A live, multi-party musical performance for the Beijing MusicAcoustic 2010 festival took place over KAREN last week, using the new internet addressing standard IPv6.

Multi-country, collaborative musical performance

Musicians in New Zealand, Canada and China gave a real-time, collaborative performance to a live audience in Beijing. The piece by University of Waikato composer Associate Professor Ian Whalley was called Mittsu no Yugo.

The composition melds aspects of sonic cultures from three points of the Pacific Rim. In Hamilton the performers were Whalley, violin lecturer Lara Hall and masters grad Hannah Gilmour. David Larson (Buffulo Drum) was in Canada and Bruce Gremo (Shakuhachi) was in Beijing were the Beijing Musicacoustic 2010 was held.

Composer Ian Whalley says “new composition techniques were required in the work to accommodate the visual latency of the digital video, and provide structures that also allow for spontaneous input from performers, as the work is improvised interactively and live.”

You can find David Larson’s commentary on the performance here:

The nuts and bolts

Technically, it involved linking multiple digital video channels and independent high quality multiple digital audio channels between the three countries to allow the real-time, interactive performance. The work is a first from this distance using the new internet IPv6 format, and multiple audio channels.

More information

This performance was part of the University of Waikato’s participation in the Syneme programme – an international collaboration in telemedia arts, that takes advantage of the worlds National Research and Education Networks. You can find more information about Syneme on the KAREN wiki at http://wiki.karen.net.nz/index.php/Syneme.