QUT CreateX 2016: Flow

Flow: an overview

10 Rooms

4 Recording studios

8 Hours

1 Continuous, ever-shifting, audience-influenced piece of music

On August the 28th, 2016, staff and students from the Queensland University of Technology’s music school premiered ‘Flow’, an interactive musical event that incorporated each of the studio spaces in QUT’s new Creative Industries building.

Each studio was locked to a central clock using Ableton’s new Link technology.  Ten rooms were synchronised together, unifying the tempo across each workstation on an entire floor.  Guest musicians were invited to perform short musical excerpts, these were captured and then sent downstream to become part of a single musical experience.

Musicians were invited from local community schools and colleges as well as QUT’s music program.  Special guests Filter Coffee were recorded via a skype connection from Chennai, India.

Each recording space featured multiple performances throughout the day, locked in time thanks to Ableton’s Link technology and kept in tune by limiting the harmonic structure available to each ensemble or iOS app to a pentatonic scale.

Audiences were invited to tour QUT’s new studio facilities, and were present in the room as students captured the various ensembles. Some ensembles had material pre-prepared, others simply improvised within a predetermined set of notes.

Audience members were then given the opportunity to shape the piece, with a series of iPad apps and a modular synthesizer creating electronic elements to sit alongside the recordings captured in the first four studio spaces.

Recordings were processed and manipulated in each control room before being sent to a series of workstations in the final space, where audience members could create their own arrangements of the sonic world they had just explored.  

A series of mixing desks and headphones allowed for each element from each room of the studio complex to be individually balanced by an audience member, creating a real-time remix environment of a single interactive musical event.  At these desks, all eight elements from different rooms throughout the building could be isolated and then individually balanced.  Throughout the day live performances by Kristina Kelman and Dan James also took place in this space, with the performers working a traditional song structure over the background loops.

Flow was a collaboration between staff and students from QUT’s music program.  Final year production students were tasked with running the project on the day, as I was occupied downstairs performing on the Garden of Minuscule Delights show.  The concept behind this project was the idea of making the flow of music and sound analogous to the flow of water.

From the outset I wanted to see if Ableton’s Link technology could be used on a large scale event.  Link is amazing.  Whoever came up with the concept was having a really good day in the office.  Unlike previous iterations of sync, wireless or otherwise, there is no master/slave arrangement.  Instead all devices lock to a single clock.  If one device changes this clock, all others change with it. This meant we could have:

Two large control rooms with large format analogue consoles recording microphone captured material from four live rooms.  We also captured performances from Indian group Filter Coffee via a skype connection in one of these control rooms.

Four iPad apps running Patterning, Fugue Machine, TriqTraq and Borderlands, with the first three apps wirelessly synced to Link. Patterning and TriqTraqs provided rhythmic material, with Fugue Machine responsible for all the sequenced synthesised sound.  We sampled various water sounds, and then placed them in Borderlands, a granular sampler, for textural atmospheric sounds.

A Make Noise Shared system.  We clocked this modular synth system off a metronome output fed from an iPhone connected to the Link network and running Maschine Jam. Not perfect, but it worked and kept the Rene sequencer in time with the rest of the building.

These eight elements (2 x mono feeds from each control room capturing live material and 4 x mono iPad feeds) then fed into our SSL AWS desk on the other side of the studio complex.  We took direct outs from each of the channels and daisy-chained a series of small format desks in the large live space.  Audience members could then put on a pair of headphones and individually re-balance and create their own unique mix of the current state of Flow.

We used a hidden, password protected network that used the existing QUT network infrastructure to run Link.  This prevented any member of the public from joining the session and being able to change the tempo.  Early tests with ad-hoc networks demonstrated the difficulty in running wireless sync over a large distance and through concrete walls, but the custom network in place worked flawlessly throughout the day.

Each of the two main recording rooms had an Ableton template set up.  This allowed students to capture long recordings on one track, and then edit, trim and warp them into time, process them with effects (e.g. reverbs, delays, EQs, pitch shifting, etc.)  and create a series of clips that could then be sent downstream to the final workstation room.

A student in each of the two control rooms was responsible for capturing performances, communicating with the performer or conductor and ultimately deciding which recordings were then processed and looped before being sent downstream.  Each performance group was able to play through a few times or, if they were improvising, spend a little time working on ideas.  It was the job of the production student to maintain communication and let them know when they were being recorded, and how long they were going to be recorded for.  The performances hinged on people feeling comfortable, and knowing when they’re being recorded.  Groups were giving headphones with rhythmic loops to perform to; we felt this would work better than a simple click track. 

Once a loop had been captured, this process repeated.  This maintained variety throughout the day; if you were to visit the room three times during the eight hours it ran, you were likely to hear quite different material each time.  Students could send a captured loop downstream, while then working on additional loops.  I call them loops, but this meant any piece of musical material that was captured so that it could be repeated.  It may have been two simple guitar chords, a reversed piano note, a full choir droning for two minutes, whatever.  The operator needed to be making musical decisions based on the material they were being provided with.  This also meant that the output being sent to the final workstations could change even when the audience group were in the final room, with each room’s operator moving between different Ableton clips, made up of these newly recorded loops.  This created more movement in, what was otherwise, quite a static overall piece.

The video below is a walk-through of the event, demonstrating the live rooms, iPad room and final workstation room.  There’s also a video demonstrating tempo changes on an iPhone that would change the tempo on all Link-enabled devices (3 x Ableton workstations and 3 x iPads) across the entire floor.

The QUT music production students involved, James Day, Moss McGregor, Will Briskey, Brad Columbine, Sam Bennett, James Gatling, Jorell Villanueva and Ben Goulter all contributed significantly to the project and I thank them for their hard work and dedication.  As a part of my role as music production co-ordinator at QUT, I work on creating projects and activities that try and mirror real world environments.  This wasn’t necessarily a real world environment, as I’m unaware of any recording project that has worked quite like Flow did.  However, the pressure, along with the communication skills and technical efficiency required to keep track of several ensembles (often made up of inexperienced high school students), the tempo changes throughout the day and the recording and editing, on the fly, of excerpts from each session, necessitated a high degree of focus and technical know-how from everyone involved.

In essence, the project was a cross between a recording session and a live performance.  It was a live performance of a series of recording sessions, with the added complexity of synchronising and connecting several disparate spaces together.  As well as a learning experience for the students, my intention was to make it a learning experience for the audience; to deconstruct and demystify the music production process and show an audience how a piece is made up of a sum of component parts.  We also gave them agency over altering several of these components, via intuitive touchscreen-based drum machines and pattern sequencers.  While the proliferation of such apps has allowed more people to access electronic music production tools than ever before, technical complexities associated with modern music production practice still seem to intimidate many young musicians.  Ableton, with Link, have done wonders in allowing cheap, accessible and intuitive apps to seamlessly integrate with their more comprehensive computer-based DAW.

Flow attempted to place the creation of music through iOS apps into a broader studio context, breaking down the wall between professional and consumer music production technologies and techniques.  

While we had enough time to develop a workflow and ensure all the technology was going to hold together, as well as briefly rehearse with two of the ensembles that were present on the day, the project was very much a prototype.  I would like to build on the concept further in the future and investigate further possibilities in the creation of multi-room, musically active spaces.

The focus was very much on ensuring a memorable experience for every audience member that made their way through the space throughout the day.  As a result, fidelity was not at the forefront of our concerns.  Each ensemble was recorded with a single mic, and there frequently people walking through the recording rooms making their way to the next element.  The ensembles were often made up of school students, and while this was (hopefully) a good experience for these students, many of the recorded excerpts suffered from tuning issues.

Despite this, the session ran for 8 hours non-stop, with only one serious issue apparently arising when two audience members (rumour has it students from my 2nd year class...) decided to ramp up the tempo to 200BPM using one of the iPad apps.  This, by all accounts, surprised a student ensemble busy in another room trying to play along with a drum loop that suddenly doubled in tempo.  Otherwise I consider the project to have been a success, though in the future I would like to spend more time preparing the acoustic material to be recorded, along with perhaps adding some real-time effects to the rhythmic material to create more variation.  I can certainly vouch for the stability of Ableton’s Link technology, and look forward to seeing how people continue to push the boundaries of its possibilities.

With that in mind, the following examples demonstrate several states of Flow at various times throughout the day.  Along with the four iPad apps providing drums and sequenced synth parts, the first example also contains Filter Coffee’s Swarupa on vocals (via a lo-fi skype connection) along with some treated guitar loops.

https://soundcloud.com/yanto-browning-qut/flow-recording-excerpt-1/s-tJfvx

The second example features Swarupa on flute (again via skype), along with two string section excerpts and a droning guitar. 

https://soundcloud.com/yanto-browning-qut/flow-recording-excerpt-2/s-si1mg

The final example features some treated piano along with a brass and woodwind ensemble and a string section.

https://soundcloud.com/yanto-browning-qut/flow-recording-excerpt-3/s-K84Mj

As we recorded the whole day in real-time, before the sound was sent to individual workstations, it’s impossible to document what the project definitely sounded like on the day.  This is the point: the piece sounded different to every person who came along, put on a pair of headphones, and played with a few faders to create their own mix.  As such, none of these examples have much in the way of further editing or post-production. I’ve simply automated volume and mute parameters on each of the 8 channels to create something that would resemble what an audience member may have done on the day.  This approach is similar to what acts like Orbital did live for their performances before the advent of software packages such as Ableton, and what producers such as Lee Scratch Perry and Dr Dre did in the studio: prepare a series of loops, play them all through a mixing desk, and then ‘play’ the mixing desk until they’re happy with an arrangement.  Hopefully the whole process inspired some young musicians, or indeed musicians or non-musicians of any age, to consider further possibilities in collaborative electronic music making.  I’ve included a short video below that demonstrates how the arrangement could be altered by mixing different elements in and out of the mix.