Female Laptop Orchestra - Telematic City Jam
About: Female Laptop Orchestra (FLO), a music research project established in 2014 by Nela Brown, connects female musicians, sound artists, composers, engineers and computer scientists globally, through co-located and distributed collaborative music creation. Each FLO performance is site-specific and performer-dependent, mixing location-based field recordings, live coding, acoustic instruments, voice, sound synthesis and real-time sound processing using Web Audio API’s and VR environments with audio streams arriving from different global locations (via the internet and mobile networks). From stereo to immersive 3D audio (and everything in between), FLO pushes the boundaries of technology and experimentation in ensemble improvisation and telematic collaboration.
Piece: ‘Telematic City Jam - Sharjah’ explores diverse modalities afforded by the network, alongside a newly-designed instrument, the CubeHarmonic, a musical version of the Rubik’s Cube.
A quantum circuit, accessed remotely through IBM, is used as a decision-making tool to maximize chord variation. The resulting chords are played via a web-based 4D version of the CubeHarmonic, developed by Maria Mannone (FLO) in collaboration with Takashi Yoshino (Toyo University), and used in telematic improvisation alongside acoustic instruments, live electronics, environmental loops, synthesizers, voice, and Web Audio instruments, such as Playsound.space. The audio streams from Brazil, England, Poland, Italy, and Australia are captured and mixed in Spain, forming the foundation for generating interactive visuals.
The resulting audio-visual blend of globally distributed music will be streamed to the FLO YouTube channel and spatialised at the Sound Kitchen performance space. This work fuses networked music performance, computer science, mathematics, and quantum physics.