conducted via email on January 20, 2002
GF: To begin with: How do you describe yourself? What´s your profession?
GH: I'm a composer with a strong interest in science and technology. Educated in molecular biology and composition at universities and music schools in Germany as well as the USA, I currently work as an assistant professor at the Münster branch of the Detmold Musikhochschule.
GF: Tell me about your network projects (very briefly). How do they involve the network and which consequences does this have for the resulting music?
GH: Since 1999, I've been working on the Internet performance environment quintet.net that allows up to five musicians to perform live over the Internet under the control of a conductor.
GF: What kind of »product« do you ultimately aim at? Can we hear net audio projects like yours as music like we have known it, or is it fundamentally different?
GH: The product "quintet.net" is a suite of applications consisting of a client, a server, a conductor and a (public) listener. The client and listener applications perform real-time notation displaying the five streams of music on five Grand staves. This, in addition to using the metaphor of a conductor in a network-based performance environment is the novelty of the project or as Chris Brown put it: "Sharing a notation space really broke new ground for this kind of music."
GF: One could argue that since the net is a time-based medium it would be especially suitable for musical application. Do you think that the net has a specific and strong musical potential?
GH: As long as you find appropriate musical forms. It obviously doesn't make sense to perform a Beethoven quartet over the Internet due to the inherent time lags. On the other hand the 20th century has developed plenty of musical forms (e.g. aleatoricism) that can adequately be realized on the Internet.
These lines only refers to real-time music performance. Network-based music installations can also be performed with ease depending on the setup of the installation. The basic problem is not created by the Internet or the network itself, but rather by spatial and social aspects; in other words: In what room is the player (public, private) located, what kinds of interfaces is he/she using or does he/she have access to?
One thing that people evidently have to get use to, is that most music will come out of loudspeakers. Whether this has the potential to provide the same esthetical enjoyment as acoustic instruments in a concert hall can't be answered since diffusion systems are constantly being refined and we don't know where this will lead to eventually. It should also be mentioned that certain acoustic instruments can also be interfaced with the Internet, something that has hardly been exploited yet.
GF: Does the net with all its drawbacks and with all its new options imply special guidelines of what you can musically do with it and what you can not do? Which would that be?
GH: Same as what I stated before, since I'd like to limit myself to live interactive music. Nonetheless, I'm aware of the non-real-time applications of the Net, such as shared production processes and the likes.
GF: Which technical tools or options of musical communication via the net do you miss?
GH: This depends a great deal on your expectations. quintet.net is relatively complete since it deals with streams of abstract messages such as pitch or dynamic (similar to the way MIDI works).
Audio/Video streaming, while technically possible, is much more ambitious and therefore causes more frustration due to the longer time lags, potentially poor audio quality and disparity of performance spaces. You really have people sit in different acoustic environments which is analogous to video chat with separate windows for the participants. Nevertheless, there is also the potential to create virtually unified rooms with some special DSP, something that's already being done for video (albeit with limited success).
The next part asks for more detailed analytical aspects of networked music-making: concerning the listener, the musician, and the arts in general.
GF: The listener of net audio is usually interacting with the production process of the music in one or the other way, and this is just logical, because active involvement is the most characteristic feature of the Internet. Does this mean that interactive audio works shift musical responsibility from the musician to the listener? Is the interacting listener a creater of music?
GH: There are several levels to this question. Research in psycho-acoustics and cognitive psychology have indeed proven that the listener's mind creates the music no matter what music he/she perceives.
As to the production process of music, you can see a steady shift of responsibility throughout the 20th C. Composers first relinquished their responsibility by using serial techniques or chance operations. Using interactive systems is only the next logical step. Still, the creative work that's done by the composer is to define a field of potentialites, which is the space in which the potential "poetry" of their system can take place. The work between composer and listener is shared: The listener thus acts more like a discoverer having to unearth the treasures for which the composer just provides the map.
In quintet.net I devised a strategy how the audience can indeed influence the outcome of a performance. The listener component includes a questionnaire with some basic questions about the performance. The questionnaire can be sent off repeatedly to the conductor at any time. It is up to the conductor to communicate this information to the performers. quintet.net thus uses a political metaphor similar to democratic systems, where an elected government may or may not ignore the people's voice.
GF: How interesting can music be that´s being brought about by musically untrained people? Isn´t that getting close to automatic Farfisa-organs? Or is it not so much the sounding music that´s interesting about net music? Or are there totally new forms of music listening or a new type of listener evolving?
GH: This question touches on the problem of gestural control. With appropriate interfaces and intelligently programmed, inherently musical applications, the audience can indeed explore many dimensions of interactive music. Something that Tod Machover has attempted with his Brain Opera: "The project connects a series of hyperinstruments designed for the general public with a performance and a series of real-time music activities on the Internet. Audiences explore the hands-on instruments as preparation for the performance, creating personal music that makes each performance unique. The project is attempting to redefine the nature of collective interaction in public places, as well as to explore the possibilities of expressive objects and environments for the workplace and home."
GF: Do you see, on the other side, new forms of music making or new types of musicians developing? Is a player using for instance the Quintet-Net interface working very differently from somebody using a sequencer?
GH: I'm not sure whether I can talk about a new type of musician. I've primarily worked with improvisers. People that have a great deal of experience with the "unforeseen". Improvisers are accustomed to probe the spaces they play in. They listen to the reverberations and adjust their performance accordingly. My experience is that they'll do the same thing with Internet-based performance environments. It also depends a lot on the quality and type of sounds they are using. For the first performance, we used mainly synthetic sounds; it turns out that musicians prefer to work with sounds they are more familiar with. Something I tried to respect in the second performance. Also when you work with improvisers you start to realize their personal styles, their musical footprints, which makes every performance unique. The bottom line is: Yes, there is a huge difference whether you stream sequences or have real players performing.
GF: Musicians working in networked environments tend to abandon the idea of the fixed musical work. Your projects present performance systems that keep music always in a flexible state. Does this imply an abandonnement of individual expression?
GH: This depends on how you define musical expression. Once again, improvisers have the ability to create pieces that sounds surprisingly similar from concert to concert. Yet, they are not notated. When I gave verbal instructions during a performance (via the quintet.net command line), I pretty much knew what to expect from a particular performer.
GF: Installation art, performance art, audio art etc. … These art forms all have to do with dissolving the borders between the arts. With the computer and now with the availability of every kind of software tool via the net, the borders bewteen the art forms are still more vanishing. Does this lead to totally new combinations or merges of the old art forms?
GH: The new Gesamtkunstwerk. Well, it's already happening and it being embraced with the same enthusiasm as New Music in the 1960s. People like Netoshka Neznanova (the programmer of nato) have had a great impact on the scene by providing the tools to integrate video into the world of interactive audio, something that included the Internet as a novel performance space from the start. And you can see a new type of artist emerge such as the 242.pilots who do interactive video/audio concerts; people that have a strong background both in music and video. Interestingly, these people are also quite outspoken politically, with an anti-imperialist, anti-globalist stance, or maybe just with another global, more democratic utopia which the Internet can provide the foundation for.
GF: Experimental arts also worked on dissolving the borders between high-brow and low-brow culture. With OrpheusKristall, there is a music tool that uses a kind of avantgarde approach in a public sphere, offering it not only to a small group of insiders, but to everyone. Does net music bring popular and experimental music closer together?
GH: I hope so. A lot will depend on whether the dominance of the modern mass media will eventually ease and allow these new kinds of expression into the mass market. At this point, the media act very defensively because they are afraid of and insecure about the implications of network based dissemination of information and culture. But this is bound to change soon. What [Manfred Stahnke's opera] Orpheus Kristall is concerned I still consider it a high-brow project with the potential of having some impact on low-brow art, similar to how Stockhausen had an influence on the pop bands in the 1960s. I prefer to think of Orpheus Kristall as an example of what Peter Ruzicka called the Zweite Moderne (Second Modernity): a modernity that is communicative and embraces technology and new media as well as the audience.
Trying to be deliberately low-brow, on the other hand, can be a trap, which was evident with Eberhard Schoener's project "virtopera." According to those who have seen it, it was a big mishmash with very little coherence.
GF: What´s interesting about networked music? What´s your musical utopia for the net?
GH: My utopia is seemingless integration of the remote into our everyday musical experience. Faster speeds and bandwidths will lead to higher audio and video quality. We will be able to combine spaces and create a radically new experience in which music and musicians on the network become nearly as tangible as in a real concert space.
I also see a huge potential for composers and performing musicians to escape the pressure the broadcasting corporations are imposing on them (which, by the way, have been instrumental in the development of contemporary music in Germany after WWII, but have all succumbed to the terror of Einschaltquoten, i.e. listener's approval). Streaming your own media content is a reality today, and I'm surprised that we don't see more avant-garde Internet radio projects these days.