ABSTRACT:
New digital technologies enabled the Virtual Reality movement in the 1990s, which led to the euphoric belief that we could virtually teleport ourselves to a distant location with such great realism that we would lose our awareness of the enabling technology. Especially in the particular case of music collaborations, however, it has meanwhile become clear that this goal is unreachable, because of the unavoidable transmission latency over long distances and other secondary factors. This paper explores how we can create new and better design goals for telematic music collaborations by treating telematic systems as a new class of musical instruments. From this viewpoint, the creation of new art forms for the new medium becomes a central challenge, in addition to the development of better telematic technology. In particular, the new works need to focus on the affordances that the telematic system introduces, not just circumnavigate current system limitations.
ABOUT JONAS BRAASCH:
Jonas Braasch is an acoustician, musicologist, and sound artist who teaches courses in Acoustics & Music at the School of Architecture at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. He obtained a master's degree from Dortmund University (Germany, 1998) in Physics and two PhD degrees from Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany (2001, 2004) in Electrical Engineering/Information Science and Musicology. His research interests include Binaural Hearing, Multi-channel Audio Technology, Telematic Music Systems, Perceptual Audio/Visual Integration, Intelligent Systems, and Musical Acoustics. For his work, he has received funding from NSF, NSERC, DFG (German Science Foundation), and NYSCA. As a soprano saxophonist and sound artist, he has worked with Curtis Bahn, Chris Chafe, Michael Century, Mark Dresser, Francisco Lopez, Pauline Oliveros, and Doug van Nort - among others. Jonas Braasch is a Board Member of the Deep Listening Institute (Kingston, NY), EMPAC affiliated faculty, and holds an Adjunct Professor Appointment with the Schulich School of Music at McGill University.