Networking concert halls, musicians, and interactive textiles: Interwoven Sound Spaces

Abstract

Interwoven Sound Spaces is an interdisciplinary project which brought together telematic music performance, interactive textiles, interaction design, and artistic research. A team of researchers collaborated with two professional contemporary music ensembles based in Berlin, Germany, and Piteå, Sweden, and four composers, with the aim of creating a telematic distributed concert taking place simultaneously in two concert halls and online. Central to the project was the development of interactive textiles capable of sensing the musicians’ movements while playing acoustic instruments, and generating data the composers used in their works. Musicians, instruments, textiles, sounds, halls, and data formed a network of entities and agencies that was reconfigured for each piece, showing how networked music practice enables distinctive musicking techniques. We describe each part of the project and report on a research interview conducted with one of the composers for the purpose of analysing the creative approaches she adopted for composing her piece.