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Research :. Formative Model :. Exploitation :. Validation  
Leonardo Da Vinci

Research in Great Britain

:. Download Rapporto BrightonArt.pdf

During this research phase of the MODEM project it is our aim to investigate online communities created to facilitate participation in musical collaboration. The results of the research are presented below. From this research we have proposed a model for the development of MODEM.

Collaborative music making on the internet has existed since it’s inception as a network for information exchange. Some of the first users of the internet were musicians who exchanged sheet music and MIDI files (digital sheet music for synthesisers) via FTP (File Transfer Protocol).

The first internet music collaborations were asynchronous, which means that the artists did not work on the same piece at the same time, but rather worked on part of the work (e.g. lyrics or a MIDI drum track) and sent part to the collaborator(s) for review and inclusion. By the mid 90s home computers had become powerful enough to allow professional standard editing of audio files (not just the simple note information from MIDI) and a new form of internet collaboration was emerging. Artists could record live instruments in their own studio and send the digital audio file to collaborators via the internet. This process mimics the production process that takes place in a conventional studio where several artists record tracks independently that are mixed together by the producer into the finished work. The crucial difference was that now the artists could easily be in different studios around the world without having to wait for a tape or CD to be delivered by courier.

In November 1994 Willy Henshall and Tim Brand formed ‘The Res Rocket Surfer Project’. “The first ‘virtual online band’ with 1,000 members that communicated through a mailing list and FTP server.” The Rocket Network was the first commercial asynchronous music collaboration network, developed by the Res Rocket team (see 1.1.2 below) and released in 1999.

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MI7

Meanwhile MIDI was still the industry standard protocol for communication between electronic music devices. A typical electronic music studio consisted of a PC running sequencer software connected via MIDI to various synthesisers, drum machines, effects and samplers. The PC sequencer acts as a very precise conductor telling the other machines what to play and when, and the devices audio outputs are mixed together on a mixing desk to produce the final master. At the same time, some musicians were using MIDI to connect their instruments on stage. A drummer would listen to a ‘click track’ provided by a sequencer on headphones to stay at a constant tempo. At the same time the sequencer would send messages to synthesisers or samplers being used by other artists on stage to synchronise their outputs.

In July 1997 Res Rocket announced the first commercial synchronous music collaboration system for the internet the ‘Distributed Realtime Groove Network’.

The online communities included in the research by all the partners were:

MI7 Libraries, IUA Freesound, Waveform.dk, Sounddogs, Ccmixter.org, Jam2Jam, Digital Musician, Artistopia, My Virtual Band, Ninjam, Digidelivery, IUMA, Magnatune, Loopwise, Overplay, Hitsquad.

The observation grid collating the results of the MODEM groups quantitative research of these communities is attached as an appendix.

 
 
     
 
 
 
 
 
 
   


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