A Look Back on the April 28th Performance

The production process of our April 28th remote collaborative performance with UCal-Irvine spanned four weeks:

April 7 - Test setup/run between Studio E and G
April 14 - Test setup/run between two stations in studio E
April 21 - Test setup/run between Studio E, the Greene Street space, and UCal-Irvine
April 28 - Performance

My specific role each week was as Tech Director for Studio E. With the assistance of Kenji Calderon as well as some classmates, I supervised the gathering of necessary cabling and equipment, the routing of the network, the setup of iChat and Apple CoreAudio, and troubleshooting — the role is akin to a recording engineer in a music-only studio recording process, but significantly more complicated.

Like a recording engineer, a tech director accomplishes his/her goals by essentially being unnoticed because the entire process is trouble-free, and fails when a tech-related glitch occurs (not to mention EVERYONE noticing). For the most part, I felt the performance went smoothly.

While utilizing DK's schematic as a rough guide, I kept a list at hand as to what was needed, and used my previous experience in remote and studio recording to keep a running list in my head as to what had to be done.

The April 7th setup was quite a whirlwind, as I didn't have the required routing fully fleshed out — therefore, the process took an extraordinary amount of time as we scrambled to get cables to get everything working (we managed to establish a video and audio connection in the last 10 minutes of class). The April 14th run went quite well, but the April 21 run introduced some new issues: establishing a good connection with California. For a yet-unresolved reason, despite restarts and constant attempts, we were unable to start an iChat connection with any e-mail address given to us by the UCal people. Getting a phone connection was even a problem. Eventually we were able to connect, but the reasons for the previous issues are mysterious. The setup for April 28th went great — we were actually ahead of schedule once we finished the setup.

Retrospectives on the performance

1 - I thought the performance went great. Seeing/hearing communication happen via movements and sound over distance was quite an experience. Though I didn't perform, if I did perform, one issue I might have is not feeling/hearing the nuances of the remotely-located musician’s performances. This would partially be due to a combination of bandwidth and noise factors, but I imagine audio fidelity would never be optimal anyhow. Of course, stage monitoring is almost never optimal in any performance (at least in my experience), so maybe it's just a matter of acclimation.

2 - At one moment, I tried to send a message to Greene Street regarding mix levels, and that dropped our video connection. Fortunately, I was able to contact Greene Street in between movements and quickly re-establish a video feed. I suppose this was a "live and learn" issue. Perhaps a newer version of iChat fixes this bug since chatting shouldn't drop video like that (and the "open video window" command in iChat didn't work), but I should have adhered to the "don't touch anything if it’s working" mantra.

Things to consider for a smoother process in the future

1 - More reliable internet connection. Based on personal experience with a performance in February, other people's performances, and the final runs of the collaborative performance, it seems that NYU's internet connection is, to say the least, tenuous at best.

2 - Fortunately, studio E did not have feedback problems, but other rooms were sending loops back to us. Feedback can be partially fixed by standard mic’ing techniques (i.e. don't point mics at speakers, etc.), but for rooms that include performers and talk-back mics, perhaps using two mixers would be an option, similar to a standard FOH mix and a house mix:

A particular room's instrument INPUTs can be routed into one mixer (and split to the Canopus and master mixer), and any incoming remote audio (as in audio from the other rooms via iChat) be sent out to the master mixer which doubles as the monitor/headphone controller.

Any musician who does NOT require monitoring (acoustic instruments or separately amplified) and any talk-back mics would only be sent to the Canopus (not to the monitors). Any musician with direct ins (synths, laptops, etc) would be sent to the monitors if needed. This setup ensures no feedback from the instruments going into the signal being sent out to the remote locations.

Studio E was setup in a way that one mixer controlled all the ins and outs of the various audio, and the summed output went to a second mixer, which served as a glorified monitor level controller.

With proper practice or clear diagraming, this setup would potentially minimize differences in people's experience with engineering, and minimize potential equipment and ear damage with feedback.

Using headphones instead of loudspeakers for monitoring when possible would be an option as well.

3 - A more reliable communication system. This is difficult of course since the rooms are dependent on phone networks, but establishing a dedicated communication line (or maybe assigning someone the task of monitoring iChat and phones) during the madness of setup would have helped expedite the process.

4 - Proper gain-staging in all rooms. Again, this is difficult to monitor across all the locations, but keeping distortion and noise to a minimum would help a lot — for example, making sure all relevant gain controllers are at unity before boosting or cutting. One instrument was very distorted when coming back to Studio E.

Future Collaborations

I would like to see more ambient and “paddy” type instruments be incorporated. For this particular performance, there was piano, bass, guitar, keyboard, and percussion. While one musician had computer processing, perhaps some instruments with more affected tones (i.e. heavy delays, layers) as well as legatos (bowed strings, horns, and winds) would make a nice contrast to the more percussive instruments. Even if there are latency issues, I’d like to compose a piece that takes these issues into account and compensates with strategies like including many common tones and embracing layers, timbre, and dissonance.