Music and the Social

Abstract

November 2010: a telematic music performance is taking place linking the Sonic Lab of the Sonic Arts Research Centre, Queen’s University, Belfast, to venues in Graz and Hamburg. Internet connections sustain for an hour or so live transnational interactions between performers in three remote settings-musical interactions that amount to a real-time distributed sociality. The composer has orchestrated interactions such that each group drops periodically in and out of the others’ hearing, eruptions of disconnection and absence. The audience in Belfast, where I am sitting, strains to catch the socio-musical and gestural theater between the performers, perceptible live in the room and projected on giant screens. Another arena of sociality is engendered between performers and audiences, one that follows the conventions of silent and immobile audiencehood that for two centuries have governed the concert hall. The technical dimensions of the event are experimental; they depend on a further vector of sociality: a division of labor between technicians, composers, and musicians manifest in the room and in the event’s networked infrastructure.

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