I am very excited to finally present Drone Garden, the project I've been toiling over for the past 3 months for the PHI Centre's Parallel Lines residency and exhibit. Drone Garden is a downloadable virtual performance that can be explored online with strangers, or offline on your own. It was created as a new way to collectively experience music while in isolation, and also explores the idea of putting dynamic and temporal changes in the hands of the listener rather than solely with the performers. I might eventually release audio recordings of the piece, but for now it exists only as an app.
Looking back, it was a naively ambitious project, and presented a lot of firsts for me - I began with only about a week's experience with video game engines and zero knowledge of C++, and somehow ended up making a networked multi-user, multi-platform "game" with a dedicated server. It was my first time writing for a larger ensemble, and I ended up writing a quarter-tone piece in 3 movements, and each of the 25 instruments has a unique part. A silver lining to our pandemic has been the ability to sit at home and just focus on one thing at a time, and I don't think I would have pulled any of this off without being forced into isolation to some degree.
Give the app a download from the link below if your computer can handle it, and try out the online mode. Anyone you see wandering around is listening to the same piece in real time, somewhere else in the world. If you can't download it, the piece will likely be physically exhibited in the fall. In the meantime, check out the documentation on the Phi website along with the other great works that came out of this residency! Check it out here: https://www.phi.ca/Justin-Wright-Expo