Just before finals last semester, Matt Roberts and I lead a group of advanced Digital Arts majors to Miami during Art Basel where we performed together as Mobile Performance Group, our student-faculty new media collective and laptop ensemble.  We presented all new material inspired by our surroundings in the bustling Wynwood arts district. You can learn all about the experience from our online documentation or get a taste of things from the video below. Special thanks to Juraj Kojs for the invite.

• online documentation @ mobileperformancegroup.com

MPG Miami 12.01.11 – 5 min, 14 sec

I just returned from several days at the Society for Electroacoustic Music in the United States National Conference.  In addition to hearing loads of new music, I gave a presentation on the MPG Carepackage.  This continues my efforts to get more people using this collection of patches for networking computers running Max/MSP/Jitter and sharing musical data.  Overall, the reaction was positive and I hope many of my colleagues from around the country will follow up by downloading the following files:

• enhanced podcast of lecture – 14.1 MB
• extended abstract in PDF – 104 kb
• MPG carepackage – last update 11 Nov 2009, 185 kb

It is worth noting that I gave this MPG Carepackage lecture earlier at FEAST in November and you can download a recording of that presentation.  At FEAST, I was a little less pressed for time and so it might be easier to understand the more relaxed pace of that version.

I also had a chance to spend some time with two former Stetson students: Jana Fisher (BA/2009) and Chester Udell (BM/2005).  Jana had a piece entitled Top40:France selected for the conference. She created this spectral composition for her senior project and it sounded fantastic on the big Genelec speakers.  Chester had a piece for trombone and live electronics that was really well done and I am not the only one that thought so; Chester was awarded first place in the annual SEAMUS/ASCAP Student Commission!  Big congrats to him as this is a huge honor.

All in all a good conference.  Looking forward to hearing where next year will be held.

Banners around campus made sure you knew where you were at.

If you were not able to attend the FEASt Festival at FIU, you can now download an enhanced podcast recording of my lecture.  The topic of the presentation was network-enabled coordination of laptop performance and featured the public debut of the MPG Carepackage.

The patches involved can be downloaded as well.  There are currently no help patches, so feel free to comment on this post if you have questions about this work.  The demo should work once you have placed the supporting files in the Cycling 74 folder of your Max installation.

• enhanced podcast of lecture – 17.4 MB
• MPG carepackage – last update 11 Nov 2009, 185 KB

This weekend, I will be giving a lecture as part of the FEASt Festival on my work as music director of MPG. I will be introducing for the first time to a group outside of Stetson my MPG carepackage. This collection of abstractions makes it easy for our members to share relevant musical data over the network and focus on the business building instruments that produce interesting timbres.

Special thanks to Paula Matthusen and Nayla Mehdi for the invite.  I am looking forward to it!

MusicLinks screenshot

MPG was invited to perform on the diverse program of this showcase concert for the School of Music.  Our performance in the lobby during intermission featured our trademark shopping cart performance rig and utilized the four story atrium to reach audience members on all levels of the venue.  Selections came from our recent performance at UCF.

• Metalik – MP3, 10 min 22 sec
• Step Up – MP3, 7 min 3 sec
• Press release from Stetson

ABSTRACT – Mobile Performance Group is a collaborative, multimedia project involving faculty and students from Stetson University’s Digital Arts program. The group’s primary mission is to find new ways of presenting art outside of traditional venues. Since 2004, MPG has fulfilled this objective by presenting a number of site-specific performances at festivals and conferences throughout the country. For each performance, members of MPG collect sounds and video from a given locale using digital equipment, edit the material into libraries based on common traits and use these libraries as the basis for a structured improvisation using laptop computers and specialized controllers. Requiring students to design their own instruments for our collective improvisation system provides a platform for them to apply advanced musical concepts including sound synthesis, audio processing, algorithmic composition, and gestural control. This demonstration will address technical methods used and discuss how these reinforce learning objectives within our interdisciplinary university program.

Stephen, Jana, me, Amanda and David. Photo courtesy of David Royse.

• Download Slides in PDF – 7.1 MB
• Listen to MP3 recording – 26.1 MB

This performance was presented as a Thursday night preview to my presentation on Friday morning.  It allowed the conference attendees to experience MPG in our normal setting so that they had a better idea of what we do.  As is our usual method with Collective Sites, we gathered sounds and images from around campus to use as material for our performance.  The following 3 tracks were the results:

• Metalik – MP3, 10 min 22 sec
• Step Up – MP3, 7 min 3 sec
• Starter House – MP3, 11 min 5 sec

The performance also featured the premiere of our new interactive shopping cart.  This touch-sensitive controller is simple enough to allow audience members to join in the fun.  You can see it in action here:

Interactive Shopping Cart from Matt Roberts on Vimeo.

• purchase tracks from iTunes
• order CD/DVD from CD-Baby

Videos on YouTube

MPG4 (4:03) – Megan England and Kevin Ward, producers

Bond in Brooklyn (4:46) – Jhaysonn Pathak and Greg Lenhart, producers

Liberate Your Cool (8:09) – Melanie McConachie and Adam Wright, producers

Co-Chairs: Nathan Wolek and Virgil Moorefield
Additional Participants: Dan Trueman and James Harley

ABSTRACT – The performing ensemble has a firmly established role in music education. In the music conservatory model, conventional acoustic groups such as the chamber orchestra provide students with the opportunity to apply musicianship skills that are taught in the classroom. These skills typically encompass subjects such as theory, analysis and aural skills. Traditional ensembles also have long-standing conventions about how their membership should be balanced based on instrumentation or range. When extending this ensemble tradition into the domain of technology-based music, certain questions commonly arise: what instrumentation is most effective in a technology-based music ensemble? What is the primary intellectual focus of the activity (code, learning software, performance skills)?

Institutions of higher learning produce diverse answers to these questions. Historically, there have been some general trends. Early technology-based ensembles were centered around the synthesizer, and leveraged its timbral variety. Repertoire usually consisted of arrangements or commissioned compositions tailored to an ensemble’s membership. As computer hardware has become less expensive and more portable, the laptop computer has begun to unseat the synthesizer as the instrument of choice.

The transition from synthesizer to laptop has created exciting creative and pedagogical possibilities. The use of general computing hardware makes it easier to explore intermedia, and enables students to more directly participate in the compositional responsibilities; this in turn raises the question of aesthetic antecedents and direction. As a teaching tool, technology-based music ensembles facilitate experiential, problem-based, collaborative learning in ways that complement and extend conventional classroom teaching. This panel will focus on the ability of laptop ensembles to enhance the development of artistic and technical skills in music students.

• Download Proposal in PDF – 64 kb

This panel discussion on presenting music in unusual contexts was sponsored by the Canadian League of Composers.  I was asked to participate as a panelist based on my position as Music Director of Mobile Performance Group.  I spoke about our early performances of Parking Spaces from inside of automobiles, roaming the city and making the laptop ensemble mobile.

• Download Announcement in PDF – 104 kb