EO+FLO: Telematic City Jam – Calgary, Sound Kitchen 2022

Following on from the first performance collaboration with the awesome folks from the Ethernet Orchestra (EO), which took place at the Halfback Books & Records in Dee Why, Australia in 2019 (and was partly ‘co-located’ and partly ‘distributed’), and the ‘telematic’ remix we did for their album Oceans Reimagined in 2021, we thought it would be nice to do another joint performance at the Sound Kitchen event, part of World Stage Design 2021 taking place in Calgary (Canada). However, the COVID-19 pandemic was still going strong in 2021, so everything got moved to 2022, giving us all a bit of time to mull over the possibilities of doing our usual ‘intercultural collaborative music-making afforded by the network’ in a ‘fully telematic’ style!

So we reached out to our dear friend Robin Whittaker who was planning to travel to WSD2022 and do a talk about TiMax software/hardware at the Sound Kitchen event and he kindly agreed to join EO+FLO as the ‘on-site’ collaborator. This involved him joining the final few EO+FLO rehearsals via SonoBus from his office/studio in London, so he can get an idea of the instrumentation (flute, trumpet, tenor saxophone, prepared and electric guitars, cello, bass, piano, theremin, percussion, live electronics, voice processing and soundscapes) and plot the 12 speaker diffusion using TiMax, before flying to Calgary and doing the final test of audio streams coming from Londrina, São Paulo, Porto Seguro, Chicago, Valencia, Palermo and Zadar and plotting the 25 speaker diffusion. Needless to say, with many years of live engineering under his belt, it didn’t take much for Robin to get the gist of what will be coming through (even though it was purely improvisational) and spatialise the EO+FLO telematic performance in the Sound Kitchen space to perfection!!! On top of all that, the whole performance was captured with Core Sound TetraMic™ (3D microphone) and streamed to YouTube for the online audience to enjoy!

In times of great uncertainty, global conflicts and physical separation, the aim of this telematic performance ‘experiment’ was to bridge time zones, continents, political boundaries, language and culture and bring us all a little closer together musically! Mission totally accomplished!!!

The 3D recording of the performance was made available to us after the event as a .w64 and .flac files, so Paulo (Hartmann) from EO asked his friend Clement Zular to do his magic with the 3D plug-ins and make a nice binaural recording we can post on YouTube. The flow of that went something like this: Archives Flac > Switch (converter) > Pro Tools (Quad Channel) > Plug In Soundfield Quad/Stereo > Export (Bin). Nice 🙂

Chris (Vine) from EO than did some ‘mastering magic’ of that recording, so it is all ‘LUFS ready’ for YouTube and can be passed onto Roser to do some ‘visual magic’ in Touch Designer and produce a nice video for it! When this is done it will be posted here, and in the meantime, here is the list of ‘who played what and from where’ and some pics with the commentary to give you a better picture of how it all unfolded!

EO performers (remote): Londrina, Brazil: Chris Vine (guitar and synths) and Fábio Furlanete (tenor saxophone); São Paulo, Brazil: Paulo Hartmann (prepared guitar and bass), Chicago, USA: Joy Yang (piano and theremin)

FLO performers (remote): Zadar, Croatia: Nela Brown (soundscapes and electronics), Valencia, Spain: Roser Domingo Muñoz (flute and electronics), Palermo, Italy: Maria Mannone (flute, trumpet, piano, percussion), Porto Seguro, Brazil: Ariane Stolfi (voice and electronics)

Sound Kitchen 2022 (on-site): Calgary, Canada: Robin Whittaker (TiMax)

Before every rehearsal, we did a quick audio test with SonoBus (and a test recording!)

When this was set, it was time to play together (which is the most fun part!) and record (so we can review things like levels and signal dropouts later)

After a few EO+FLO rehearsals, we did a few rehearsals with Robin who joined us from his office/studio (nice to have one of those!) in the UK, so he can do a quick mix in 12 channels and get an idea of how it will all sound on the day in 25 channels!

Needless to say, the network started causing issues in Brazil at the very same time! Whaaaaa???

At WSD2022 Sound Kitchen, Robin did a super talk about TiMax …

…touching upon history of the multichannel spatialisation (so we all learnt a lot!)

Sound Kitchen team posted a link on the WSD2022 website where folks could tune in to hear all the performances, all of which were captured live with Tetra Mic for the full 360 experience 🙂

As the Sound Kitchen 2022 curator, the lovely Brad Ward did a stellar job introducing all the performers (local and remote) …

And whilst he was doing so, EO and FLO folks were chatting in SonoBus to Robin who was ‘standing by’ to start the immersive 25 channel spatialisation!

This is how Robin routed all the remote streams coming from SonoBus into TiMax and mixed and spatialised the performance. If this sounds like something you’d like to do feel free to reach out to him and he will gladly explain what’s involved!

This is the audio Plug-in Clement used to export the recording of the performance into binaural! Neat!

A BIG THANK you to the following peeps and organisations who helped make this performance happen:

• The amazing Robin Whittaker, who expertly spatialised the performance in Sound Kitchen venue in Calgary using immersive spatial audio hardware and software system called TiMax (which you should definitely check out if you haven’t already!)
• The awesome Sound Kitchen 2022 curator, Brad Ward, and the rest of the equally awesome Sound Kitchen team (including Curtis Craig who recorded the concert spatialised with TiMax using Core Sound TetraMic!)
• Our gear sponsors: Bitwig Studio, Audio-Technica, RØDE Microphones, PreSonus and NETGEAR