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Osnabrück, Germany, June 10-13, 1999
Global Village Global BrainGlobal Music
Reviewed by Martin Gieseking (Osnabrück, Germany) and Dr. Albert Gräf (Mainz, Germany)
When international musicians and scientists of
different disciplines come together in Osnabrück to report on their research, and
concerts are performed by Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream in the evening,
then it is time again for the biannual KlangArt Congress and Festival.
The 1999 edition of KlangArt, which took place June 10-13 under the
direction of Prof. Dr. Bernd Enders and Dr. Joachim Stange-Elbe, was the
fifth since 1991. The main theme this year was "Global
villageglobal brainglobal music," which of course
refers to the famous metaphor of Marshall MacLuhan. This set the
framework for a large variety of different subjects in the realm of
music technology, presented by more than 40 internationally known
experts in the field. With the much discussed topic of globalization,
the organizers picked up the thread of the two previous KlangArt
congresses, "Digitalization of the media," and
"Digitalization of music aesthetics." And, for the first time,
it was also possible to follow all lectures live or on the Internet
using RealAudio.
Global Music
After the introductory addresses by
representatives of the Ministry of Education, Science, Research and
Technology, the German Music Council, and the University of
Osnabrück, the congress started with a keynote lecture by Thomas
Troge from the Public University of Music in Karlsruhe. In his talk,
entitled "Global Village, Global Brain, Global Music: Reality or
Fiction," he criticized the predominant euphoria towards global
connectivitydifferent cultures coming togetherand the
globalization of music. He discussed the potential risks these trends
may incur: "If there is something like Global Music (or a trend in
this direction), is this actually desirable, or is it rather a threat to
the countless regional and national music cultures?" Further, he
asked whether the conception of the "Global Brain" is not just
a superficial illusion created by the omnipresent media, which in the
end lacks the necessary effort to develop the abstract concepts needed
to include extra-European, or non-Western, traditions.
Other speakers, such as Simon Emmerson or Ian Whalley, presented less
pessimistic, albeit still critical, views of the influence globalization
has had on intercultural efforts. Different cultures have different
conceptions of aesthetics and the arts which become apparent when, for
example, non-Western musicians come in touch with unknown music
technology or, conversely, when Western musicians become acquainted with
African or Asian musical instruments. However, as Jobst P. Fricke
noted, this examination of foreign culture may actually lead to an
expansion and further development of the respective music and its
environment.
Technology
Besides these intercultural questions, another
main focus of the Congress was on the impact of technological progress
and world-wide connectivity on musicians, composers, and enterprises.
After Oliver Vornbergers comprehensive talk on current techniques
for transmitting and presenting audio-visual data, including virtual
realities, there was a lively discussion on proprietary versus open
audio and video formats. The predominance of some proprietary compressed
formats guarantees the corresponding enterprises a big market share as
these formats become increasingly popular in the Internet. The same kind
of gold-rush mood is currently unfolding in the realm of virtual
libraries and publishing houses. The integration of pictures, video, and
audio in hypertext documents, together with the immediate global
availability provided by the Internet, opens unforeseen possibilities
and markets to these traditional domains. Some impressive examples of
this kind of application could be seen in Bernd Enders presentation,
including the Internet transmission of a hand-written score following
along the playback of the music, and a scientific
publication prepared for multimedia presentation using video and sound.
An interesting question in this context related to the recognition of
musical motives in scores, of interest for musicological applications,
but also for detecting plagiarism.
Copyright, Distribution, and Media
With regards to plagiarism,
there is no doubt that the issue of copyright protection has become one
of the main concerns when considering the impact of the global network.
Bernd Schabbing discussed the problem of illegal copying of digital
media. The ease with which CDs, CD ROMs, and DVDs can be duplicated and
spread, flooding the market with pirate copies, is forcing governments
and institutions to strive for an international copyright agreement.
However, in the face of widely differing legal views, it remains
questionable whether such an international law can be implemented in the
near future. This was also stressed by Alex Merck, editor of the
specialist journal ProductionPartner, who then discussed the
impact of the Internet as an alternative distribution channel for music,
a development which has been triggered by the spread of compressed audio
formats, most notably mp3. In fact, similar problems arise in the
context of the new digital radio format, DAB (Digital Audio
Broadcasting), which also uses a compressed digital audio encoding based
on the MPEG format, and is capable of distributing accompanying
multimedia data services as well. This medium was considered in the
technical talk by Albert Gräf, who also discussed some of the
planning problems pertaining to DAB broadcasting, which is expected to
replace current analog radio in Europe and in other countries world-wide
in the future.
The Internet as a distribution and communication channel
for music was also discussed by Karlheinz Essl, who showed how he
used worldwide
connectivity for compositional purposes. "By documenting the
respective state of the artistic work and reflecting on it on a website,
the hermetic process of composing in splendid isolation
mutates to a transparent process which everybody can look at."
Besides the development of closed compositions, the Internet is also a
platform well suited for realizing "works in progress," in
which multiple musicians and artists from other branches work together
and continuously develop a composition without ever arriving at a final
result. Such online forms of art also call for their own distribution
channels, which make increasing use of web browsers as front ends,
including the presentation of scores. In this context, new questions
concerning aesthetics have been raised from different perspectives
(Georg Hajdu, Eric Lyon/Hisagazu Igarashi, John Palmer, Thomas
Noll/Jörg Garbers, Norbert Schläbitz).
A comparatively early experience with performing a
concert worldwide was reported by the well-known composer and conductor,
Eberhard
Schöner, who gave a talk on the significance of "anima"
for the new global medium. In his ground-breaking project, Mr.
Schöner conducted a live concert in which musicians from Japan and
Germany communicated and played synchronously over a satellite
connection. One of the main technical obstacles of this performance,
which dates back to 1985, was the latency period, just as it is in live
performances on the Internet today.
And More
Given the large number of diverse topics covered
by the congress, we can only summarize the other subjects very briefly.
One important theme was centered on the new possibilities of soundscape
compositions using environmental sounds, presented by Hildegard
Westerkamp, Barry Truax, and Nye Parry. Other interesting talks were
about novel forms of performing music with interactive instruments (Joel
Chadabe), and computer-based composition and analysis (Christian Spevak,
Ioannis Zannos, Hae Jeong Yoon). The participants could also learn about
the history of music technology in lectures given by Hans-Peter Haller,
Christoph Reuter/Wolfgang Voigt, and Hans-Joachim Braun, while new
concepts in music theory were discussed by Guerino Mazzola, Joachim
Stange-Elbe, and Heiner Klug. More than in past years, a major thread
of the congress was concerned with applications in the realm
of music education. Some typical topics in this area were music education
in
primary school (Bernhard Müßgens/Tillman Weyde), using
sequencers (Bernhard Cronenberg) and the Internet (Peer Sitter) in music
classes, and a review of multimedia software for music education
(Reinhard Kopiez). Jøran Rudi and John Fitch presented
synthesis/recording programs for educational purposes, Karl-Jürgen
Kemmelmeyer discussed experiments using MIDI and computer, and Martin
Gieseking gave a talk on the design of graphic user interfaces for music
education software.
Congress Concerts
New to this years KlangArt were the
concerts, which provided concrete demonstrations of the artistic works
described in accompanying talks, and which complemented the festival
events such as the Tangerine Dream concert and the impressive
"Amorphic Robot Works" by Chico MacMurtrie. Mark Bromwich and
Julie Wilson Bokowiec presented their "Bodycoder System," with
which the dancing artist can manipulate audio-visual compositional
material that is presented during the performance. The 20-minutes dance
performance of Ms. Wilson Bokowiec gave an impressive demonstration of
the systems capabilities. The second part of this concert was made
up of André Ruschkowski's "virtual sightseeing tour
SALZBURGTRUM," which was concerned with the "complexity of
human spatial perception and its interaction in the town of
Salzburg." Without the accompanying talk, however, one could not
gain much from this performance, and the supporting video was not
particularly meaningful. The live computer performance by Karlheinz Essl
and the piano concert by Jan Beran on the following evening were rather
more intriguing.
Conclusion
Since the first congress in 1991, KlangArt has
always been a forum not only for established researchers but also for
the new generation of academics. Thus, as in preceding years,
postgraduates had the opportunity to present their research in short
talks called "paper sessions." The joint dinner enabled the
participants to establish contacts with international guests in a
pleasant atmosphere, a non-virtual experience which, despite major
advances in technology, the Internet still cannot provide. The closing
event was the panel discussion about the main theme of the congress,
presented by Guerino Mazzola with Simon Emmerson, Bernd Enders, Niels
Knolle, Alex Merck, Norbert Schläbitz and Thomas Troge. Interested
people with a connection to the Internet had the opportunity to follow
the discussion and participate in it using the web-based chat client of
the university. As expected, opinions were divided into two streams. On
the one hand, the skeptics primarily saw the disadvantages globalization
has for regional cultures and moral concepts, and described the efforts
to define new forms of art through the global network as fairly immature
patchwork. On the other hand, most of the speakers emphasized the
positive possibilities the global net offers for future music culture.
Norbert Schläbitz made an attempt to give a new definition of the
work of art in a virtual community.
In spite of this years theme and the different
visions of globalization offered by the Internet, the congress showed
once again
that it does not reduce itself to absurdity by not taking place in
cyberspace. Rather, we find that the new technology only has a
supplementary effect which opens up fruitful new areas, and, despite
many anxieties, only rarely contributes to the immediate and complete
removal of proven concepts and personal contacts, whether in music or
more generally in the social life of humankind.
The complete congress program and the abstracts of the talks can be
found on the KlangArt homepage
(http://www.musik.uni-osnabrueck.de/veranstaltungen/klangart).
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