Music: The Next Generation

Scientific American Frontiers on PBS is one of my favorite television shows. Recently I caught an episode that featured innovations in music. Children played "Beat Bugs" which are electronic bug-like instruments designed so that people with no formal musical training can pick them up and just play. I was especially excited about a music composition program called Hyperscore that transfers pictures or visual patterns into sound. At the time the show originally aired it was an open-source program. It's still around, but now you have to pay for it.

My search for Hyperscore led me to MIT's Media Lab website. Two research groups there caught my eye: Music, Mind, and Machine and Opera of the Future. There are several projects that look fascinating: MIT scientists are developing tests to identify early Alzheimer's using music, the creation of a "hyperbow" to analyze bow technique of violinists, and a program that completely visualizes the main aspects of music are just a few that caught my eye.

KSO on the Radio

Last Thursday evening I was in the car and, as usual, switched on WUOT. The piece that was playing was Gershwin's Piano Concerto in F. There was something very familiar about the performance and I finally realized that it was the broadcast of the KSO's first Masterworks concert of the 2008-2009 season. Hearing a recording of yourself playing, either solo or as part of a larger group, is a lot like hearing a recording of your own voice. It's very different. You hear a much different blend of sound sitting in the orchestra than you do as an audience member. I enjoyed listening to our performance from a different perspective.

WUOT broadcasts a Knoxville Symphony concert from the previous season Thursday evenings at 8pm. This weeks concert is an all Tchaikovsky program featuring cellist Reynard Rott playing the Rococo Variations. If you are out of the broadcast area for WUOT, you can stream it on the web.

YouTube Symphony Orchestra

Symphony orchestras all run auditions in much the same way. We have rounds where we hear candidates, eliminate some, and then hear them again until we decide who the winner is. In early rounds a screen separates the audition committee from the candidates to eliminate any bias. In the final round the screen comes down and we are able to talk to the finalists and see their resumes.

YouTube is doing things differently. They are in the process of choosing musicians for the YouTube Symphony which will perform at Carnegie Hall on April 15^th under the direction of San Fransisco Symphony's Michael Tilson Thomas. Over 3000 musicians from around the world have uploaded video auditions to be a part of the YouTube symphony. Judges reviewed the submissions and narrowed the entries. The videos of the finalists in all instrument categories are now up on the YouTube Symphony site and you can vote for your favorites through next Sunday. Thats right. It's a people's choice symphony.

If you'd like to browse the entries and vote for your favorites, here is a link to the YouTube Symphony Orchestra website.

Virtual Concert Hall

Now you can attend a Berlin Philharmonic concert in the comfort of your living room. For about the cost of a movie ticket you can watch the Berlin Philharmonic perform in their virtual concert hall. This blows my mind. Classical music is a field that has not been dramatically changed by technology. Yes, the internet has revolutionized marketing strategy, and recording artists have benefited from new developments, but when it comes down to the actual performance, attending a concert in 2009 is much like attending a concert in 1989. Until now if you wanted to see an orchestra outside your region you would have to travel to their home town or hope that they would tour close to your home. Tickets were bought according to travel plans, not necessarily because of the music or artist on the program.

As exciting as this technology is, a virtual concert will never be the same as physically attending a concert for the same reasons that watching a DVD is not the same as watching a movie on the big screen. Scale, ambiance, and volume are all factors, but the biggest difference is you, the audience. The collective energy of an audience is an amazing force. I have attended concerts that were an amazing experience despite a luke-warm performance because of an engaged, energetic audience. On the flip side, I have also attended tremendous concerts that fell flat because the audience was sleepy. The heart pounding drama that ensues when a soloist breaks a string, holding your breath and leaning forward to hear a particularly quiet passage, experiencing the force of sound when the whole group is playing as loud as possible: these are all things that I expect would be lost with a virtual broadcast.

Still, I plan to scout out Berlin's season and find a concert or two to virtually “attend.” Like the DVD, virtual concerts have their place, and it's a whole lot cheaper and more convenient to attend their concert in my living room that to fly to Berlin.