be used for this, ranging from the computer keyboard , MIDI devices and sensors to the built-in pitch tracker. The server serves to multiply the streams and send them to all clients (five players and an unlimited number of listeners). In addition, a sixth player, the conductor, can influence the game through manual or automated intervention.

The area used while two protocols to exchange data: The on UDP patch Open Sound Control for time-critical events as well as TCP for secure data transmission . It also has a mechanism to compensate for temporal deviations (network jitter ) caused by the network .

The open architecture of Quintet.net supports different playbacks such as the built-in sampler , MIDI instruments as well as VSTi plugins and user-programmed software instruments . In addition, there is also a granular synthesis that can be controlled by the players and the conductor.

The notation in real time enables better interaction between the performers: they see the musical events that the participants generate in a space notation on the five piano systems (see picture). The Conductor can also send voices that are displayed on the screen and played back by the players.

The viewer add-on enables the realization of “full-blown” multimedia compositions by using the video processing of MaxMSP / Jitter in its modular architecture. This means that users can easily add new processes. The server also offers a complex mapper and sequencer that allows any input to be mapped to any output (whether audio or video).

The music that has been performed with Quintet.net is generally characterized by a combination of composed and improvised elements. The absence of true synchronicity , which is caused by the usual delay on the Internet, leading to the development of a genuine "Internet" -Kompositionstechnik, which number pieces of John Cage takes the model: determined Cage that notes and phrases within the so-called time brackets ( time brackets ). It is therefore hardly surprising that the composition " Five ", written in 1988 , is among the first pieces to be realized with Quintet.net .

In local networks, however, you can play with unrestricted synchronicity.

history

The basic concept of Quintet.net was presented in 1999 at the KlangArt Congress in Osnabrück . In autumn 2000 the first performance took place as part of the festival “Mystik und Maschine” in Münster , where musicians from Münster, Wiesbaden, Amsterdam, Boston and the San Francisco Bay Area played together. In 2002, the heavily revised software was used for the performance of the opera Orpheus Kristall by the Hamburg composer Manfred Stahnke at the Munich Biennale for New Music Theater . This time musicians from Berkeley, New York and Amsterdam were part of the party, who played live to the stage. In 2003, Quintet.net was expanded to include options for live video processing and was also used in local network compositions, such as in the composition "Hamburg Revisited" by the Hamburg Network Composers' Collective. In autumn 2003 the program was presented at the International Computer Music Conference ( ICMC ) in Singapore. New Zealand composer and computer musician Ian Whalley described Quintet.net as a high point in a review of the conference in the Computer Music Journal , "as it is an immediately pragmatic system that in a musical way overcomes some of the limitations of Internet-based performance."

European Bridges Ensemble

The European Bridges Ensemble has existed for local and internet performances since 2005. The seven-member ensemble consists of the musicians Kai Niggemann (Münster), Ádám Siska (Budapest), Johannes Kretz (Vienna), Andrea Szigetvári (Budapest), Ivana Ognjanovic (Novi Sad, Serbia), the video artist Stewart Collinson (Lincoln, England) and the conductor Georg Hajdu (Hamburg). The term bridges is a metaphor for the intention to bridge cultures, regions, places and individuals, each with its own specific history. The ensemble plays a central role in the German-Hungarian project "Music in the Global Village " funded by Bipolar . The results of the project were shown at the conference of the same name in Budapest at the beginning of September 2007. The European Bridges Ensemble is also Ensemble in Residence in the European Culture 2007 project CO-ME-DI-A (Cooperation and Mediation in the Digital Arts) led by the IRCAM .

Compositions

There are currently more than a dozen arrangements and original compositions for Quintet.net:

literature

  • Automatic Composition and Notation in Network Music Environements. Proceedings of the Sound and Music Conference, Marseille 2006.
  • Quintet.net: An Environment for Composing and Performing Music on the Internet. LEONARDO, Vol. 38, No. 1, pp. 23-30, 2005.
  • Composition and Improvisation on the Net. Proceedings of the Sound and Music Conference, Paris 2004.
  • Quintet.net - A Quintet on the Net. Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference, Singapore 2003.
  • Topicality of a myth. Orpheus Kristall in Quintet.net, positions 51.
  • Preliminaries of a networked real-time composition environment. In: Enders, Bernd / Stange-Elbe, Joachim (Ed.): Global Village - Global Brain - Global Music. Osnabrück 2003.

Web links

Download

The download requires the installation of MaxMSP and Jitter. The software also runs in the free MaxMSP Runtime (current version 5).