Telematic Drum Circle: Towards Global Community in ...
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA,
IRVINE
Telematic Sound Improvisation Using Human-Controlled
Robotic Percussion Instruments
THESIS
Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements
For the degree of
MASTER OF SCIENCE
in Information & Computer Science
by
Byeong Sam Jeon
Thesis Committee:
Professor Robert Nideffer, Chair
Professor Antoinette LaFarge
Professor John Crawford
2008
© 2008 Byeong Sam Jeon
The thesis of Byeong Sam Jeon is approved:
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Committee Chair
University of California, Irvine
2008
DEDICATION
To my love Ho Sook (Stephanie) La
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. INTRODUCTION
1.1. A fun gathering to play makeshift instruments together
1.2. Towards the heart-to-heart human communications over the network
2. TELEMATIC DRUM CIRCLE
2.1. What is drum circle?
2.2. Telematic Drum Circle
2.3. A Basic User Scenario of Telematic Drum Circle
2.4. Connecting Cultures through Sharing the Knowledge of Rhythm
2.4. Musical Improvisation by the General Public
2.5. Passive Viewing vs. Active Participation
2.6. Play in Telematic Drum Circle
3. FOUNDATION & CONTEXT FOR TELEMATIC DRUM CIRCLE
3.1. Telepresence As Symptomatic of Human Desire for Long Distance Communication
3.2. Telematics and Telematic Art
3.3. Some Notable Examples of Early Telerobotic Art
3.4. Experiments of Musical Improvisation over Networks
4. PERSPECTIVES ON TELEMATICS
4.1. Technological Utopia and Dystopia
4.2. Networking the World
4.3. Telematics and the Revival of Democracy
4.4. Military Telecommunications Technology - Paradox of Telematics
4.5. A Dream of Unifying Human Kind
5. TELEMATIC DRUM CIRCLE: IMPLEMENTATION
5.1. Technical Description
5.2. Technical Goals and Challenges
5.3. The Development of Hardware
5.4. Website & Interaction Design
5.5. The Development of Software
5.6. Sound & Percussion Instruments
6. CONCLUSIONS
6.1. What Makes Telematic Drum Circle Unique
6.2. Successes and Challenges
6.3. Future Developments
BIBLIOGRAPHY
APPENDIX A: FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
APPENDIX B: TECHNICAL SCHEMATICS
APPENDIX C: VISUAL DOCUMENTATION
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1: Telephone Pictures
Figure 2: Telematic Dreaming
Figure 3: Telephonic Arm Wrestling (shown here with technician, Ian McGuigan)
Figure 4: Telephonic Arm Wrestling – Schematics
Figure 5: Ornitorrinco
Figure 6: Ornitorrinco Keypad diagram
Figure 7: Ken Goldberg’s The Mercury Project (1994) – User Interface
Figure 8: Ken Goldberg’s The Telegarden (1995-2004)
Figure 9: Imaginary Landscape No. 4
Figure 10: League of Automatic Music Composers
Figure 11: Drum Circle
Figure 12: The photo of two people playing drums together. Together in Rhythm, page 9
Figure 13: modified version of Kalani’s drumming photo
Figure 14: Telematic Drum Circle - Concept Drawing
Figure 15: Telematic Drum Circle - Keymap
Figure 16: Telematic Drum Circle – Website Screenshot
Figure 17: Telematic Drum Circle – Robotic Installation
Figure 18: Telematic Drum Circle - Participation Flow chart
Figure 19: Telematic Drum Circle – Client Interface (Not Connected)
Figure 20: Telematic Drum Circle – Client Interface (Connected)
Figure 21: Telematic Drum Circle - Color Codes of Drum Buttons
Figure 22: Telematic Drum Circle – User Input Device and Intensity of Drum Stroke
Figure 23: Telematic Drum Circle - Sixteen Percussion Instruments
Figure 24: Telematic Drum Circle - Dataflow
Figure 25: Telematic Drum Circle – Dataflow Sideview
Figure 26: Telematic Drum Circle – First prototype of Robotic Actuator
Figure 27: Telematic Drum Circle – Final version of Robotic Actuator
Figure 28: Telematic Drum Circle – Pneumatics Components
Figure 29: Telematic Drum Circle – Pneumatics Diagram
Figure 30: Telematic Drum Circle – Microcontroller
Figure 31: Telematic Drum Circle – Circuit Diagram
Figure 32: Telematic Drum Circle – Diagram of Air Distribution
Figure 33: Telematic Drum Circle – Diagram of Sixteen USB Connections
Figure 34: Telematic Drum Circle – Quantization
Figure 35: Pieces of Eight
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to my committee members: Robert Nideffer, committee chair, for his thoughtful advice on my thesis and my studies in the Arts Computation Engineering Graduate Program at University of California, Irvine; Antoinette LaFarge for heartwarming support to successfully develop Telematic Drum Circle project and for insightful advice to construct the backbone of my thesis; John Crawford for his excellent comments on my written thesis and for generous support including the use of the New Media Art Lab in California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, where I was able to successfully present my project.
Thank you to Christopher Dobrian for giving me invaluable advice on the music side of the project; Simon Penny for challenging me to find out the best design and mechanism of the robotic actuators of the project and for teaching me pneumatics in his ACTION Lab; Paul Dourish for his excellent advice on my project from the computer science perspective; Gopi Meenakshisundaram for his advice on improving the graphical user interface of the project website; and Victoria Vesna for her thoughtful comments and advice on my project.
Special thanks to Matthew Teeter for providing his incredible support on programming for Java Server and Flash development; Tom Jennings for helping me to develop the electronic circuits and programming for microcontrollers; Ho Sook (Stephanie) La for offering her tireless advice and tremendous help on the project design and installation; and Rachael Starr for helping me to develop the online system and giving me musical advice.
Thanks to Tiffany Holmes, one of my best mentors, for her sophisticated advice and encouragement which allowed me to develop the very first project proposal of Telematic Drum Circle project in 2005.
Thanks to the following people who offered me the financial support and material donations for the project, including Paul Gent, Mike DeMenno, John Fitzgerald, Jerry Zacharias, Nathan Seidle, Gary Hays, Shellie Nazarenus, Mia Martinez, and Cloud Hsueh and her family. In addition to these individuals, the following institutions, companies, and organizations also deserved acknowledgement for providing generous support on my research: the Arts Council Korea (Korean Culture & Art Foundation); Clippard Instrument Laboratory, Inc.; Remo Inc.; Embodied Media + Performance Technology Lab (EmptLab); California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2); Sparkfun Electronics; Arts Computation Engineering Graduate Program at the University of California, Irvine; Department of Music at the University of California, Irvine; Medici Scholar Award from the Claire Trevor School of the Arts at the University of California, Irvine; Graduate Research Award from the Claire Trevor School of the Arts at the University of California, Irvine; and Bimba Manufacturing Company; and University of California Humanity Research Institute.
Last, thanks to my lovely family, friends and colleagues from South Korea, who constantly gave me emotional support to be more energetic and creative every single day in the United States.
ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS
Telematic Sound Improvisation Using Human-Controlled
Robotic Percussion Instruments
By
Byeong Sam Jeon
Master of Science in Information & Computer Science
University of California, Irvine, 2008
Professor Robert Nideffer, Chair
This thesis presents the interdisciplinary project Telematic Drum Circle, which combines telecommunications, robotics, human-computer interaction, and improvisational music. The project allows multiple online users around the world to create a live collective sound improvisation by controlling sixteen robotic percussion instruments via the Internet. The thesis starts with the project overview while I describe the motivation and the characteristics of Telematic Drum Circle. I address a foundation and context of the project through exploring the history of telematic art from the late 1980s to early 2000s. The technological utopian and dystopian perspectives on telematics and telematic art are discussed. The implementation of Telematic Drum Circle is described in detail and illustrates how the project has been developed with various technologies mainly including telecommunications, robotics and pneumatics over the past two and a half years. Finally, it concludes with the overall evaluation of the project and the ideas for the possible future development.
1. INTRODUCTION
1.1. A fun gathering to play makeshift instruments together
It was a summer in 2004 when I first encountered a drum circle [Footnote: According to Mickey Hart: “the Drum Circle is a huge jam session. The ultimate goal is not precise rhythmic articulation or perfection of patterned structure, but the ability to entrain and reach the state of a group mind.” In the words of Arthur Hull: “The Drum Circle is a fun entry-level learning experience that is accessible to anyone who wants to participate. Drum Circle participants express themselves collectively by using a chorus of tuned drums, percussion, and vocals to create a musical song together while having a great time.”] in my life. I was living in Chicago, IL for my master’s study in Art and Technology Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago [Footnote: ] which is located at the center of downtown Chicago. One day, I was getting out of the main entrance of the school building, and heard a lot of laughing, clapping, and loud banging sound coming from a group of people gathered on a street. I first assumed a street demonstration happening for something, but was quickly realized that it was a fun gathering to play makeshift instruments together. It was very interesting to me because everyone in the circle was so enthusiastic in communicating each other through sharing improvised rhythm. After few minutes, I was already a part of the circle, and found myself dancing and clapping along in sync. I was fully communicating without saying hello. To me, that was an incredible experience, because I was having hard time to live in the U.S. where I had to speak English than my mother tongue, Korean, to communicate with the world in every single moment. Not to mention about the cultural gaps or different mind sets between the U.S. and South Korea, speaking English all the time was simply a big challenge to me even though I had spent several years to learn English in Korea. However, during the unexpected drum circle participation on a Chicago street, I was able to escape from all the obstacles and to wholly communicate with the other participants because we were somehow in the rhythmical sync.
The experience was an eye-opener, and my own creative ideas began flowing. What if a conventional drum circle could be transformed by advanced technologies to form a collective global voice without a spoken word, reflecting the rhythm at the center of our beings? What if we have a drum circle that anyone from every corner of the world could join at any time? What if the public could feel exactly the same emotion I experienced in a drum circle first time in Chicago? What if people could understand the concept of harmony through joining the creative activity over the net?
1.2. Towards the heart-to-heart human communications over the network
In order to explore the questions above, for the past two and a half years, I’ve developed an interdisciplinary project entitled Telematic Drum Circle. The project combines the fields of telecommunications, robotics, human-computer interaction, and improvisational music. It allows multiple online users around the world to create a live collective sound improvisation by controlling sixteen robotic percussion instruments via the Internet.
To give readers the big picture of the project, the thesis starts with the overview of Telematic Drum Circle. I describe a basic user scenario in detail while I explain the motivation and characteristics of the project. The concept of ‘play’ in the drum circle is also addressed.
The next section deals with a foundation and context for Telematic Drum Circle by exploring the history of telecommunications. The meaning of ‘telepresence’ is addressed as symptomatic of human desire for long distance communication. While addressing the origin of the term ‘telematics’ and the history of telematic art, some notable examples of early telematic art projects, in particular art projects that involve telerobotics, as well as work that incorporates musical improvisation over the network, will be discussed.
The technological utopian vision and the fear of the dystopian future of telematics are discussed as a theoretical root of Telematic Drum Circle project. The revival of pure democracy upon the Internet, the paradoxical nature of telematics often used for military, and the dream of unifying human kind, will be explored.
The following section focuses on the technological implementation of the project. I describe the various technologies used to develop Telematic Drum Circle, including the hardware (robotic actuators, electronic circuits, and pneumatic system), and the custom software includes a Java Server and a Flash client application for accessing the project through the web. I also discuss how I approached the design of the project website and the user interface in effort to provide an intuitive user experience.
I conclude with an overall evaluation of the project, where it succeeded and where it didn’t, based on the statistical data collected from the back-end database system of the project website, and based on my own use and observing the user of others during the exhibition. Finally, in response to this evaluation, I propose the three possible game scenarios that could be implemented in the project, and present several ideas about future development.
2. TELEMATIC DRUM CIRCLE
2.1. What is drum circle? Why Telematic Drum Circle?
“A circle is one of the most natural forms found in our physical universe. It has no beginning and no end. For longer than we have written history, people have gathered together in circles in ritual fashion to celebrate and to pray in community.” [A. Hull, 1998]
Originated from pre-historic ritual ceremonies using various old-time percussion instruments, which have also been used as tools for long distance communication in several African cultures such as New Guinea and the tropical America, a [community] drum circle is generally defined as a modern day version of a traditional social activity using improvised and collaborative rhythmic patterns. People gather to sing, dance, and play improvised music for the purpose of socialization and strengthening the unity of the community itself.
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[Figure 11: Drum Circles]
In 1991, during testimony before the United States Senate Special Committee on Aging, Mickey Hart [Footnote: ], a musicologist and the drummer of the music band Grateful Dead, [Footnote: ] stated:
Typically, people gather to drum in drum "circles" with others from the surrounding community. The drum circle offers equality because there is no head or tail. It includes people of all ages. The main objective is to share rhythm and get in tune with each other and themselves. To form a group consciousness. To entrain and resonate. By entrainment, I mean that a new voice, a collective voice, emerges from the group as they drum together. [Mickey Hart, Rhythm As a Tool for Healing and Health in The Aging process, ]
Kalani, [Footnote: ] one of the most famous drum circle facilitators in the U.S., describes “a drum circle is not a percussion ensemble performing a prepared piece of music, or a drumming class led by a teacher, nor any group that is re-creating music it has played before. It is a unique event that is spontaneously created by the participants.…” He continues that “when two people play drums together, each person is listening to the other, and they simultaneously create new music based on what they hear and feel. The music from one player enters the other through the ears, travels through the heart, and flows back out through the instrument to the first player. The process can be thought of as an ‘infinite rhythm loop’ that connects people through a dynamic process of communication and expression.” [Kalani, 2004]
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[Figure 12: Infinite Rhythm Loop]
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[Figure 13: Drum Circle in Sync]
Can a group of people – the general public who have access to the Internet – dynamically interact with each other while remotely playing instruments in real-time? Can the remote improvisation be synced in certain sense? Can they feel any kind of deep spiritual connection over the network? Can the sonic vibration digitized and transmitted to the computer speakers still allow the online participants to feel a deep sensation of pleasure? And finally, as Roy Ascott [Footnote: As one of the early pioneers of the art using telecommunications technologies, Roy Ascott first applied the term ‘telematic art’ in 1983.] asks: “Is there love in the telematic embrace?” [R. Ascott, 1990]
For me, the heartbeat provides the ideal metaphor for Telematic Drum Circle. People may have other differences – physical, cultural, economic, and political – but when it comes to the heart, everyone has a beat. Through combining the spirit of drum circle and the various advanced technologies including telecommunications, robotics, and pneumatics, I was hoping to answer (or, at least, add some important clues for the future answers) to some of the above questions I have been puzzling over for many years.
A traditional drum circle has potential limits which include “time” and “space.” To join a drum circle, he or she has to be at a certain location at a certain time to join a drum circle. If the drum circle opens in Irvine, California today and if you were currently located in New York, NY, then it is impossible to experience the event. Therefore, I was thinking what if I could use Internet technology, and if I could link those two, and provide people a networked online environment where people from all over the world can join the drum circle from anywhere around the world at anytime.
2.2. Telematic Drum Circle
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[Figure 14: Telematic Drum Circle - Concept Drawing]
"The spirit and magic of rhythm expressed on drums and percussion instruments cuts through all ages, sexes, religions, races and cultures." [A. Hull, 1998]
For me, the heartbeat provides the ideal metaphor for Telematic Drum Circle. We may have other differences – physical, cultural, economic, and political – but when it comes to the heart, everyone has a beat.
[pic]
[Figure 15: Telematic Drum Circle - Keymap]
2.2.1. Telematic Drum Circle (Basic Description of Step-by-Step Participation)
Telematic Drum Circle is an interdisciplinary project which mainly combines Robotics, Telecommunications, Human-Computer Interaction, and Improvisational Music. The project invites multiple online users around the world to create a live collective sound improvisation by controlling sixteen robotic percussion instruments over the network. The project explores the rupture of deeper communication in the technology meditated world, and addresses the issue of global harmony by sharing participants’ rhythmical spirit produced through the telematic live drum ensemble.
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[Figure 16: Telematic Drum Circle – Website Screenshot]
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[Figure 17: Telematic Drum Circle – Robotic Installation]
It consists of two main components: a set of sixteen robotic percussion instruments arranged in an installation space and an interactive website networked with these drums. Each percussion instrument is representative of a geo-cultural region. Regardless of age, sex, religion, race, and culture, we all have a universal rhythm which is a heart beat. The drum is an instrument of rhythm, and I believe it can stand in for a person’s heart. The heart-to-heart communication expressed on drums cuts through all the differences, and blurs the boundaries between us. By tapping the computer keyboard while at the website, participants around the world can remotely play the robotic instruments together, while watching a live streaming video of their ensemble broadcast through the website.
2.2.2. Development and Presentations of Telematic Drum Circle
To my knowledge, Telematic Drum Circle project was the world’s first system dedicated for the real-time networked sound improvisation using telerobotic percussion instruments played by online users (and optional participation of local visitors of the robotic installation space) The development of the project has started in December 2005, and the first demonstration (the alpha version with three telerobotic drums) was held in September 2007. The official presentation of the full version was open to public from February 22nd to March 2nd, 2008 at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology in Irvine, California, USA. It consisted of two components: a set of sixteen robotic percussion instruments arranged in the exhibition space and an interactive website networked with these instruments. By tapping their computer keyboards, participants around world could play the percussion instruments through the website simultaneously with those in the exhibition room, while watching a live streaming video of their group performance of percussion improvisation.
2.3. A Basic User Scenario of Telematic Drum Cricle
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[Figure 18: Telematic Drum Circle – Installation Floor Plan]
2.3.1. Link between the user computer and the robotic drum actuator
As an anonymous online user, you visit the designated project website at first. In the website, you click the ‘Play the Drum’ menu link on top of the site to join the live online drum circle. Due to the security reasons and to the purpose of analyzing the user behaviors statistically, you must create a new account with account ID and email address. It takes less than a minute to complete it. In this process, recommended ID format is “your city" + "your name", and the simple examples include NEWYORK_Monica, SEOUL_Jin, LONDON_Tom, etc. As soon as you create your account, the website automatically forwards you to the actual drum circle web interface page.
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[Figure 19: Telematic Drum Circle – Client Interface (Not Connected)]
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[Figure 20: Telematic Drum Circle – Client Interface (Connected)]
(Description: The web interface shows the list of current participants, round-shaped drum buttons labeled with actual drum name each, live video player at the center of the drum buttons.)
On the left side of the page, you see the list of online users who are currently logged in the website, and you must see your user name in the list now. On the lower right side of the list, you see the video player surrounded by the sixteen drum buttons. The video player shows the live video stream of the actual installation of the sixteen robotic drum actuators in the exhibition space, and the location of each drum button in the web interface corresponds to the location of each drum in the live video. On the upper side of the drum circle interface with the live video player, there is a big blue ‘CONNECT’ button to connect to the main server located in the installation space. When you click the button, the button becomes grey and shows the message “The server connection established!” right next to the button. The status of the audio feed, the round-trip latency (in milliseconds), and the name of the drum you are obtaining are also listed below the connection message. As soon as your computer is successfully connected to the server, the sixteen small round-shaped light-green buttons arranged in the circle of the web interface are highlighted with three different colors including blue, dark green, and grey. Now you are ready to play the drum remotely. Make sure your computer speaker is turned on. [Footnote: For more information with a video document, you may visit the project website at ]
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[Figure 21: Telematic Drum Circle - Color Codes of Drum Buttons]
2.3.2. How to play the instrument telematically
For the input device, the project uses a computer keyboard instead of other external devices which often cause online users any inconvenience in cases. So you, as a participant, do not have to spend extra time to find out or buy the new input device since you already have a computer keyboard connected to the computer. On the keyboard, the number keys between 1 and 9 are used for playing the remote instruments via the Internet. Whenever you press one of the nine keys on your keyboard, the data goes to the server computer, and the selected robotic actuator bang the drum in real-time. The lower number bangs the drum soft, and the higher number bangs the drum loud.
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[Figure 22: Telematic Drum Circle – User Input Device and Intensity of Drum Stroke]
Each online user can play one instrument at a time, and up to sixteen users can play the live instruments simultaneously. If you want to switch your drum to the other, then you may click one of the sixteen drum buttons which is only dark green. As I mentioned, the dark green button represents the drum no one is playing at the moment, and anyone can obtain it if s/he wants. As soon as you click one of the dark green buttons, the button becomes blue while other participants see the same button with grey color in their computer because you are obtaining the drum and the drum is not available for them at the moment.
2.4. Connecting Cultures through Their Share the Knowledge of Rhythm
To play drums and percussion instruments with people who have varied musical background, the selection of instruments should be very carefully made. The combination of instruments in a drum circle should create harmonious pitches and tones in most cases if possible. In Telematic Drum Circle, selected each drum and percussion instrument with different pitch level and sound tone represents each geo-cultural region divided into Asia/Pacific, Latin America/Caribbean, Africa, Arab States and Europe/North America.
Drums can be categorized as four different pitch groups including High, Middle, Low, and Bass. Some sample drums are following: 1) High Pitch - Bongos, Doumbeks, and Talking Drums, 2) Middle Pitch - Ashikos, Djembes, Festival Tubanos, Djembes, and Djembeks, 3) Low Pitch - Tubanos, Congas, Buffalo Drums, and larger Frame Drums, and 4) Bass Pitch - Djun-Djuns, Surdo, and Gathering Drums. In addition, the three timbre groups of hand percussion include Wood Sounds, Shakers, Bells, etc.
The list of drums and percussion instruments used for Telematic Drum Circle presentation at California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, Irvine, CA is following:
Surdo 18" (Brazilian – Low pitch), Djun Djun (African – Bass Pitch), Conga (Cuban – Low Pitch), Tammorra Napoletana (Europe – Low Pitch), Djun Djun (African – Bass Pitch), Timbau (Brazilian – Middle Pitch), Tsukeshime Daiko (Asia – High Pitch), Tubano 12" (World Wide – Low Pitch), Cowbell (Cuban – High Pitch), Surdo 10" (Brazilian – Bass Pitch), Maraca (World Wide – High Pitch), Coffee House Drum (North America – Middle Pitch), Djembe 14" (African – Middle Pitch), etc
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[Figure 23: Telematic Drum Circle - Sixteen Percussion Instruments]
2.5. Musical Improvisation by the General Public
Improvisation often focuses on bringing one's personal awareness "into the moment," and on developing a profound understanding for the action one is doing. This fusion of "awareness" and "understanding" brings the practitioner to the point where s/he can act with a range of options that best fit the situation, even if s/he has never experienced a similar situation. [Footnote: ] The techniques of improvisation are widely used in the entertainment arts, for example, in music, theater and dance. In music, there are different kinds of improvisations. But in here, I would just concentrate on how a drum circle, as an example of the musical improvisation by the general public, differs from the improvisation by musical experts in Jazz and Blues. The fundamental distinction between these two is the fact that the main goal of each activity is clearly different. The improvisation by professional musicians often aims for a high quality sonic product which means to create a rhythmically well-patterned structure while focusing on the concept of the “moment” in a certain sense. The drum circle, however, aims to share the state of group mind while they appreciate playing drums and percussion instruments together. Mickey Hart noted that “the ultimate goal of a drum circle is not precise rhythmic articulation or a perfection of patterned structure, but the ability to entrain and reach the state of a group mind.” [Mickey Hart's Testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Aging, ] Like a general drum circle session, the purpose of Telematic Drum Circle is also to experience the state of one mind through sharing the collective and improvised sound performance. So everyone in the circle should be an enthusiastic player and a thoughtful listener at the same time. If each of the participants concentrates on only his or her drumming without listening to what other people are playing, then the drum circle can be out-of-sync and easily messed up. In this case, the members never experience the concept of harmony and unity. Group mind can be achieved when each participant focuses on the other members’ rhythmical spirits. [Kalani, 2005] In other words, the concept of one mind in a drum circle is accomplished when the members synchronously play instruments in the same beats, when they enjoy recreational games using rhythm as a medium of the games, or even when each member listens and responds to each other through expressing one’s own rhythmical patterns improvised on the percussion instruments. Therefore, it is crucial to concentrate on what other members are saying through their instruments in a drum circle. When each participant’s non-verbal cue is somehow synced in the moment, the group mind can be naturally achieved, and the drum circle could be considered successful.
Another major difference between the drum circle and the other improvisational music is that the former does not divide the performer and the audience, while the latter separates these two.
2.6. Passive Viewing vs. Active Participation
When I was a kid, I was educated in the typical Korean manner in a western theater or concert hall that no talk and no unnecessary movement are allowed by the audience (a passive observer) while musicians and actors (active bodies) perform on the stage. Most western traditional theaters also draw a line between a space for being watched (stage) and a space for watching (auditorium). This traditional distinction between stage and auditorium emphasizes that a player is an active body and an audience is a passive observer. There is not much interaction exist between players and audiences in this active-passive model. Audiences’ participation is often not encouraged or allowed in many conventional music settings.
In a drum circle, there is no distinction between those two, and everyone becomes a player and listener at the same time. Blurring the boundary and eliminating the distinction of the two make more dynamic and experimental ensemble. It also aims to feel more closely and to have better communication between those two.
2.7. Play in Telematic Drum Circle
“Play cannot be denied. You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.” [J. Huizinga 1998]
“Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible player.” [A. Einstein]
2.7.1. Play
Play and work have been separated in the process of industrialization in human society. As a part of a wider modernization process where social and economic change was closely related to technological innovation, particularly with the development of large-scale energy and metallurgy production, the industrialization has emphasized the maximum efficiency of labor. As a result, it stigmatized play as an unproductive activity mostly for children and retirees. Play often uses props, toys or animals in the context of recreation. Some play has defined goals and it becomes a game when it is structured with rules.
According to Johan Huizinga [J. Huizinga, 1938] in the pre-internet age, play is “a free activity standing quite consciously outside “ordinary” life as being “not serious”, but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner. It promotes the formation of social groupings which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their difference from the common world by disguise or other means.” [J. Huizinga, 1938] Another classic in play theory, Man, Play and Games [R. Caillois, 1958] expands Huizinga’s more contest-oriented notion of play to include a range of cultural forms. Caillois illustrates play as “an activity which is essentially: Free (voluntary), separate [in time and space], uncertain, unproductive, governed by rules, make-believe.” [R. Caillois, 1958]
To jump up to the year of 2008, people are now living in the information-technology-mediated world where numerous social networking online communities and massively multiplayer online role-playing games are widely spread out over the world. The definition of play has also been constantly modified depending on the historical/geo-cultural contexts. However, always the same thing in the discussions of play is the fact that play is still valuable enough in our lives and the quality of the play is indirectly but tightly interrelated to the quality of work meaning the efficiency. People also tend to agree that play includes all kinds of activities which aim toward amusement at large. From the science point of view, these playful activities often stimulate human brain and produce endorphins which are morphine-like substances originating from within the body. Both drumming and online games are obviously two of many examples of the context of play in our society.
2.7.2. Play in Drum Circle
A drum circle is known as a rhythm-based recreational activity and a playing environment where people gather in a circle and play percussion instruments together. Not like other musical training sessions or musical events aiming for precise rhythmic articulation or perfection of patterned musical structure, a drum circle’s ultimate goal is the ability to entrain and reach the state of a group consciousness through sharing participants’ rhythmical excitement expressed on percussion instruments. In a drum circle, no musical experience is required to participate. No boundary between player and audience exists. There is no right or wrong, which means that it is a safe, permissive exploratory environment. No obligation and no compulsory performance are forced on participants. [C. Stevens, 2003] So, we can consider that a drum circle somewhat meets Huizinga’s and Caillois’s definition of play.
There are different kinds of drum circles, and they attract people for a variety of reasons, though of course there are universal qualities such as sharing, cooperation and focusing on a common goal. Some general categories include the following: community drum circles, educational drum circles, training & development drum circle, health & wellness drum circles, etc. [Kalani, 2005] I only focus on community drum circle and will call it ‘drum circle’ in short. Arthur Hull [Footnote: ], an internationally renowned percussionist and drum circle facilitator, describes a drum circle as following:
“[…] Drum Circle, in the context of how we are using it within our non-professional hand drumming culture, is the most basic and simple use of the drum and rhythm. It is the use of a rhythm based event as a tool for unity. A community drum circle in the United States is a noisy and fun, family friendly event, where people come together in order share their spirit by entraining rhythmically as a percussion ensemble. They empower each other in the act of celebrating community and life through rhythm and music. People of all levels of musical expertise come together and share their rhythmical spirit with whatever drums and percussion they bring to the event. Everyone who comes and participates has something to offer the circle, and any one is welcome.” [A. Hull, 1998]
3. FOUNDATION & CONTEXT
3.1. Telepresence As Symptomatic of Human Desire for Long Distance Communication
Transmitting signals over a distance for the purpose of communication began thousands of years ago mainly with the use of audio signals (such as drums and horns) and optical signals (such as fire and smoke signals) [J. Blades, 1972]. Developed and used by cultures living in forested areas from 3000 B.C., drums served as an early form of long distance communication. For centuries, Africa, New Guinea and the tropical America natives used drum telegraphy to communicate with each other from far away [J. Blades, 1972]. In Scandinavia, beacon networks of hill forts were commonly used to warn against invading pillagers in the Middle Ages. [J. Clarke, 1902]
Since modern human communication wants to transmit more complicated messages to long distance locations, the level of precision has become one of the most important factors in telecommunications. In 1792, a new form of optical telecommunications came along: the Semaphore, which was developed by a French inventor Claude Chappe [Footnote: ]. These windmill-like structures enabled people to relay messages at distances of up to twenty miles, and could transmit fifteen characters per minute. The phenomenal technological advances of the 19th century brought profound changes, many of which were made possible by the introduction of mechanically generated electricity in 1832. With the ability to flow electrons down copper wire, European inventors Wheatstone and Cooke and right behind them, Morse and Vail in the United States, developed the telegraph, and the telecommunications industry was born. Since the first cable underneath the River Thames in London was successfully laid in 1840 and the first undersea cable between England and France was established ten years later, the network cables enabled various international telegraph services. Beyond the transmission of Morse code and audio signals at a distance through telephone links, television allowed us to broadcast audio-visual data at distances in the early 20th century. But more importantly, the explosion of the Internet opened a whole new generation of real-time bi-directional telecommunication for massive information data. As soon as this amazing technology became available to the public in 1990s, active telecommunications spread out quickly. Even now, there are different groups of people who have been working on transmitting more high resolution data over the network such efforts clearly indicate a strong human desire for achieving a more realistic telepresence.
Simulating more realistic human contact at a distance has been supported by new technologies for centuries, and the notable results since the modern era include the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, the television, and the Internet. As these technologies have been available to public, artists constantly used them as expressive media of art because artists always look for new ways of expression. Since the Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) collaborations [Footnote: Billy Kluver (1927-2004), the Swedish-born scientist formed the influential Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) with Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Whitman, and other artists.] started to push the boundary between art and technology in the 1960s, many pioneers in between the two fields have established numerous contemporary art-and-technology milestones. According to the development of telecommunications networks since the late 1980s, many avant-garde artists like Kit Galloway, Sherrie Rabinowitz, Roy Ascott, Paul Serman, Norman White, Ken Goldberg, and Eduardo Kac have challenged themselves to collaborate with scientists to explore the emergent field of Telematic Art.
3.2. Telematics and Telematic Art
The term ‘telematics’ is the English language version of the French word télématique which combines with télécommunication (telecommunication) and informatique (information) [S. Nora and A. Minc, 1980], and sometimes refers to the conjunction of computers and telecommunications. [E. Shanken, 2000] Thus, initial examples of telematics include the Internet and the Minitel system, [Footnote: Minitel, the monochrome teletext system founded in 1981, ] which is the public videotext system that enables widespread interaction between users and databases across an enormous range of services in France. The word ‘telematics’ was coined by Simon Nora and Alain Minc [Footnote: In 1978, Simon Nora, the Inspector General of Finance in France, and Alain Minc, one of France's leading thinkers, an historian, economist, and social commentator, invented the term ‘telematics’ to describe the new technology which finds itself at the convergence of computers and telecommunications.] in their well-known book L'informatisation de la Societe (La Documentation Francaise, 1978), which was the report to President of the French Republic, Valery Giscard d'Estaing to raise both practical and philosophical issues in the domain of information and telecommunications, and eventually to suggest a French national plan with particular emphasis on telecommunications to prepare for the evolving new digital information era. The book was translated as The Computerization of Society (MIT Press, 1980) two years later, and the term ‘telematics’ was popularized world wide. The book, written prior to the Internet era, talks about how the globalization of the information will affect the world.
While Nora and Minc described the potential impact of telematics, there is often a tension between the ruling class (to keep the control) and the working class (to have freedom), which is related to who has the control of the new technology invented. When a new technology comes up to the world, the desire of powerful authority often wants to monitor access to the technology in order to keep their power and to control the public who are intolerant of such hierarchical control. It is ironic because telematics could be used either to facilitate the distributed control or to strengthen centralized control because of the nature of telematics. Nora and Minc ask the following question: “Are we headed… toward a society that will use this new technology to reinforce the mechanisms of rigidity, authority, and domination? Or, on the other hand, will we know how to enhance adaptability, freedom, and communication in such a way that every citizen and every group can be responsible for itself?” [S. Nora and A. Minc, 1980] Even though the question is still unanswered, researchers generally agree that telematics would be helpful to facilitate a meaningful change of social order. In that sense, Nora and Minc add:
“The challenge… lies in the difficulty of building the system of connections that will allow information and social organization to progress together. Under certain conditions, computerization can facilitate this development.” [S. Nora and A. Minc, 1980]
In the late 1970s, while scientists were working on more stable and innovative telecommunications technologies in their government/industry-supported labs, and while businesses were fanatically chasing the profits coming from their telecommunication services, many experimental artists were also exploring the next generation of the aesthetic model using telecommunications technologies. [P. Dick, 1995]
One of the pioneering telecommunication art projects, Satellite Arts Project [Footnote: ] by the team of Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz [Footnote: Since 1975 Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz have worked as a couple on issues of communication projects; in the course they developed pioneering projects in the context of a democratic alternative media movement which led them to the foundation of C.A.F.E., an acronym for Communication Access For Everyone, in 1989 which consists of various locations on the West coast in the U.S. ] was presented in November 1977. This series of work, using video and computers for bi-directional real-time communication, first introduced the notion of a ‘virtual space’, a video space in-between physical spaces. [Footnote: Telematic Connections ] As they pointed out:
“Central to the “Satellite Arts Project” idea was an aesthetic inquiry that would apply the performing arts as a mode of investigating the possibilities and limitations of various technologies to create new contexts for art, including the emergence of telecollaborative arts on a global scale.” [K. Galloway and S. Rabinowitz, 1977]
Roy Ascott is often credited as one of the early pioneers, who first applied the term ‘telematics’ to art in 1983. In his book From Technological to Virtual Art, Frank Popper, a historian of art and technology, notes that “the five defining features of Ascott’s art and indeed of the art of our time, which so conspicuously differentiate it from the art of earlier eras, are: connectivity, immersion, interaction, transformation, and emergence.” [F. Popper, 2007] [Footnote: Technological Art and Artists (1968-1983) Chapter 2 page 79-80, Nowadays, the five defining features of Ascott’s art and indeed of the art of our time, which so conspicuously differentiate it from the art of earlier eras, are: connectivity, which part to part, person to person, or mind to mind; immersion into the whole, and thus the dissolution of subject and ground; interaction as the very form of art, such that art as behavior of forms has become art as a form of behavior; transformation via the perpetual flux of image, surface, and identity; and emergence, the perpetual coming into being of meaning matter, and mind.]
In addition, Edward Shanken, an art historian whose research focuses on 20th century experimental art, describes that “telematic art challenges the conventional categories of artist, artwork, and viewer, and the traditional opposition of subject and object.” He continues “at the same time, the artist retains authorial control and responsibility for defining the parameters of interactivity and for imbuing them with meaning and significance. Aspects of traditional narrative structure may remain, while others are relinquished in order to allow a more open-ended development, fashioned by participators as active agents involved in a multi-directional creative exchange.” [E. Shanken, 2000]
Ascott’s first telematic project La Plissure du Texte (The Pleating of the Text: A Planetary Fairy Tale, 1983) [Footnote: ] created a collaborative fairytale with networked participants at eleven remote locations including the U.S., Canada, Europe and Australia. The traditional concept of ‘viewer’, in this case, takes the important role in the creation of the work. Therefore, the viewer becomes a participant. This participation has been termed ‘distributed (or dispersed) authorship’. In addition to breaking down the artist-viewer paradigm, the other reason why this project is significant is the interactivity of the artwork and the way it breaks the barriers of potential limits including ‘time’ and ‘space.’
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[Figure 1: Telephone Pictures]
Even though Ascott was the first person to name this phenomenon, telematic art, the first use of telecommunication technologies as a medium of art had already appeared in 1920s. László Moholy-Nagy, [Footnote: For more info of László Moholy-Nagy, visit at ] the Hungarian constructivist artist, created an artwork entitled Telephone Pictures [Footnote: Moholy–Nagy's Telephone Pictures were made in Berlin via the processes of modern technology: Moholy–Nagy dictated the paintings' specifications by telephone (a relatively new invention at the time) to the foreman of a sign factory. Three paintings were made, each with identical images, but in different sizes. The telephone was a new studio tool that allowed Moholy–Nagy to produce work independent not just of his own hand but of his presence. The fact that the paintings were made by ordinary laborers demonstrates his commitment to a non–elitist approach to creative work. ] in 1922. Bertold Brecht [Footnote: Bertold Brecht is a German poet, playwright, theatrical reformer, and one of the most prominent figures in the 20th century theater. ] described the idea of telecommunications as an expressive art medium in his essay The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication [B. Brecht, 1977] in 1932. Brecht, in the essay, illustrated the two-way communication for radio to give the public the power of representation and to pull it away from the control of corporate media.
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[Figure 2: Telematic Dreaming]
In 1992, another significant early telematic art project was created by Paul Sermon, one of the well known pioneers of telematic art. The project entitled Telematic Dreaming used a bed to display high-resolution images that could project a partner that was thousands of kilometers away as though they were laying right beside a person on the bed itself. Through the ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) digital telephone network supported by Telecom Finland, a person on the bed in the location A sees the projected body image of the other person on the bed in the location B, and visa versa. These two people would interact with each other telematically and even try to touch each other. Oliver Grau, an art historian, notes that “Sermon aims at expanding the senses of the user, while it is obvious that the other cannot really be touched but that only swift, decisive, possibly tenderly reactive movements can experience the suggestion of touch—a moment of contemplation, as many users observed. The synaesthetical, sensual impression lets the hand and the eye fuse, and it is this effect that characterizes this work.” [O. Grau, 2005 - ] Starting from the project, Serman has created several other notable projects including The Telematic Séance (1993), Telematic Vision (1993), Telematic Encounter (1996), and many others.
Like Roy Ascott, and Paul Sermon, many experimental artists had addressed the utopian/dystopian vision of the coming information society through exploring the idea of telematics which connects the world in wholly different ways.
3.3. Some Notable Examples of Early Telerobotic Art
Telerobotic Art, as a subdivision of Telematic Art, started when telephone network was available for public in 1980s. Some notable artists in the area include Norman White and Doug Back, Eduardo Kac and Ed Bennett, and Ken Goldberg.
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[Figure 3: Telephonic Arm Wrestling (shown here with technician, Ian McGuigan)]
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[Figure 4: Telephonic Arm Wrestling – Schematics]
Telephonic Arm Wrestling created by Canadian artists Norman White and Doug Back in 1986 is generally considered as one of the first telerobotic art project. The piece allowed two participants to arm wrestle each other in the two physical exhibition spaces in real time. It used motorized force-transmitting systems interconnected by a telephone data link between Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris, France and the Artculture Resource Centre, Toronto, Canada. This project would not follow the conventional active-passive relationship [Footnote: As Edward Shanken described in his essay, Tele-Agency: Telematics, Telerobotics, and the Art of Meaning, “the literature on robotics and telerobotics employs the terminology of “master” and “slave” to describe the relationship between the active human agent who issues instructions and the passive mechanical apparatus that executes them. To use a typical example, human agents (active) control via the Internet a remote robotic gripper (passive) that can manipulate an array of blocks.” [E. Shanken, 2000]] of telerobotics, but instead would allow data to flow bi-directionally between the two robotic arms controlled by active agents at each of two sites. Edward Shanken adds that “while the work enabled active-active agency, because of the latency in the slow telephone link, the system was not able to support standard rules of arm wrestling games.” [E. Shanken, 2000]
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[Figure 5: Ornitorrinco]
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[Figure 6: Ornitorrinco Keypad diagram]
Ornitorrinco, which means “Platypus” in Portuguese, started in 1989 is one of the early telerobotic art projects, which was a collaboration between the artist, Eduardo Kac and the technologist, Ed Bennett. It consists of two telephone lines, four telephone sets, a robotic creature with a camera, a transcoder, and two modems, and explores the ideas of remote sensing, improvisation and teleoperation. The project was developed throughout 1989, and was presented in 1990 in a link between Rio de Janeiro, Brasil and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where their Kinetics & Electronics Lab is located. Kac, in his essay Telepresence Art on the Internet, describes “Ornitorrinco proposes to unite three areas of aesthetic investigation that so far have been explored as separate artistic realms: robotics, telecommunications and interactivity. Ornitorrinco is the name of both a series of telepresence art installations and the telerobot used to realize them. This noun was chosen early on as the telerobot’s name because of the unique nature of the platypus, which is popularly thought as a ‘hybrid’ of bird and mammal. The objective was to imply kinship between the organic (animal) and the inorganic (telerobot).” [E. Kac, 1996]
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[Figure 7: Ken Goldberg’s The Mercury Project (1994) – User Interface]
Mercury Project, created by Ken Goldberg and his students at University of Southern California in 1994, is often considered to be the first system using the Internet in a way that allowed remote operators to actually manipulate and explore a physical (i.e., non-virtual) environment. [K. Goldberg, 2000] In the telerobotic art installation, WWW users excavated artifacts buried in a sandbox in their laboratory in Los Angeles, CA. Statistically, the Mercury Project was online for seven months (1 Sep 1994 - 31 March 1995) and received over 2.5 Million hits as the artist said in the project website. [Footnote: ]
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[Figure 8: Ken Goldberg’s The Telegarden (1995-2004)]
After the huge success of the Mercury Project, Goldberg started a new project entitled Telegarden [Footnote: ] in 1995. It is an art installation that allowed web users to view and interact with a remote garden filled with living plants. Online members who logged in could plant, water, and monitor the progress of seedlings via the tender movements of an industrial robot arm as a gardener. In its first year of the project, more than 9000 registered members helped cultivate. In September 1996, the Telegarden was moved to the lobby of the Ars Electronica Center in Austria, where it remained online until August 2004.
“In linking their garden to the World Wide Web and creating an intuitive interface for the control of the arm and camera, the artists transformed what most would consider a fit of over-engineering into a subtle rumination on the nature of the Commons.” [P. Lunenfeld, 1996]
3.4. Experiments of Musical Improvisation over Networks
In relation to the experiments between robotics, telecommunications and visual art since 1980s, there have also been numerous musicians dreaming of shared music at a distance. This experimental idea started when a radio communication technology became available to musicians in 1950s.
In his article, The Aesthetics, History, and Future Challenges of Interconnected Music Networks, Gil Weinberg noted that there are “three major technological innovations which helped make such interconnected musical behaviors possible. These are the transistor radio, the personal computer, and the Internet. When these technologies became widespread and commercially available, they inspired musicians who were looking for new ways to expand the vocabulary of socio-musical expression.” [G. Weinberg, 2002]
John Cage’s Imaginary Landscape No. 4 in 1951 can be possibly considered as the first electronic interconnected music network. When it was originally created, this piece was scored for twelve transistor radios and to be performed by twenty four players, two per radio, one to control the tuner and one to control the amplitude and timbre. It incorporates live radios tuned and adjusted by players according to a score developed using aleatory compositional techniques. [P. Rush, 2004]
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[Figure: John Cage, Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (1951), The musical score] [pic]
[Figure: John Cage, Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (1951), Performed by a conducted ensemble using 12 Radios, the score specifies frequencies and volumes to create an almost unpredictable sonic collage]
Inspired by the Chinese book of oracle, the I Ching also known as “Book of Changes”, Cage demonstrated his fascination with chance operation, allowing players to control only partial aspects of the composition, while technology, chance, and other players determined the actual audible content. So the end result of this piece which creates an almost unpredictable sonic collage is dependent entirely on the broadcast material at the time of performance. Beyond the ‘Imaginary Landscape No. 4’, Cage continued to create several compositions using radio broadcast, and those examples can be listened in compositions like Speech (1995), Music Walk (1958), etc. His experiments with the transistor radio as an infrastructure for musical interdependency opened the door for other experiments of electronic music with telecommunications technologies in the late 20th century. [G. Weinberg, 2001]
Even though the revolutionary telecommunications technology, “transistor radio” allowed limited interpersonal connections in Cage’s experiments of shared live music in those days, 20 years later, the commercialization of the personal computer was able to provide many musicians and sound artists new possibilities of network music. In 1976, when MOS Technology, Inc. known as Commodore Semiconductor Group built the world’s first single board computer the KIM-1, it allowed configurable network topologies to consumers especially including experimental musicians.
The ‘League of Automatic Music Composers’, a group of musicians from San Francisco Bay Area, was one of the first experimental group musicians who used several Commodore KIM-1s for interdependent computer compositions.
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[Figure 10: League of Automatic Music Composers]
By networking their KIM-1s, they were able to send and receive information data from each other to create programmable musical interconnections. Exploring the new aesthetics of their musical creation over the network, the League worked on several musical experiments with networked computers until 1986, and evolved into an offspring group, ‘The Hub’ [Footnote: The Hub is an American "computer network music" ensemble consisting of John Bischoff, Tim Perkis, Chris Brown, Scot Gresham-Lancaster, Mark Trayle and Phil Stone. The Hub grew from the League of Automatic Music Composers: John Bischoff, Tim Perkis, Jim Horton, and Rich Gold. Perkis and Bischoff modified their equipment to allow more musicians and founded The Hub. They have collaborated with Rova Saxophone Quartet and Alvin Curran. They currently perform around the world after a hiatus. ] which used midi protocol for more accurate communication schemes. [G. Weinberg, 2002] The Hub also expanded their experiments to “remote” collaboration and audience participation, but their experiments were often not that successful due to technical problems and a complicated set of ad-hoc connections between computers. [T. Perkis, 1995, The Hub - ]
In 1989, The HUB performed HubRenga. The title was originated from is a Japanese parlor game, Renga, a social poetry in which the participants link one line with another to create verse with a particular theme. It was first performed as a live radio broadcast on KPFA [Footnote: KPFA is a listener funded radio station located in Berkeley, California, broadcasting to the San Francisco Bay area on 94.1 FM. KPFA airs public news, public affairs, talk, and music programming.] in Berkeley. Members of the Poetry Conference on the WELL (an electronic bulletin board) [Footnote: The WELL (The Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) is one of the oldest virtual communities in continuous operation. It currently has about 4,000 members. It is best known for its Internet forums, but also provides email, shell accounts, and web pages. The discussion and topics on the WELL range from the deeply serious to the generally silly, depending on the nature and interests of the participants.] sent lines of poetry to The HUB via modem. Each line contained power words which triggered musical events from The HUB. [J. Bischoff, 1996, ]
The League’s and The Hub’s experiments, using the personal computer as a versatile and resourceful partner of music, made a significant contribution to the shared network music, even though they could not fully support large scale systems for novices and wide ranged general public in those days due to technical challenges. [G. Weinberg, 2002]
Since the year 2000 when the mobile phone becomes popular, several intriguing mobile phone performances and artworks were developed. Some notable examples include Japanese Whispers [Japanese Whispers
As an experiment into the way information is changed by being digitally processed and transmitted through electromagnetic space, up to 20 mobile phones were laid nose-to-toe in a circle. During the performance event, calls between the phones were initiated in a variety of patterns (neighbour to neighbour or across the circle) and the ambient sounds and voices of participants were input into the mouthpieces to be propagated through the phones and mobile phone network. The resulting feedback loop delayed and distorted the sounds through the iterative process of being digitised, transmitted, output and re-digitised, creating echoes of the room and nearby people that sounded much like chirping birds.] by Usman Haque (2000), Telephony [Telephony
Telephony allows gallery visitors to dial into a wall based grid of 42 Siemens mobile telephones, which in turn begin to call each other and create a piece of 'music.' Each phone has been individually programmed with a different ringtone, which played en-masse, create various harmonic layers all of which are based in some way on the popular and prevalent, NokiaTune. The more people who dial into the work (whether inside or beyond the gallery walls) the more complex and layered the audio becomes. A piece of anodyne 'elevator' musac also plays into the space as a kind of background layer, and is also an improvisation on Nokiatune.] by Alison Craighead and Jon Thomson (2000), Dialtones (A Telesymphony) [Dialtones (A Telesymphony)
(2001-2002: Golan Levin, Gregory Shakar, Scott Gibbons, Yasmin Sohrawardy, Joris Gruber, Erich Semlak, Gunther Schmidl, and Joerg Lehner) is a large-scale concert performance whose sounds are wholly produced through the carefully choreographed ringing of the audience’s own mobile phones. Before the concert, participants register their mobile phone numbers at a series of web terminals; in exchange, new ringtone melodies are automatically transmitted to their phones, and their seating assignment tickets are generated. During the concert, the audience’s phones are dialed up by live performers, using custom software which permits as many as 60 phones to ring simultaneously. Because the exact location and tone of each participant’s mobile phone is known in advance, the Dialtones concert is able to present a diverse range of unprecedented sonic phenomena and musically interesting structures, such as waves of polyphony which cascade across the audience. Dialtones was presented at the Ars Electronica Festival in September 2001, and at the Swiss National Exposition in May and June of 2002.] by Golan Levin and his collaborators (2001), PLOrk: Princeton Laptop Orchestra [Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk)
The Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) is a newly established ensemble of computer-based musical meta-instruments. Each instrument consists of a laptop, a multi-channel hemispherical speaker, and a variety of control devices (keyboards, graphics tablets, sensors, etc...). The students who make up the ensemble act as performers, researchers, composers, and software developers. The challenges are many: what kinds of sounds can we create? how can we physically control these sounds? how do we compose with these sounds? There are also social questions with musical and technical ramifications: how do we organize a dozen players in this context? with a conductor? via a wireless network?] by Dan Trueman, Perry Cook, Skot Smallwood and Ge Wang (2005), and so on.
From the drum and beacon in the pre-historic age, to the Internet in the 21st century, the potential human desire has constantly contributed to create numerous innovative telecommunications technologies which have connected people over the world. The desire has also been a powerful motivation for both art and science. Since E.A.T. started to encourage artists and technologists to collaborate with each other in 1960s, they have pushed the boundary between the two fields. While the advanced telecommunications and robotic technologies have commercially available to the public, those technologies have used as expressive art media. Beyond the notable early telematic and telerobotic art projects as well as the experiments of early musical improvisations over the network, the explosion of the Internet in the middle 1990s started to spur artists and musicians to create vivid telematic artworks.
4. PERSPECTIVES ON TELEMATICS AND TELEMATIC ART
I will give an overview of two radically different perspectives. It includes the utopian vision and the dystopian vision on telematics and telematic art. Can advanced telecommunications technologies really improve the quality of human communication? Is the technological utopian vision truly possible? Can future technology perfectly simulate the five senses of human beings at distances in real time? Isn’t the utopian dream an illusion artificially constructed upon the highly sophisticated promotions by the industries which will eventually have all the economical benefits through selling the technologies?
4.1. Technological Utopia and Dystopia
4.1.1. Technological Utopia
“… [tele]communication reduces distances not only between two points but also between social classes.” [A. Mattelart, 2000]
Nowadays, the terms ‘global village’ and ‘global citizen’ are commonly used in many different contexts, as advanced telecommunications technologies are widely spread out over the world. The fast increase of interconnection among people in the electronic network allows political, economic, and cultural convergence. For centuries, new innovative telecommunications technologies have constantly been introduced to the world. Those technologies in modern society mainly include the telegraph in the late 19th century, the cable and the Internet in the late 20th century, and many other recent innovative technologies in the early 21st century like WIFI-enabled mobile phones and the satellite communications technologies. As new technological innovations came up in those days, futurists believed that these scientific innovations have significantly influenced our lives in many different ways, and the acceleration of technological advances has led the human society much more convenient than before. These technologies, to some degree, have enabled people to eliminate travel and meetings in person, and to interact instead electronically. These people think that the highly advanced technologies in the future will eventually allow humans to live without the fear of death since the distinction between the human and the machine will be melt down.
“A techno-utopia is a hypothetical ideal society, in which laws, government, and social conditions are solely operating for the benefit and well-being of all its citizens, set in the near- or far-future, when advanced science and technology will allow these ideal living standards to exist; for example, post scarcity, changes in human nature and the human condition, the absence of suffering and even the end of death. Several 20th and 21st century ideologies and movements, such as transhumanism and singularitarianism, have emerged promoting a form of techno-utopia as a reachable goal.” [J. Hughes, 2003]
4.1.2. Technological Dystopia
On the other hand, there is also skepticism on what the advanced technologies can do for us in future. A technology forecaster and essayist, Paul Saffo [Footnote: ] noted in his essay The Future of Travel that “[i]f electronic meetings could deliver the subtlety and richness of a face-to-face encounter, maybe we really could substitute screens for airplanes. Travel substitution is a phantom." [P. Saffo, 1993] These skeptics believe that the amazing possibilities of new technologies have long been understood not only to bring life changing and brilliant new things into the world but also terrible new dangers. Throughout human history, this has been true; for example, recent research has suggested that the Romans had invented the steam engine but chose by decree of the emperor not to use it, preferring to keep there large slave workforce busy and thus avoid any possibility of a populist uprising. A novelist, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four [Footnote: ] is also a classic example of a dystopian portrayal of developing technologies and how they could be used to intrude into peoples lives and take away the freedoms and pleasures which humans take for granted. In today’s world, the fear of technology has not decreased as our understanding of science has increased, in fact with every new possibility come new fears. One of the most famous Japanese comics, Ghost in the Shell (1989) [Footnote: Ghost in the Shell (攻殻機動隊, translated as "Mobile Armored Riot Police") is a Japanese cyberpunk comics created by Masamune Shirow, and first published in 1989 in Young Magazine in Japan. A sequel, Ghost in the Shell 2: Man/Machine Interface, was released in 2002. Over the years, the comics series has been adapted into the following: three anime films—Ghost in the Shell, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, and Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex Solid State Society.] investigates the impact of artificial intelligence and super computing on a futuristic world and the dangers which it could bring. Human cloning, DNA modification, super toxins, weapons of mass destruction, etc have all had loads of front page scare story headlines in recent years.
A novelist, Edward Morgan Forster, in his science fiction, The Machine Stops (1909), illustrated the limit of futuristic electronic audio-visual simulation operated by machine in the following:
“She could see the image of her son, who lived on the other side of the earth, and he could see her….”What is it, dearest boy?” …“I want you to come and see me.” “But I can see you!, she exclaimed. “What more do you want?” …”I see something like you …, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this phone, but I do not hear you.” The imponderable bloom, declared by discredited philosophy to be the actual essence of intercourse, was ignored by the machine.” [E. Forster, 2000]
4.2. Networking the World
In the late 18th century, the onset of the Industrial Revolution marked a major turning point in human social history, comparable to the discovery of fire or the invention of farming. Almost every aspect of daily life and human society was eventually influenced in some way. The steam engine, railway, static electricity, and other technical innovations allowed people to come and go to long distance much faster and easier than before. Hence, those innovations gave human an extended accessibility to the world.
Steam power was gradually developed over hundreds years since the early 1600s. Since James Watt made significant improvements in the design of steam engines in the middle of 18th century, the stationary steam engine became an essential early element of the Industrial Revolution, and influenced major changes in agriculture, manufacturing, and transportation, which had a profound effect on socioeconomic and cultural conditions in Britain at the moment. Those changes were subsequently spread throughout Europe and North America and eventually the world. In the early 19th century, railways started to widely bridge between cities and between counties, and became essential to the swift movement of goods and labor that was needed for industrialization. The railroads also quickly gained ground as steam and rail technology improved. From the idealists’ perspective, it was the start of the global networking and the universalism toward enlightenment and liberalism. It, however, is also true that the railway and other new industrial technologies have been used for numerous negative events while it brought tremendous economic profits for only a certain small number of people. Early railways were single-track affairs, so numerous accidents occurred on them. Hence, it needed instantaneous signaling communication methods to prevent further disasters. Because of the social necessity of the railway safety, a new long distance communication, telegraph, was essentially needed in that historical period. [B. Winston, 1998]
4.3. Telematics and the Revival of Democracy
Telecommunications transmit signals over a distance for the purposes of communication. In a certain sense, being able to transmit signals across the countries may be understood as breaking down of national boundaries. The concept of physical boundaries between states means nothing in the world with telecommunications. [A. Mattelart, 2000] In the early historical period of electronic telecommunications in the 1880s, on the one hand, the idealists believed that the telecommunications technologies and telematics will help to construct a new form of democracy which allows each social member to participate in all governmental decision making events electronically. On the other hand, scholars with skepticism on the technology believed that those technologies were often promoted as a guarantee of the revival of democracy for the purpose of getting huge profits through the telecommunications service they provided. In addition, when a new telecommunications technology comes up to the world, the desire of governments and other powerful interests often want to strictly monitor access to the technology in order to control their constituencies who are intolerant of such hierarchical control. It is ironic because telematics could be used either to increase centralized control or to facilitate the decentralization of control because of the nature of itself.
4.3.1. An interesting example of Webocracy in South Korea
There was surprising news in South Korea in December 2002. Roh Moo-hyun, one of the presidential candidates, finally won the election based upon the huge supports from the countless Korean online users. Mr. Roh is considered as the world’s first president who benefited from the Internet. When he was nominated as the candidate of the Democratic Party, no one could imagine that he would win the final election because he was not well known to the public compared to the more established political figures in other parties. Even though he was sincere, smart, and qualified to be president in Korea, it looked almost impossible to compete with the other candidates who had much more power and money at the beginning of the game. However, the well-developed infrastructure of high-speed Internet over South Korea changed the whole political dynamics, and became one of the most important factors in helping Mr. Roh become president of the country. In South Korea, where elections are usually decided by regional rather than generational loyalties, this was a dramatic development. His young but enthusiastic supporters, Nosamo, an internet-based group as a fan club (since 2000) for Roh Moo-hyun, came into national prominence as an active force behind Roh's election to the presidency. They had voluntarily gathered money to support him and promoted him online. They are also widely credited with mobilizing the younger voters in the election; its efforts included a mobile-phone campaign on election day to urge young voters to cast their ballots. [Footnote: ] Like this successful case study of telematics as revival of democracy in South Korea in 2002, there are numerous political online activities ongoing in many countries nowadays. Their serious online discussions and creative suggestions to the process of governmental decision making events often help the society to be more democratic than before.
Meanwhile, pessimists still think that the Internet can easily be controlled by political authority and/or capitalistic economy, even though the promotion of the Internet contributing for participatory democracy sounds plausible. As an initial example, China, North Korea, and several other countries have been monitoring and limiting the online activities of their working class all the time.
4.4. A Dream of Unifying Human Kind
Starting from his essay Art and Telematics: Towards a Network Consciousness (1984), Roy Ascott has been exploring the relationship between telematics and consciousness throughout his life. He has coined the term ‘technoetic aesthetics’ [ ] in order to describe the specific relations between art, mind, and technology. Ascott notes that “as the planet becomes telematically unified, the self becomes dispersed. The convergence of dry silicon pixels and biologically wet particles is creating a moistmedia substrate for art where digital systems, telematics, genetic engineering and nanotechnology meet. A technoetic aesthetic not only will embrace new media, technology, consciousness research and non-classical science but also will gain new insights from older cultural traditions previously banished from materialist discourse. In the present post-9/11 crisis, collaborative transdisciplinary research is needed if a truly planetary culture is to emerge that is techno-ethical as well as technoetic. [85]
These ideas about ‘telenoetics’ stem from the early 20th century thinker Pierre Teilhard de Chardin who developed the concept of the ‘noosphere’ – the sphere of human consciousness, and the British anthropologist and cyberneticist Gregory Bateson who developed the concept of the ‘Mind at Large’ in his book Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972). Both (tele-)noetics and noo(-sphere) come from the Greek word νούς (“nous”) meaning “mind”. [86]
By taking up Chardin's image of the noosphere, the brilliant science fiction writer, Philip K. Dick, in his essay Man, Android and Machine, suggests Gnostic information is both a space and a being, and something strange occurs when technology entered the human picture. He notes that “… the noosphere ... no longer served as a mere passive repository of human information (the “Seas of Knowledge” which ancient Sumer believed in) but, due to the incredible surge of charge from our electronic signals and information-rich material therein, we have given it power to cross a vast threshold; we have, so to speak, resurrected what Philo and other ancients called the Logos. Information has, then, become alive.” [87] The whole encyclopedic space of thought, juiced up by technology, becomes the ultimate example of artificial life. [88] Also, the noosphere concept of ‘unification’ was elaborated in popular science fiction by Julian May in the Galactic Milieu Series. [89]
In Erik Davis’s book, TechGnosis, explaining the Chardin’s idea of noosphere in detail and offering an insightful perspective on this whole field, he argues technology not as a neutral tool we can use but a force as strange and difficult to comprehend as human themselves. Throughout the book, he attempts to map the mythos of technology, and articulates common conceptions of technology that opens up new ways of considering the impact of technology within our lives. [90] To go back to Ascott, Shanken notes:
“… [Ascott] has described the emergent consciousness that is created via global telematic exchanges as ‘telenoia.’ He contrasts this unification of minds collaborating remotely (combining the Greek roots ‘noia’ meaning ‘mind’ and ‘tele’ meaning ‘at a distance’) with the paranoia that results from the opposition of minds trying to control one another surreptitiously. He has theorized that this expanded consciousness incorporates a broadened perceptual field, or “cyberception,” in which human and artificial systems of perception and cognition are melded together to form a global sensorium that might be likened to a neural network.” [91]
Besides the perspective on the utopian vision of using innovative technology to extend human consciousness, there is also the counter side warning the future may not be that bright. Possible human misery, poverty, oppression, violence, disease, and/or pollution may be happened from their perspective.
5. TELEMATIC DRUM CIRCLE: IMPLEMENTATION
5.1. Technical Description
The overall design of Telematic Drum Circle system is one that requires the use of computer programming, pneumatics and many fields of engineering including software, electrical, and mechanical. The system has two main components: an interactive website with a musical performance interface as well as sixteen robotic drum machines that can be controlled via the Internet users.
An online participant reaches the project website at via a fixed IP address from a broadband Internet service provider. The participant logs in to the live musical interface with his/her user name and email address. Up to sixteen people can play the instruments together at once. If more than sixteen users are online at the same time, the seventeenth person’s user name still appears in the list of current online users; however, the seventeenth person will not be allowed to connect to the server until any of the previous persons disconnect from the server or leave from the webpage. Processing of user participation is on a first-come first-serve basis. As soon as the user gets connected to the server, then the host server system assigns the user a specific instrument. The user can also choose one of any other instruments available unless someone is playing it. Then, the participant can remotely play the percussion instrument placed at the installation space through tapping his/her keyboard, while s/he watches the robotic drum ensemble broadcasted with live streaming video through the webpage. The number keys between one and nine are used to play the instrument with that intensity. The Ascii data of the online participation is transferred to the server in real-time and is converted to binary numbers which allow the air valves to proportionally open or close to move the robotic actuator for drumming. In the installation space where the robotic instruments are displayed, the live streaming video of the installation and the list of current participants are projected on the front wall. While the instruments are being played, there are four microphones and one webcam which record the actual percussion ensemble in real-time. The audio and video data is stored in two separate computers and they are being broadcasted to the online users in real-time through the Flash Media Server and the Flash Video Broadcaster. Therefore, online participants are able watch and hear what they are playing while they remotely play the instruments together.
5.2. Technical Goals and Challenges
To build up the actual Telematic Drum Circle project, I had to carefully define what the technical goals were and what the technical challenges I have to deal with were. From the technological perspective, the project consists of three major developmental components including: 1) the development of hardware, 2) the development of software, and 3) the development of the project website and the interaction design. In addition, the technical challenges include: 1) how to minimize and manage the Internet latency, 2) how to control airflow proportionally to play the drums with different intensity, and 3) how to synchronize all the input data coming from the online users in real-time.
5.3. The Development of Hardware
The hardware development is categorized into following four: 1) designing and building the robotic actuator with the pneumatic cylinder, 2) the designing the airflow system with electronic air valves, 3) developing the electronic circuit to control the valves, and 4) managing the distribution of compressed air and the sixteen USB connections.
5.3.1. The Design of Robotic Actuator
The ultimate goal of the robotic actuator design is to create a solid but also simple, compact, and easy to assemble/de-assemble mechanical structure.
5.3.2. Design of the Airflow System with Electronic Air Valves
Instead of building an actuator operated by electrical force, Telematic Drum Circle uses compressed air with air control valves. Pneumatics, known as a green technology, provides significantly fast and powerful energy to operate the robotic drums with limited electrical energy consumption. After testing several electric solenoid actuators for a while, I assessed that pneumatic technology is the ideal solution for Telematic Drum Circle since actions of drumming often require very quick and fast movement of a drum stick. To develop an air-controlled high-speed actuator for the project, a Clippard’s EVP proportional control valve with custom adjustment, two miniature-three-way valves, magnetic reed switch air cylinder (double-acting), magnetic position sensing switches, and some miscellaneous components mainly including tubes and varied connectors were necessary.
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[Figure 29: Telematic Drum Circle – Pneumatics Diagram]
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[Figure 28: Telematic Drum Circle – Pneumatics Components]
The double-acting cylinder (with the embedded magnetic piston) has two ports for compressed air. The first port is connected to the proportional control valve and the miniature-three-way valve. The second port is connected to the other miniature-three-way valve. The two magnetic position sensing switches are mounted on the back of the two ports which means the two edges of the cylinder to trigger the rod strokes (extension stroke and retraction stroke). For extension stroke (to strike the drum skin with the drum stick connected to the actuator), the compressed air should be applied to the first port while the second port is opened. The proportional valve provides the different amount of compressed air for varied stroke speed (eventually to hit the drum with different intensity) As soon as the extension stroke is completed, the magnetic limit switch near the second port triggers it, and let all the air control valves change the direction of the air flow. So, the piston starts to return to its resting position while the air goes through the second port and the first port opened up so that the compressed air in it can be expelled. When the piston reaches to the end (the resting position), the magnetic limit switch near the first port triggers it and close all the valves and be ready to receive next commend. Now, the one cycle of the stroke is completed.
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[Figure 26: Telematoic Drum Circle – First prototype of Robotic Actuator]
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[Figure 27: Telematic Drum Circle – Final Version of Robotic Actuator]
5.3.3. Microcontroller & Electronic Circuit
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[Figure: Telematic Drum Circle – Electronic Circuit Schematic]
To play the percussion instrument with different intensity, it is important to have a full control of the proportional electronic valve and the two miniature-three-way valves. The electronic circuit consists of five different components including an Atmega8 [Footnote: The ATmega8 is a low-power CMOS 8-bit microcontroller based on the AVR RISC architecture. By executing powerful instructions in a single clock cycle, the ATmega8 achieves throughputs approaching 1 MIPS per MHz, allowing the system designer to optimize power consumption versus processing speed.] microcontroller, a power operational amplifier (LM675) circuit [Footnote: The LM675 is a monolithic power operational amplifier featuring wide bandwidth and low input offset voltage, making it equally suitable for AC and DC applications. The LM675 is capable of delivering output currents in excess of 3 amps, operating at supply voltages of up to 60V. The device overload protection consists of both internal current limiting and thermal shutdown. The amplifier is also internally compensated for gains of 10 or greater.], two single channel high side solid state relay (VN920) circuits [Footnote: The VN920 is a monolithic device made by using STMicroelectronics VIPower M0-3 Technology, intended for driving any kind of load with one side connected to ground. Active VCC pin voltage clamp protects the device against low energy spikes (see ISO7637 transient compatibility table). Active current limitation combined with thermal shutdown and automatic restart protect the device against overload. The device integrates an analog current sense output which delivers a current proportional to the load current. Device automatically turns off in case of ground pin disconnection.], a board for FT232RL [Footnote: The FT232R is the latest device to be added to FTDI’s range of USB UART interface Integrated Circuit Devices. The FT232R is a USB to serial UART interface with optional clock generator output, and the new FTDIChip-ID™ security dongle feature. In addition, asynchronous and synchronous bit bang interface modes are available. USB to serial designs using the FT232R have been further simplified by fully integrating the external EEPROM, clock circuit and USB resistors onto the device. The FT232R adds two new functions compared with its predecessors, effectively making it a "3-in-1" chip for some application areas. The internally generated clock (6MHz, 12MHz, 24MHz, and 48MHz) can be brought out of the device and used to drive a microcontroller or external logic. A unique number (the FTDIChip-ID™) is burnt into the device during manufacture and is readable over USB, thus forming the basis of a security dongle which can be used to protect customer application software from being copied.] USB to Serial (to send/receive data between the computer and the microcontroller), and two magnetic limit sensors (attached to the air cylinder).
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[Figure 30: Telematic Drum Circle – Microcontroller]
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[Figure 31: Telematic Drum Circle – Circuit Diagram]
5.3.4. Air Distribution & USB Connections for data transmission
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[Figure 32: Telematic Drum Circle – Diagram of Air Distribution]
To distribute the equal amount of compressed air to each pneumatic actuator, air tubing should be organized carefully.
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[Figure 33: Telematic Drum Circle – Diagram of Sixteen USB Connections and the USB Serial Port Connections (COM3 – COM18)]
The sixteen robotic actuators are connected to the host computer through USB connection. Each four actuators are linked to ‘the self-powered 4 port USB 2.0 hub’ and the four 4 port USB 2.0 hubs (linked to sixteen actuators total) connected to a middle-point 4 port USB hub. This hub is attached the host computer.
5.4. Website & Interaction Design
5.4.1. Website Design
The project website, , was carefully designed to guide and naturally encourage anonymous online users to join the drum circle remotely. The website mainly consists of Information Session, Live Video Room, Participation of the Live Drum Circle, etc. It also provides a four-minute-long video clip describing the whole project and how to play an instrument at a distance. To join the drum circle through the web, the system requires each user to create a new account (which takes less than 30 seconds) and to login to the system while drumming. The login system allows users a more secured web environment and is prepared to provide each registered user a specific solution if s/he experiences any technical challenge to join the circle. The back-end database system of the website gathers and monitors the user logs. (Each user’s password is specially coded so even the administrator of the system cannot see it, and the system does not collect any important personal data.) The statistical log data gathered from the group of online users is used to improve the drum circle system to provide them a more intuitive and convenient web interface.
5.4.2. User Interface Design
It is important to develop a well-designed web interface which allows online users to play drums intuitively. The design should be simple and easily understandable to start playing the drums right away.
The first decision I had to make to start designing the interface was which software is the best for my purpose. After researching different softwares, my decision was Adobe Flash. Flash technology, since its introduction in 1996, has become a popular method for adding animation and interactivity to web pages. It is commonly used to create various web page components to integrate video into web pages. It is available in most common web browsers and some mobile phones, and can also run on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. More importantly, Flash as a format has become very widespread on the desktop market and created a market dominance. (Adobe claims that 98 percent of US Web users and 99.3 percent of all Internet desktop users have the Flash Player installed.) [Flash Player Penetration, ] Therefore, online users do not need to download and install new software or plugin to join the project with their computers, because we can think most of them already have Flash player installed.
Because people, in general, gather in a “circle” to join a drum circle session, I arranged the sixteen drum buttons (labeled with the instrument names) in a circle; thus, the online users feel they are sitting in the virtual circle. I also put the live video stream at the center of the circle, so the users can watch the live video of sixteen robotic instruments played by the users from different locations. The video shows the top view of the live video of robotic drum installation, and the location of each drum button corresponds to the location of each drum in the live video. Regarding the color of the drum buttons, I assigned four different colors depending on the status of the drum button. If the user does not connect to the server yet, all the buttons are all light green. As soon as s/he connects to it, one of the sixteen buttons become blue which is the drum the server automatically assigned for you. The other fifteen buttons become dark green (the drum no one is obtaining yet) or grey (the drum someone is obtaining) depending on the status of each drum’s availability. If the user click one of the dark green buttons to switch to the instrument, the dark green button becomes blue and the previous blue button becomes dark green since the user just switched his/her instrument.
On top of the interface, there is a big blue ‘CONNECT’ button, so users can easily see what they have to click first. Left side from the interface and the connect button, there is a list of current online users, which allows the each user in the webpage can see how many people are currently online and which city each of them are from. [Footnote: The current version of the login system encourages each new user to create an account with a user name with specific format. The preferred ID format is “your city" + "your name". The simple examples include NEWYORK_Monica, SEOUL_Jin, LONDON_Tom, etc.]
5.4.3. User Input Device
At the beginning of the development of the user interface, I had to decide what kind of input device I was going to use, because the direction of the interface design goes differently depending on which input device to use.
An Input device is any piece of computer hardware equipment used to provide data and control signals to a computer. Typical examples of input devices include keyboards and mice, and there are also other devices which provide many more degrees of freedom. It is important to choose the right user input device which can provide similar feeling when a user is actually playing real percussion instrument. In addition to the simulation of the feeling, the device should be easy to find out, and should be compatible with any kinds of computers. Users, otherwise, may easily give up joining the drum circle due to the difficulty of getting/installing the input device. Because of the common behavior of many online users, which mostly prepares to simply stick with the basic input devices like keyboards, mice, and/or touch pad in many cases, I eventually ended up with the decision to use “computer keyboard” as the right user input device for this project. Everyone, who uses a computer, has a keyboard, and the feeling of tapping a keyboard is somewhat similar to the feeling of tapping a drum in certain sense.
After the finding out the right input device, the keyboard, I experimented with the keyboard in several different ways, and eventually decided to use the number keys between ‘1’ and ‘9’, which correspond to the intensity of drum playing.
5.5. The Development of Software
This project requires three computers with Pentium 4 CPU, 2GB RAM, and Windows XP as the minimum requirement. The first computer receives all the input data from multiple online users via a fixed IP address and transmits the data to specific robotic actuators to play the percussion instruments in real-time. The four microphones at the center of the drum circle are connected to the four-channel audio mixer and the mixer linked to the second computer. This computer takes the roll of broadcasting the high quality live audio to the online users who are currently playing those instruments at distances. From the ceiling, there is a webcam which captures the live scene of the robotic drum circle being performed. The webcam is hooked up to the third computer which has the Flash video broadcaster running. The software broadcasts the live stream to the online users in the interface webpage.
The development of software consists of 1) Java Server, 2) Client Application, 3) Audio Broadcaster, and 4) Video Broadcaster.
5.5.1. Java Server for Input Data from Multiple Online Users
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[Figure: Java Server receiving data from online users]
The main purpose of the custom Java server is 1) to receive all the input data coming from the online users in real-time, 2) to measure the round-trip latency between the host computer and the each user’s computer every ten seconds, and 3) to synchronize and quantize the incoming data and to transmit it to proper robotic actuator in real-time.
Transmitting data from one location to the other always takes time no matter how close the distance is. Unless we have the Internet connection with the velocity of light, it is impossible to eliminate the issue of delay, especially in the field of network computer music. Even though a certain amount of delay and varied Internet speed in user sides, it is fortunate that the Java server developed for this project has its own synchronization and quantization algorithm which helps multiple online users to play percussion instruments at long distances simultaneously.
As long as the host computer has a static IP address and a specific port opened, it is not that hard to receive data from online users in real-time. Once the Java server receives all the data over the network, it is important to synchronize and quantize the data to help the online users to remotely play drums together. Everyone has different Internet speed and the varied distance from the host computer, so a keystroke data of each user arrives to the host computer in different timing; nonetheless, all users press the same key at the same time. For example, there are two online users including user A and user B. The A is sending a keystroke via the wired high-speed Internet connection at the distance of 100 kilometers from the host computer. The B is sending the same keystroke through the wireless high-speed Internet connection at the distance of 500 kilometers from the host computer. Even though both A and B hit their keyboard at the same time, the A’s message arrives to the host computer first and the B’s data later. Then, the two robotic actuators play their drums in different timing, and the A and the B eventually receive the audio and video feedback which is out of sync. In the field of shared network computer music, synchronization is one of the most important issues to deal with beside the issue of latency management. So the Java server, in this project, measures the round-trip latency of each client computer through sending Ping (Packet Inter-Network Groper) packet in every ten seconds, and calculates the average round-trip latency. Based on the average latency measured, the server intentionally holds onto the data received for the certain amount of milliseconds to make everything in sync. The quantization of each beat before transmitting the data to the robotic actuators is also important because it helps multiple users play drums simultaneously over the network. The current version of the Java server allows the administrator to preset the beat time if quantization is preferred in certain circumstances. If general online users visiting the project website are from extremely far from the host computer and if they generally use slow internet connection, then it is useful to setup the beat time (in milliseconds); it helps the rhythms to be synced. After all the calculations made through the real-time synchronization and quantization algorithm, the server transmits each data coming from the multiple online users to each robotic drum separately in proper timing.
5.5.2. Audio & Video Broadcast
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[Figure: Adobe Flash Media Server for audio & video broadcasting]
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[Figure: Live Video-Audio Broadcaster and Switcher]
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[Figure: Live Audio Broadcaster for Drum Circle Interface and four Microphones capturing the instrument sound for live audio broadcast.]
The audio broadcasting and the video broadcasting have been intentionally separated in this project. In general, audio and video are broadcasted as a package because the synchronization between them is important in most cases. However, the reason why I decided to go for the separated two broadcasts is minimizing the latency of the audio feedback is more important than synchronizing the audio and video. When the audio and video are broadcasted separately to online users, the loading time of audio is much faster and it has less buffering time. When these two are transmitted as a package to users, the loading time goes up. This occurs because loading time of video is much slower than the time of audio.
6. CONCLUSIONS
Telematic Drum Circle has mainly three distinctive characteristics compared to other art projects related to music, robotics, and telecommunications. 1) It is designed for the general public (ranging from novices to musical experts) as the target users. This differs from many other computer-networked improvisational music projects, which have been developed for the purpose of facilitating professional music improvised by experts. 2) Not like other music projects aiming to the precise rhythmic articulation or to the production of high quality sonic work, it rather focuses on how to reach the state of group mind while they appreciate playing percussion instruments together over the network. 3) The project would not follow the conventional master-slave (active-passive) model originated from the literature on robotics and telerobotics. As Shanken described that this model employs the terminology of ‘master’ and ‘slave’ to describe the relationship between the active human agent (master) who issues instructions and the passive mechanical apparatus (slave) that executes them. [E. Shanken, 2000] [Footnote: “To use a typical example, human agents (active) control via the Internet a remote robotic gripper (passive) that can manipulate an array of blocks.” [E. Shanken, 2000]] While this traditional model creates a hierarchical structure between the remote operator (active master) and the robotic object (passive slave), Telematic Drum Circle instead follows active-active model which allow data to flow multi-directionally among the sixteen robotic percussion instruments controlled by remote participants at each of sixteen locations.
6.1. Successes and Challenges
6.1.1. Statistics
Once I completed the detailed proposal of the project in November 2005 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the development of Telematic Drum Circle project began in earnest in August 2006 when I moved to the Arts Computation Engineering (ACE) Program at University of California, Irvine (UCI). The very first prototype of the robotic drum actuator using pneumatics technology was designed and developed during the fall 2006, and the first remote control of the robotic actuator over the network was successfully demonstrated in December 2006 at Simon Penny’s ACTION Lab. The alpha version of Telematic Drum Circle with the three robotic drums networked with the project website was exhibited in the annual ACE exhibition entitled interfACEd: mediating techno-cultural practice [Footnote: ] at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), Irvine in September 2007. Based on the research fellowships and sponsorships from the eight organizations/institutions/companies [Footnote: The current version of Telematic Drum Circle has been developed with the generous supports from the following ten organizations/institutions/companies: Arts Council Korea (Korean Culture & Art Foundation); Clippard Instrument Laboratory, Inc.; Remo Inc.; Embodied Media + Performance Technology Lab (EmptLab); California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2); Sparkfun Electronics; Arts Computation Engineering Program, University of California, Irvine; Department of Music, University of California, Irvine; Claire Trevor School of the Arts, University of California, Irvine (Medici Scholar Award and Graduate Research Award); and Bimba Manufacturing Company.], the full version of the project including the sixteen telerobotic actuators, the final project website () with the Flash user interface, custom Java software, and the audio/video broadcaster, was created during the year of 2007. The official presentation of the full version of the project was held as my solo exhibition at Calit2, Irvine from February 22nd to March 2nd, 2008.
During the ten days of the exhibition, the project website’s back-end database management system has monitored the online participation for the ten days of the presentation, and collected all the statistical data of user behaviors. After the successful completion of the presentation, the site has got a great public attention with approximately 11,500 page views. About 3,000 online users from twenty seven different countries and more than 500 offline visitors have joined the project. I, however, found out that there are also a few issues I have to revisit and improve the project to provide the online users better environment for playing drums together. According to the statistical data collected, one of the major issues is that the only thirty five percent of the online users registered have played the drum circle more than ten minutes, and the twenty percent of the total users have visited the site more than twice.
6.1.2. User Behaviors Observed in the Current Version of Telematic Drum Circle
For the first ten days of the public presentation, I found out the fact that people (the online users and the local visitors) react and response differently to the project. Luckily, I was able to observe some of actual users’ behaviors by watching how they interact (or not) with other participants. A few participants also sent me feedback through the online guestbook. Here are some examples of the different user behaviors reported.
Online Users’ Behaviors Observed
- Online player to create rhythmic patterns alone (no interaction with other players)
- Online player to be crazy (tapping keyboard as fast as they could)
- Online player to experiment with latency (some scientists’ response to the project)
- Online player to rhythmically interact with the other online players
- Online player to transmit Morse code through banging the drums
- Online player to interact with offline visitors who play actual drums by their hands, etc
Local Visitors’ Behaviors Observed
- Offline player to interact with online players
- Offline player to interact with the other offline players
- Offline player to just play his/her own rhythm (no interaction with the other players)
- Offline visitor to dance based on the rhythm generated by online players
- Offline visitor to clap hands or to passively observe the robotic drums banging, etc
6.1.3. Telematic Drum Circle Intended for Free Jamming with Minimum Facilitation
Telematic Drum Circle was originally developed as a networked jamming environment, where the online users have the maximum freedom of play/control in remote drumming as well as the minimum facilitation provided by the automated software algorithm for synchronization and beat-time quantization, which is required due to the unavoidable Internet latency and Jitter issues. What I was hoping with the idea of free jamming was that, after spending little bit of time to be used to the project website and the interface, the participants would somehow regulate the group sound by themselves and eventually create a good harmonic sound together via the Internet. I still think that providing the users the detailed rules may limit their imagination; therefore, the results may be misread. In addition, if the users were forced to follow the specific musical rules given, people without musical background may feel uncomfortable and simply give up this play.
6.1.4. Challenges
Comparing the original intention and the statistical data, it seems that online users often do not find further interest in the project as soon as they successfully control the drums remotely. The ideal system should be able to invite online users to keep staying in the site longer than the current version of the system. Since my intention of the project is more like creating a community environment where online users come, stay, and build their history with collective rhythm; I feel that I have to rethink how I can motivate online users to keep playing the percussion instruments with others together longer than what I observed during the installation. One other thing I may need to consider is the issue of the highly physical nature of drumming (which is so pleasurable to many people) versus the keyboard tapping (which maybe less pleasurable than real drumming). Originally, the computer keyboard was selected as the final input device for online users because everyone who use computer has a keyboard. To reach wider group of online users, the selection of the keyboard as the input device for Telematic Drum Circle was the right decision at the beginning. However, it is less playful compared to playing a real drum because users cannot experience the same feeling of the vibration of the drum skin while tapping a keyboard. Optional input devices might be supported in this project if any users want more dynamic and immersive experience while playing the robotic percussion instruments remotely.
To encourage online users to stay longer in the virtual drum circle, providing them specific game scenarios might be a useful strategy. It is good because playing games together often allows the participants to be more active while gaming, and because it often encourages the players to compete each other with enthusiasm. The next subsection describes the three possible game scenarios of Telematic Drum Circle which might be helpful to encourage the users to stay longer with more fun in the circle.
6.2. Games of Telematic Drum Circle
6.2.1. Three Possible Game Scenarios
Compared to many other intensive online games which require critical competition from players, the games of Telematic Drum Circle tend to be more like recreational activities which provide players more a relaxed and warm environment. So, the games, described below, are similar to some recreational games people easily experience without learning them. These game scenarios below are inspired by basic recreational games and activities which are fun, engaging, cooperative learning opportunities for participants of all ages. These examples are modified version of Kalani’s music games. [Kalani, 2005]
6.2.2. Game #1: Pieces of Eight
Time span: 20-25 minutes
Process:
1. Ask online participants to silently choose a number from 1 to 8. Explain that the system will be counting out from 1 to 8 in rhythm (repeating).
2. Ask participants to play one note on their instrument each time the system reaches their number.
3. The system makes distinguishable simple sound in rhythm and count for the group. (The system can automatically/gradually stop counting once the participants are playing on their own.) Invite everyone to listen to the drum melody that results.
4. Suggest they try to find the people who are playing on the same beat as they are.
5. After a couple of minutes, suggest that everyone adds one note (playing 2 notes per each 8-beat phrase).
6. If desired, add more notes over time.
7. When it feels appropriate, reduce the number of notes by one until everyone is back to playing 1 note per 8 beats.
8. Bring the activity to a close by saying “Last time through,” or cue a fade out.
[pic]
[Figure 35: Pieces of Eight]
In the game of Pieces of Eight, the music is full, even when everyone only plays one note. The players construct interesting collective sound patterns with dynamically changing beats. The game master can be either one of the online participants, the automated server system, or the webmaster depending on who wants to take the position. This game was inspired by the same title of the game Pieces of Eight illustrated in Kalani’s book, Together in Rhythm.
6.2.3. Game #2: Beat Wave
Time span: 20-30 minutes
Process:
1. Play starting rhythm three times together.
2. The game master provides a number between 4 and 16, and plays the base drum constantly in a same tempo.
3. The player who is located on the right side of the game master hits his/her drum once.
4. The next player hits his/her drum two times with the same tempo the game master provides.
5. The third player hits the drum 3 times, and increase the number of hits until a player reaches to the number the master provides.
6. The master provides a new number and the rotation goes backward.
In the game of Beat Wave, the base tempo can be speeded up or slowed down depending on the situation.
6.2.4. Game #3. Drum Battle
Time span: 25-30 minutes
Process:
1. The game master assigns and let the player group know who will play next and how long for each.
2. The master sets the timer, and the assigned player starts playing his/her drum for the assigned time duration. (The online user interface will allow other players to watch who is playing through button light indications while listening to the drum improvisation).
In this case, the game master becomes a musical conductor. The conductor’s graphical interface is being provided separately. The interface may allow the master to preset some patterns of drums. Each player will be able to see who is currently playing drum(s) through watching the blinking or highlighting drum indicators of the user interface.
6.2.5. Possible Rewards & Penalties
The possible rewards and penalties in the Telematic Drum Circle games are the following: 1) Winner gets points. Loser loses the points. 2) Winner or loser takes the position of game master. 3) Loser may be restricted from joining the game for short amount of time.
These three Telematic Drum Circle game scenarios including Pieces of Eight, Beat Wave, and Drum Battle, are some of many examples that I could think of to invite more online users to encourage them for learning a new way of sharing a group mind in the virtual space. The main purpose of these games is not to create an environment where the users intensively compete with each other to get more points, but rather to naturally encourage them to stay longer in the virtual circle while having enjoyable moment with playing the percussion instruments together over the network. Besides these initial examples described above, online users are also invited to propose new games or new ways to enjoy this virtual drum circle environment by proposing suggestions in the online forum which will be created in the next version of the project soon.
6.3. Future Developments
The current version of Telematic Drum Circle‘s back-end software and database system have no function to digitally record audio/video of the robotic installation played by participants yet. The next version will add a live audio/video recording and editing algorithm which will allow the main server to store all the participants’ audiovisual data in real-time. The data is automatically edited and is saved in the database. The files are forwarded to each participant through the automatic email sender as soon as s/he leaves from the web interface page. All the media files are stored in the one terabyte A/V storage linked to the archive page of the project website. Online users are invited to the archive page where they can search other people’s performance files and watch them.
The sound file recorded through the microphone in the installation space is also automatically converted to SMAF(mmf) file format for mobile service in the archive section later. In the archive page, downloadable video and sound files will be available. The participant and visitor of the website can use the archive page to e-mail the multimedia files to his/her friends and to encourage them to visit the project website and create a collaborative piece with the networked percussion robots.
The possible use of the Telematic Drum Circle application could include educational settings, game industries, medical settings for rehabilitation, art venues and public spaces. To be useful in those fields, Telematic Drum Circle needs to have additional features. The initial ideas for future development include the following: 1) Cuing: this is one of the most important and critical issues in technical side the project. It is also related to the issue of unavoidable latency and jitter of the Internet communications; 2) Necessity of facilitator for gaming in Telematic Drum Circle; 3) Audio/video data archiving and search engine; 4) Upgrading of robotic actuator (at least two robotic actuators for each drum); 5) New design of two online graphical user interfaces (one for game master & the other one for other players); 6) Pre-recorded video tutorials (Step-by-step instructions to help newly registered players to get started); 7) Artificial Intelligent system which may play drums automatically while no online user is participating the circle. It would be helpful to encourage the first comer to be familiarized to the drum circle in certain sense; and 8) Developing other possible game scenarios.
6.5. A Universal Rhythm: Telematic Drum Circle Promoting Harmony across the Globe
Overall, Telematic Drum Circle allows multiple online users around the world to create a live collective sound improvisation by controlling robotic percussion instruments via the Internet. While dreaming of the project at the beginning, I was curious if a traditional drum circle could be transformed by telecommunications and robotics technologies to form a collective global voice without a single spoken word, reflecting the rhythm at the center of our beings. My intention was to remind people to think about the importance of heart-to-heart communication in the technology mediated era, and to provide the online users a chance to similarly experience the amazing feeling of sync as I felt during the first encounter of a drum circle in Chicago in 2004.
All human beings have a heart beat and therefore, we all have rhythm. The heartbeat provided the ideal metaphor for Telematic Drum Circle project. People may have other differences – physical, cultural, economic, and political – but when it comes to the heart, everyone has a beat.
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APPENDIX A: FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
What is a Drum Circle?
According to Mickey Hart: “the Drum Circle is a huge jam session. The ultimate goal is not precise rhythmic articulation or perfection of patterned structure, but the ability to entrain and reach the state of a group mind.” In the words of Arthur Hull: “The Drum Circle is a fun entry-level learning experience that is accessible to anyone who wants to participate. Drum Circle participants express themselves collectively by using a chorus of tuned drums, percussion, and vocals to create a musical song together while having a great time.”
What do I need to have to participate in the drum circle?
A computer with Internet access and a speaker are required.
I have never played any musical instruments before. Does it require musical background to participate?
No musical experience necessary. We all have a heart beat and therefore, we all have rhythm. That's all you need.
Why a “telematic” drum circle?
A general drum circle which is a very good tool for unity requires only on-site participation. Other people from different regions can not participate in this great event. Therefore, I thought what if I can create a virtual environment anyone from any locations can enjoy the drum circle with anybody at any time.
Why robots? Why robot-played instruments?
Human players obviously can not play drums for one full month without a break time. (
Technically, robots do not play the instruments. The online participants play them telematically. The robots receive the data from the online participants, and enact the data.
Why do you ask for my email address? Will I get spam?
The email addresses are needed in order to notify you when a webpage for downloadable video/audio files is ready for you. Even though all webpages in archive sections of the website are public, the email address is NEVER revealed to anyone. You can ensure that we will not reveal your address to any spammers.
How many people can participate in the Telematic Drum Circle at the same time?
Currently, sixteen people can participate in this event at any given time. (The number of robot-played instruments may be increased in near future.)
What happen if more than 15 people trying to participate at the same time?
The sixteenth person’s name and location will be appeared on the waiting list which will be shown at the top right side of the participation section of the web interface. If anybody leaves the participation section, the sixteenth person can participate in the drum circle. It is a first-come, first-serve basis.
If nobody plays the instruments, what happens?
If nobody plays the instruments for 5 minutes, then the computer will start playing basic rhythms softly. If a participant starts to play one of them again, the computer will gradually stop playing the basic rhythms.
Can I choose any of the percussion instruments prepared at the installation site?
Yes, you can choose any percussion instruments, as long as other participants are not currently using it.
How do I know if the robot I chose is playing the drum well?
You can see the robot via the live streaming video broadcasted in the participation section of the website. There are two video camcorders at the installation space - one for the entire scene, the second one revolving slowly from the ceiling for the detail shot. The video images captured from these two camcorders are edited automatically through a custom-made software (a video editing algorithm). Then the video will be transported to the web server and will be broadcasted in real time for participants in the website.
How do a group of participants get started playing together, when we are all in different locations?
Instead of using verbal languages, the aim of this project is to explore the nonverbal global language of 'rhythm'. However, I am on developing iconographic messages superimposed on the live video screen to guide the participants.
Can I keep the video and audio files of the drum circle I participated?
When you leave from the participation section, you will receive an email including a URL to visit an archive webpage automatically created. Please visit the webpage and download all your files created to your computer and/or mobile phone. You can also enjoy other peoples’ music through the search engine.
I want to introduce the Telematic Drum Circle to my friends. What should I do?
There are two ways: 1. Go to the archive section and use the ‘invitation’ menu. Or 2. You can simply forward the email you received to your friends.
Will I be able to hear and be fully immersed in the end result?
Regarding this question, I would like to talk about the potential limit of online participation and some possibilities. I have been focusing on the potential limit of online experience, which means online participants cannot feel the exactly same experience with real playing instruments. However, we have a history of satisfaction with technologies that provide virtual contact, such as in computer games where online players can fly freely and kill devils in an imaginative 3D world, and also in listening to music through MP3 players instead of attending a concert. Cutting-edge technologies and future sciences also have potential limits, yet we are still satisfied with webcam chats and cell phone conversations despite some of their technological issues, as a result of what the successes of technology. Therefore, I believe this is sort of a recreational game - Telematic Drum Circle, it has the same potential limits. But the Telematic Drum Circle also has an intuitive musical interface and a video streaming system with a well organized video algorithm and high quality sound that can give participants an immersive experience and a satisfactory level of participation.
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