Throughout history, our relationships with the places we inhabit have been inseparable from their auditory imprints, like reverberation in a Gothic cathedral, chatter in a bustling marketplace, or a birthday song in a kitchen. These sonic signatures serve as markers of what's familiar, and frame our relationships with places and what we expect to find within them.
Opera of the Future master's student Ana Schon's thesis project proposes a series of live music performances that express the idea that the relationships we build with spaces can be transformed by music performance, and that music performance is deeply affected by the context in which it happens. In these shows, an especially designed digital signal processing system lets performing musicians control modulations on the amplification of their instruments, expressing different levels of exaggeration of unique acoustic qualities of each performance venue captured via impulse responses and other measurements.
Throughout this project, shows that use the system take place in vastly different spaces in the Boston area, including at the MIT Media Lab: Here...NOW premieres this March at the MIT Media Lab as part of Artfinity. A version of the system will also be implemented in the world premiere of the Wellbeing of the World Symphony by Tod Machover in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Live music has always been somewhere we go to connect with others, whether they are audience members or musicians. With this project, Schon argues that a major purpose of live music technology is to facilitate that connection. It aims to make its participants aware of it, to link it to context, to place, to express a fleeting moment and show the significance—in music and beyond—of the places we go and the people we are with.