Using Internet2 for audio performance, supported by digital video communication between players, provides the opportunity for networked electroacoustic music practitioners to connect with, bridge, amalgamate and lead diverse sound-based music traditions. In combination with intelligent/multi-agent software, this facilitates new hybrid sonic art forms. Extending prior work by the author, Mittsu no Yugo (Whalley 2010a) recently explored this direction. While Internet2 expands production/aesthetic possibilities, accommodating established aesthetics in tandem requires careful consideration. Beginning from a prior model of a decision space (Whalley 2009), the paper discusses the extended decision terrain and choices that Internet2 brings, and some of the compromises that need to be made to realise the proposition. The paper is then part conceptual map, and part artistic perspective.

Maturation of network technologies and high-speed broadband has led to significant developments in multi-user platforms that enable synchronous networked improvisation across global distances. However sophisticated the interface, nuances of face-to-face communication such as gesture, facial expression, and body language are not available to the remote improviser. Sound artists and musicians must rely on listening and the semiotics of sound to mediate their interaction and the resulting collaboration. This paper examines two case studies of networked improvisatory performances by the inter-cultural tele-music ensemble Ethernet Orchestra.It focuses on qualities of sound (e.g. timbre, frequency, amplitude) in the group's networked improvisation, examining how they become arbiters of meaning in dialogical musical interactions without visual gestural signifiers. The evaluation is achieved through a framework of Distributed Cognition, highlighting the centrality of culture, artefact and environment in the analysis of dispersed musical perception. It contrasts salient qualities of sound in the groups’ collective improvisation, highlighting the interpretive challenges for cross-cultural musicians in a real-time ‘jam’ session. As network technologies provide unprecedented opportunities for diverse inter-cultural collaboration, it is sound as the carrier of meaning that mediates these new experiences.

This paper argues that today's sampling culture, emerging out of pioneering efforts in electroacoustic music in the 1950s carries a similar ethos of autonomy found in many significant advances in music instrumentation throughout history. By looking at the evolution of musical instruments, the author hopes to address these continuous effort towards autonomy, which, if proves legitimate should be of great concern for networked music research that deals with all forms of music praxis of varying reciprocity and group dynamics. By further looking into what sets collaboration apart from cooperation and collective creation, and elaborating on the ‘social’ of music, this paper hopes to extend the discourse on current trends of accessing, shaping and sharing music in solitude, from something often seen as unfortunate and anti-social, to something less so.

This paper describes the implementation of NeVIS, a local network system that establishes communication between individual performers, as well as between laptop and performers. Specifically, this is achieved by making use of vibrotactile feedback as a signalling tool within an improvisational setting. A discussion of the current developments regarding the use of networks within improvisation is presented, followed by an outline of the benefits of utilising the haptic feedback channel as a further sensory information pathway when performing digital music. We describe a case study of the system within the context of our computer-mediated improvisational duo Můstek, involving piano, percussion and live electronics. Here, a cueing system or framework is imposed over the improvisation and is transmitted directly to the skin of the performers via tiny vibrations. Additionally, performers may make use of simple vibrotactile signals to enhance traditional visual cues that are often employed within performance. A new work, Socks and Ammo, was created using NeVIS, and was presented at various international conferences and festivals. We also tested the system itself within a group of postgraduate researchers and composers. Qualitative evaluation of the musical outcomes as experienced both by the performers and by the listeners at these events is offered, as well as implications about the nature of collaborative music-making.

NOMADS (Network-Operational Mobile Applied Digital System) is a network client–server-based system for participant interaction in music and multimedia performance contexts. NOMADS allows large groups of participants, including the audience, to form a mobile interactive computer ensemble distributed across a network. Participants become part of a synergistic interaction with other performers, contributing to the multimedia performance. The system enhances local performance spaces, and it can integrate audiences located in multiple performance venues. Individual user input from up to thousands of simultaneous users across a network is synthesised into a single emergent sound and visual structure in an approach we call socio-synthesis. This paper recounts research leading up to NOMADS, outlines its technological architecture, and describes several implementations. Current applications include the telematic opera Auksalaq, and performances by the MICE Orchestra. The authors also consider the potential of large-scale human–computer ensembles as a paradigm for composition and performance.

Guided by the idea of participatory culture, networked pulse synchronisation and live coding have been core approaches in the activity of the Cybernetic Orchestra, an electronic performance ensemble at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. Following general discussion of the way in which networked pulse-based music and live coding work within this orchestra, there is specific discussion of a number of compositional models and practices that have been found effective, including code-sharing, instruction-scores, code as material, and physical performance.

Historically, network music has explored the practice and theory of interconnectivity, utilising the network itself as a creative instrument. The Machine Orchestra (TMO) has extended this historical idea by developing the custom software suite Signal, and creating a shared, social instrument consisting of musical robotics. Signal is a framework for musical synchronisation and data sharing, designed to support the use of musical robotics in an attempt to more fully address ideas of interconnectivity and embodied performance. Signal, in combination with musical robotics, also facilitates the exploration of interaction contexts, such as at the note level, score level and sound-processing level. In this way, TMO is simultaneously building upon the historical contributions and developing aesthetics of network music.

What does it mean to speak of tele-media as a musical instrument? The unfolding of this question is aided by analysis of the control domains of two existing instrument categories, acoustic instruments and digital controllers. Design criteria for making tele-media instruments are formulated thence, and also from consideration of the special capacity of tele-media to bring together multi-lateral non-proximate control sources. Such design anticipates musicians in different continents participating in single sonic outcomes. What does it mean for such a tele-instrument to facilitate virtuosic performance? Any high standard of instrument making urges that instrument makers do so. Virtuosity is understood in part as performance presence, an important issue for tele-media criticism. The broader topic concerning the relation between presence and transmission is represented narrowly here in a single argument. Transmission of performance intention is more important to remote performance presence than literal representations of musicians on stage. Performance presence is better facilitated by interactive graphic notations that dynamically render control domain data into images. Two tele-performances inform the discussion.

Network music foregrounds the materials and processes of communication and in so doing repositions the acousmatic and other strata of electroacoustic music practice. The type of network music considered in this paper, at base defines a member of its category as music which undergoes an electrical-optical conversion, referring to its transport over fibre-optic research network backbones. A more compelling motivation for us is the realisation that network music entails the exploration of disjunct chronotopic frames (stated less poetically as ‘latency in the network’) using probes of sonic material travelling near the speed of light. This article is an overview of a three-year project investigating music performance over high-speed research networks, a project funded by the Canada Research Chair programme (Syneme). The aim of the project was fourfold: to investigate aspects of physical and social networks in the production of network music (The Network); to investigate a branch of study continuing but critically distinct from Internet music as marked by ingenious strategies mounted to overcome the conditions of slow networks (Liveness); to embed ourselves in new practices (Telemusic Studio) and technologies (Artsmesh); and to compose network music pieces (Net Works). Our narrative picks up from where high-speed P2P networking crosses a threshold producing a successor to the Internet akin to the methodological shift that occurred in electroacoustics when CPUs achieved rendering speeds that allowed for real-time audio.