Online orchestras
Posted on: September 20, 2009
Among the various possibilities that the internet offers, one in particular has recently caught my attention.
I was asked to think about “the impact of the internet on world music”. As the legislation on that matter becomes stricter and stricter every day – « Hadopi2 » law passed recently in France – one would immediatly think about the negative effects of the internet on music.
It is true that by allowing consumers to download their favourite singer’s album for free, the internet has shattered music’s former business model. The web has put music copyrights in the spotlight, as lawyers from all around the world were trying to come to an international agreement.
As the media often focus on the downsides of this technology, today I would like to point at a great innovation that is going to please the music-mads of the world : online orchestras.
The idea of an online orchestra is not new, but at first it was for professionals only. It required specific satellite links that allowed a singer in Paris to record a CD with a band located in San Fransisco. Patricia Kaas CD was made that way. A new technology called MIDI (Music Instrumental Digital Interface) has made things easier for non specialists. By downloading electronic scores as files, MIDI managed to speed up the process.
A few music schools have taken this opportunity to communicate with their equivalents all around the globe. The World Band Project was created, and brought together American, Corean and German participants in a single workshop. Teachers and students could be thousands of kilometers away from eachother, and play the same orchestra.
I paid a special attention to this example, as my school is allowing us to live a similar experience in our English class. It is called e-learning. Our teacher doesn’t have to physically be in the class for us to learn. We haven’t played in a virtual band yet, but it could be an idea.
To conclude this article, I would like to post a link to a very interesting concert, that has been organized by YouTube in 2008. The aim of this initiative was to select 80 musicians among thousands of candidates in order to invite them to play at the Carnegie Hall, in New York. Musicians had to upload a video of themselves playing the Eroica Internet Symphony, a play written for the occasion by Tan Dun.
In this case, the orchestra is not virtual as all the participants came in person to play it. But it is definitly linked to the internet, as this medium made it happen. “Classical music is federative, because it is not limited by the language barrier”, said Emmanuelle Flahaut Franc, head of the communication of YouTube. If classical music is an international language, today the internet allows us to speak it.
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