Expanded composition in the era of rapid technological progress

On September 17-18th 2018 METS - Conservatory of Cuneo hosted the multimedia artist and art curator Yannick Hofmann from the ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany. Yannick held a two-day masterclass, entitled The expanded composition in the era of rapid technological progress, intended for METS students and also open to external participants.

During the masterclass Hofmann updated the participants on new forms of musical expression related to multimedia, with emphasis on physical computing (i.e. the possibility of organizing and managing software and hardware systems (one of the most famous is certainly Arduino) that acquire data from outside (e.g. through sensors), process them, use them for various creative purposes, and/or intervene outside the system through actuators.

Hofmann also dwelt with METS students on the possibilities of interaction in network communication systems, via WebSockets, and made reference to artificial neural networks. A practical part of the workshop allowed the setting up of interesting experiments on the spatialization of sound in real time on portable devices of any type (laptops, mobile phones, PDAs) equipped with small speakers and with access to a wi-fi network. In particular, a laptop marching band formed by METS students was set up in the Cantore barracks (the new building of METS-Conservatorio di Cuneo), which moved from one end to the other of the long corridor, while Hofmann, who followed the "caravan" also on the move, piloted the spatialization of the sound in real-time between the laptops’ speakers connected via wi-fi.

Other experiments involved real-time interaction between pre-recorded audio and digital processing altered audio, visual elements (projections) generated by the computer and also modified by the audio signal, MIDI data sent to the Yamaha Disklavier® included in the equipment of METS studios.