Online Music Communities

Administrator wrote this in the early morning:

Ok, here is the abstract for my paper. I know that I should have been ‘exploring’ my ideas in the blog first, and then coming up with the abstract. But, that didn’t happen. What I will do is explore some of the details of what I am researching in future blog posts. I will keep you updated on how some of my online musical collaborations turn out. I might even post some mp3’s for you to listen to.

I will just post the PDF, because the text is just too long to read from a blog post.

Larry’s Abstract

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Administrator wrote this around lunchtime:

I just discovered this document while poking around online. It looks like an ‘official manual’ for Ninjam. The creators refer to the ‘semi-syncronous’ nature of Ninjam as ‘fake time’:

Ted, Steve, and Rob are all musicians jamming with Ninjam. Ted is playing the drums in time with Ninjam’s metronome, Steve is playing the electric bass, and Rob is playing an electric guitar. Each of them plays a “measure”, the length of time it takes for the timing bar at the bottom of their Ninjam window to go all the way across the screen. This measure of music is sent to the Ninjam server as it’s recorded, and then each user’s measure is sent to every other user to be played the next measure while recording the subsequent measure at each user. That is: While Ted records his drums for measure 2, his computer is playing Steve’s bass and Rob’s guitar recordings from measure 1, in tempo. While Steve records his bass for measure 2, he’s playing along with the recordings of Ted and Rob from measure 1. Likewise, Rob is listening to Ted and Steve’s previous measure (Measure 1), while recording the measure that will get sent to them next. On the measure after that, Ted will record measure 3 of drums while he hears what Steve and Rob were recording for measure 2. And so on. This continues as long as the users play, whatever Ted records, on the following measure Steve and Rob hear it, starting exactly as Ted’s measure stops recording, and the same experience is had by the other users.

I am hoping to get the creators involved in the reaserch of this project. Hopefully they will reply to my inquiry soon.

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Administrator wrote this in the late afternoon:

When most people think of music improvisation, they think of Jazz greats from the 50’s such as Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane. This type of music improvisation usually involved a structured ‘song’, arranged by the composer. The difference between orchestral scores and s jazz scores is that jazz scores are open to the individual musician’s interpretation of the music. For instance, in an orchestral score an instruments individual part is written out note for note, and the pitches, rhythms and dynamics are adhered to strictly by the player. In a jazz score, the instruments individual part is usually indicated by a chord, and maybe a loosely followed rhythm. Some main melody parts are spelled out, with significant sections of the song left open to improvisation, or soloing. Where traditional orchestral performances will differ only slightly from night to night, a jazz performance is rarely duplicated.

Eventually, musicians of other genres began to pick up improvisational techniques from both jazz and blues players. Bands like Led Zeppelin and Cream would often drift into long, unstructured ‘jams’ during live sets. The band the Grateful Dead is well known for its freeform improvisations interludes, sometimes stretching a song for an hour or more. This new type of improvisation is devoid completely of any type of structure. Since rock and roll music is rarely written down, improvisations have become much more organic and intuitive. Every person in the band must be listening to every other person, and be able to anticipate chord changes, tempo changes, and overall changes in the mood of the music. Bands such as Phish and Galactic have taken this type of improvisation to new levels of complexity.

A band that I recently played in also used to do improvisational music, yet our style of jamming was a bit different than any other band that I have encountered. Often, when we would improvise on stage, we would just start playing and what sounded like a ‘song’ would come out. Our singer, Steve Janiak, could improvise words and melodies so well, it was hard to tell that he was making them up on the spot. The rest of us knew each other so well musically; we could improvise whole song structures that sounded like they were completely pre-planned. Eventually, we started recording these jams in our makeshift recording studio.

Here are two examples of the band ‘The PubSigs’ improvising music. Both of these songs where complete improvisations, with no pre planning what so ever. If it wasn’t for the magic of digital audio, nobody might have ever hear them again. Enjoy.

Half Drunk Limo Driver
Put Out the Warning

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