WARREN BURT - Journal

It's become an annual event. About once a year (well, this year and last), Kristof Lauwers organizes a world-wide interactive jam with the computer controlled acoustic instruments of the Logos Foundation in Gent, Belgium. (www.logosfoundation.org) Kristof designed the software which lets a number of people give commands to the robots and they play the music you specify. With a number of people playing, some very interesting improvisations result. This morning at 4 am (which was 8 pm Tuesday, in Gent Belgium), I participated in the jam with 9 other folks from around the world, simultaneously. Here's the list of who was jamming, and where they were. The results were heard by an audience in Gent, and now, by you.

The crew:

Kristof Lauwers, Yvan Vandersanden and Troy Rodgers at Logos Foundation, Gent, Belgium

Celio Vasconcelos at home in Aachen Germany

Scott Barton and Steve Kemper at the University of Virginia (Virginia Center for Computer Music) Charlottesville, Virginia USA

Jaime Reis in Linda-a-Velha, Portugal, west of Lisbon, - with students in his Acoustics class at the Conservatorio de Musica de Linda-a-Velha, Escola de Musica Nossa Senhora de Cabo.

Warren Burt at home in Wollongong Australia

Simon Halsberghe - in a lazy armchair in Antwerp Belgium

Brent Wetters - at home in Providence, Rhode Island, USA

Juan Sebastian Lach Lau - at home in Morelia, Michoacan, Mexico

Here's the results of last night's performance. This is the recording made in the Logos studio, during the concert. It's a lot higher fidelity than what I was hearing over the Skype connection during the performance, and I'm delighted at the details in some of the sound combinations. Enjoy! It's 18 minutes and 33 seconds long.

Update 4 May 2010: And here are some photos of Jaime Reis and his students in the Escola de Musica Nossa Senhora de Cabo where he was performing his contribution. The photos of Jaime are by Rita Cordeiro, and Jaime took the one of his students. Looking at the photo of the students, you can see the video projector and the chat room interface that we performed with. The photo of Jaime with the wall projection shows what the students were looking at - the chat room interface projected. They also heard the performance that was happening in Gent in the classroom at the same time. If you want to see pictures of the Logos instruments themselves, go to www.logosfoundation.org and look up "Musical Robots."

And one more picture - this is a screen-grab of the chat-room interface devised by Kristof Lauwers that we performed with. To the left is a list of commands. At the bottom of the screen are the riffs people are playing. At the upper right is the list of currently playing instruments. In the middle is the chat itself, with the robot's responses in red, and all the other players named.