Isolation Journal: Remote Interactions in the Time of the COVID-19 Pandemic

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses the development of artistic collaboration during the global lockdown, related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The art work under study involves the author’s practices of ecological sound art and intercultural collaboration in collaboration with Canadian composer and improviser John Oliver. A primary outcome of this work was the album Isolation Journal, released in 2020, in the midst of the pandemic. One feature of Isolation Journal was how it revisited site-specific recordings made in Vietnam, on the countryside north of Hanoi, for an installation made by Östersjö in collaboration with Nguyễn Thanh Thủy and Matthew Sansom [Östersjö, Stefan, and Thanh Thủy Nguyễn. 2016. “The Sounds of Hanoi and the After-Image of the Homeland.” Journal of Sonic Studies 12. https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/246523/246546]. Through remote interactions, and by building a complex sampler instrument using Östersjö's recordings of Aeolian đàn đáy, a traditional Vietnamese lute, as well as field recordings from the site, Oliver and Östersjö created the album Isolation Journal through remote interaction. This in turn became a fundamental building block when the author's Vietnamese/Swedish group The Six Tones took the initiative to develop a scene for telematic performance at Manzi Art Space in Hanoi. This series started out with a concert with John Oliver, The Six Tones and guest performers from Hanoi in July 2020. Building on audio and video documentation, as well as on qualitative interviews with the participating co-performers, an analysis of the emergence of discursive voice [Gorton, David, and Stefan Östersjö. 2019. “Austerity Measures I: Performing the Discursive Voice.” In Voices, Bodies, Practices: Performing Musical Subjectivities, edited by Catherine Laws, William Brooks, David Gorton, Nguyễn Thanh Thủy, Stefan Östersjö, and Jeremy J. Wells, 29–79. Orpheus Institute Series. Leuven: Leuven University Press] is drawn from these two internally linked artistic projects. The paper develops the analytical framework of tele-copresence, a synthesis of the contrasting concepts of telepresence and copresence, as a means for analysing the virtual presence which emerges through such remote musical interaction. 

Introduction

This paper discusses the creative process of making Isolation Journal (Oliver and Östersjö 2020), an album created in April and May 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, through remote interaction between the Canadian composer John Oliver and the Swedish guitarist Stefan Östersjö. Further, the paper also outlines how the design of their artistic collaboration was taken further in a telematic performance with the Vietnamese-Swedish group The Six Tones, connecting the Manzi gallery in Hanoi with spaces in Europe and Canada. Building on these examples from musical practice, the paper seeks to develop a better understanding of the artistic processes of remote interaction between musicians, and in what ways these may afford different possibilities and constraints due to their situatedness in the use of audio technologies.

Analytical Framework and Data Collection

The analysis is built on qualitative data, captured through exchanges during the compositional processes and performances, all collected in spring and summer 2020. Additional data was collected in 2022, in the form of interviews, some of which were designed as stimulated recall interviews using video drawn from the concert performance as stimuli. Audio and video materials are found in a repository in the Research Catalogue (RC), following this link: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/1301475/2015640.

Tele-Copresence during the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profoundly disruptive effect on human-human interaction. Its impact has been experienced in all areas of society, but especially in practices which typically depend on physical copresence. One such field is the performing arts, which rely on the encounter of artists and audiences in theatres, practice rooms, concert halls, clubs and so on. Access has been severely restricted during the pandemic, making it difficult for audiences to access live music, but also for musicians to rehearse and perform together. In order to avoid isolation, institutions, students, teachers and individual musicians across all genres have explored different forms of remote interaction, mediated through the internet, radically challenging and transforming music practice globally. The user experience of such technologies are often referred to as ‘telepresence’, a term coined by Minsky (1980), in a paper discussing teleoperations (the remote control of a machine).

In Philippe, Schiavio, and Biasutti (2020), one of the first psychological studies of online teacher-student relationships in music education during the COVID-19 pandemic, both positive and negative trends were identified. Of particular interest is how one of the four dimensions they identify ‘was characterised by the discovery and development of a new type of relationship—a long-distance relationship involving a profound relational reorganisation’ (n.p.). For both teacher and student this entailed a reconfigured interaction, a new form of positive relationship, emerging despite, or better, even through the physical distance:

Because of its novelty, the development of this new form of relationship resembled the pattern gone through during a first encounter, and it involved the following three components: making a new acquaintance, the development of boundaries, and the maintenance of the previous relationship. (Philippe, Schiavio, and Biasutti 2020)

But telepresence stretches way beyond such dyadic relations. In telematic performance—understood as the real-time interaction between musicians that are geographically dis-located, and may or may not involve both aural and visual communication—Mills (2019, 157) argues that similar intercorporeal processes occur, ‘not only between musicians’ ‘bodies’ and the network but also through the distributed environments and ‘nonhuman bodies’, instruments, technology and acoustic spaces with which the performance is taking place’.

Telepresence may also be seen as an extension of the broader notion of copresence. In 1966, Goffman defined copresence as human experience of being together with another, an experience which is dependent on ‘richness of information flow and facilitation of feedback’ (1966, 18), a factor which distinctly shapes the behaviour of each individual. While Goffman understood these phenomena as dependent on proximity, experienced in the same physical space, Campos-Castillo and Hitlin (2013, 169) argue that ‘the physical presence of other actors is neither necessary nor sufficient for copresence’. As pointed out by Giddens (1991), telephones already provide communication means that allow for an experience of copresence. Campos-Castillo and Hitlin (2013, 169) propose an updated understanding of copresence as instead dependent on ‘the perception of mutual entrainment between actors, where entrainment is the mutual synchronisation of three components: attention, emotion, and behaviour’, whether mediated by communication technologies or through interaction in the same physical space.

Such an expanded understanding of copresence could be further emphasised by combining the technologically oriented perspectives of telepresence with the sociological concept of copresence. Human relationships which are technologically mediated may then be conceived of as tele-copresence. In the field of music, the notion of tele-copresence may be understood as encompassing the qualities of technologically-mediated synchronous cooperation between musicians in multiple locations and the sociocultural contexts which shape their activities. Technologies for such real time interaction between musicians over the internet have been under development since the early experiments carried out in 1993 (McKinney 2016; Mills 2019).

This paper builds its analysis of tele-copresence on a theoretical framework which combines perspectives from embodied music cognition with sociologically grounded understandings of musical creativity. This entails a combination of the study of how a shared voice (Östersjö 2020) emerges as an outcome of artistic collaboration, as a negotiation between individual voices, grounded in the habitus of each artist (Gorton and Östersjö 2019). But the study of voice must also take into consideration how such processes are reliant on interactions with musical instruments, broadly understood as any technology involved in the artistic process.

Further, the study employs the temporal perspectives on artistic creation conceptualised by Nilsson (2011) as Design Time—in which instruments or compositional materials are created, prepared or modified, outside of the temporal framework of musical performance—and Play Time, which refers to any form of real-time composition, musical interpretation or improvisation that takes shape as acts of performance. When applied to remote interaction between musicians over the internet, this distinction provides a perspective which further details the musical affordances of each type of situation, and also suggests how different forms of interaction can be mutually supportive in a creative process.

Mediated Experience of Place in Bắc Ninh, Vietnam

This section provides background that introduces the perspective of sense of place, and how such experience of presence may also be technologically mediated. While such mediation is central to the argument of the paper as a whole, we will first consider a sound art project, carried out in Vietnam in 2013, that formed the basic material for the remote exchange which led to the creation of the Isolation Journal album (Oliver and Östersjö 2020).

In September 2013, Stefan Östersjö visited the village of Ngang Nội in Bắc Ninh, an area north of Hanoi, to carry out an ecological sound art project with the British composer and sound artist Matthew Sansom and the Vietnamese đàn tranh player Nguyễn Thanh Thủy. The village, characterised by the large ponds next to the rice fields, is surrounded by mountains on all sides. When scouting the area in spring of the same year, the group found that the mountains were full of pathways. Most of them lead to little burial sites. When they talked to people in the village, they learnt that the reason for this is that the area is regularly flooded. The mountains are a safe haven for the ancestors, but also hold the tracks that little children follow on their way to school. They were fascinated by the pathways and decided to situate one project on the nearest mountain top. Östersjö had brought a đàn đáy, a long-necked Vietnamese lute, and set it up as an Aeolian instrument, with harmonics excited by the wind, by stringing it through the bridge, several metres away around trees further down the slope. By alternating the string tension, Östersjö could then control the pitch of the resulting dense clusters of high harmonics.

The group returned to the mountain every morning for several days. Östersjö's recording setup allowed for a very detailed representation of the interaction between the wind and the instrument, captured from inside the lute with two AKG microphones, one condenser instrument microphone, and one hybrid contact/condenser microphone. With a SONY stereo recorder, Matthew Sansom captured the soundscape on the mountain, providing a contrasting aural image of how the noise from the surrounding villages was a constant, but distant, presence. Additionally, Nguyễn Thanh Thủy recorded video with a handheld camera. This capture was used for an installation produced by the three artists at the Manzi gallery in Hanoi, which premiered during the Hanoi New Music Festival in December 2013 (Östersjö and Nguyễn 2016).

The technologically mediated listening generated by this project affords a particular experience of place in the interaction between performer, the site-responsive Aeolian lute, and the natural environment on the mountain top in Ngang Nội. The tiniest inflection of pitch with the left hand (afforded by the high frets characteristic of Southeast Asian lutes) as well as the slightest colouring when a plucked note is extended by harmonics, excited by the wind, is brought to the immediate attention of the performer, when monitoring over headphones. Such a listening situation, with a microscopic focus on sound objects, I have previously termed micro-sonic listening (Östersjö 2020). The setup offers a choice for the performer to either be immersed in such technologically mediated listening ‘through microphones’ (Westerkamp 2002) or, to tune into the space via the human ear. In this particular site, the two options afford radically different experiences, since listening with the human ear reveals the noise from the nearby villages, and micro-sonic listening focuses on the sonorities captured inside the lute.

Isolation Journal: Remote Interaction in Design Time

Canadian composer John Oliver collaborated with the guitarist Stefan Östersjö, and his all-digital chamber group Trembling Aeroplanes, in winter 2010. The group commissioned a work from Oliver, which was to explore the creation of sampler-based instruments, performed with a series of different user interfaces. Thereafter, many ideas for new projects evolved, but, paradoxically, it was only when the entire world was struck by the COVID-19 Pandemic that a new project could eventually develop.

On 18 April 2020, Stefan Östersjö and John Oliver were in an online chat, sharing their experiences of the pandemic, and its current effects on their artistic work. Oliver mentioned live-streaming events and notes how he has ‘been tuning into a few things, but it's usually depressing because people put in all the effort for the live event and not many people are watching, unless it's the symphony or something’. They start discussing ideas for a collaboration and, with reference to Oliver's above statement, decide to look at a recording project, thinking it could take shape both as telematic interaction and by exchange of recorded tracks. Further, Oliver and Östersjö are both guitarists playing many different experimental models, and they begin by searching their instruments for interesting constellations. Östersjö mentions his work on Vietnamese lutes, and points Oliver to an online article, reporting on the ecological sound art project in which he played the đàn đáy, a Vietnamese long-necked lute, presented above (see further Östersjö and Nguyễn 2016). Through the website of this article, John listens to a recording of the Aeolian lute and expresses his affinity for the detailed capture of the instrument with close-up microphone placement, suggesting also that some of the source tracks for the exchange could be drawn from archives. Östersjö proposes that they could consider making a ‘site-specific’ CD: find a few different places in which to record, and include the recordings from the Vietnamese mountain top, together with one site in Canada and one in Sweden. The next morning, Oliver sends an email suggesting the title ‘Isolation Journal’ for the recording project, a title which they both like.

On 29 April, Östersjö shared a track with Aeolian lute and the two got together online to discuss what to do with it. Oliver, in a Messenger chat, suggested ‘keeping the source recording more or less intact and doing a couple of things to make it into a piece: adding low sounds, and creating processes that extend the sounds in the source recording’. Still at this point, the aim was to create a single piece for the CD, and then find new locations to make other site-specific explorations.

On 14 May, Oliver shared two tracks based on the đàn đáy recordings. In an email on the same day he described how he is,

recording the tracks like a journal: one ‘idea’ per track. I did a number of experiments, and as soon as I had created ‘Track 1’, I knew I had a good opening for our concept of ‘isolation.’ It is mysterious: the listener has no idea what creates the sound. Then, track two, suddenly, we have an instrument, making some sounds  …  but the ‘musical’ sounds are just as attractive to the ear as the sounds of the plectrum on the strings, and the ear searches through the sound to the background birds and voices  …  then, suddenly, an echo chamber that amplifies the small sounds and resonates the strings like a drum. (John Oliver, email to author, 14 May 2020)

In an interview on 15 February 2022, Oliver described his working process in further detail, observing how his primary focus was on individual sounds or short motives that Stefan played.

I put these into new sonic spaces and manipulate the sounds to create a new experience. Yet my objective in pieces where this is the focus is to create a kind of expanded version of his instrument and listening. (John Oliver, interview with author, 15 February 2022)

A clear and concise example can be observed in the track ‘Mountain Spirits’ (see Video Example 1 in the RC repository), the shortest piece on the album. In the first half of the piece we hear the original lute improvisation, wherein Östersjö also plays the extended strings using a metal slide, both to modulate pitch and to sometimes strike the open strings: we hear the click of the slide, as well as the resonance of the strings. However, we also hear the dog and the rooster in the background. In an interview on 15 February 2022, Oliver describes how, in the second half, he enhances ‘the detail of those đàn đáy sounds and increases their spectral energy’.

Less than two weeks later, on 25 of May, Oliver completed two more tracks, and the discussion moves to how the methods used in the first four pieces might be expanded to create a large-scale form. This discussion leads to the decision to make the đàn đáy recordings the only material for the album, picking three parts of the original improvisation to stand on their own, and build a form on the CD in which some tracks are created through further processing, some explore the soundscape of the site, and again some are improvisations by Oliver, using a sample library of the Aeolian lute and the soundscape.

Oliver built his instruments in the Ableton LIVE software, controlled by their Push 2 hardware controller interface. In an interview on 15 February 2022, he describes how this sampler software allows him to create transformations of sound ‘using standard electronic music subtractive and time-domain synthesis techniques, such as filtering, envelope, panning, looping, transposing, time-stretching, and so on’. He further describes how he also designed the controller settings to allow the sound to be transformed in response to expressive gestures of the fingers, mostly the velocity of striking and releasing a keypad, and pressure applied after striking.

So I developed sound design and playability in the same creative act. My creative process tends to be intuitive rather than linear; however the ‘intuition’ is only possible due to deep training in electronic music and instrumental performance. (Actually, I approach all music creation in a similar way, whether a score written for acoustic instruments, or an electronic instrument design: I ‘play’ as I write. For me, the manner of execution (playing) is fundamental to the concept of sound design (composition)). (John Oliver, interview with author, 15 February 2022)

This artistic method could be understood as shifting between the modes of Design Time and Play Time, and in an online chat on 9 June 2020, Oliver describes how he is playing around ‘with the sound as I ‘build the instrument’, and then, when I feel like I know it well enough, I hit record. I want to get it in one take. If it's no good, I do another take. I don't edit’. Much of the interaction between Oliver and Östersjö had to do with evaluating these performances, and eventually agreeing which tracks were good to go on the album. Considering how Oliver's process of shifting between Design Time and Play Time entails building an instrument based on samples of Östersjö's improvisations, the interactions between Oliver and Östersjö could be conceptualised as negotiations of a shared voice (Östersjö 2020). An example of such a negotiation is found in the same online chat conversation on 9 June 2020, where Östersjö suggests that.

In the new track 10 (with the tremoli) I wonder whether the form could be slightly modified. It has a great, and more complex texture starting from 1:11, and in comparison, the more monolithic starting texture seems a bit too much like listening to a sampler, if you see what I mean? It's important to make it an energetic track, but perhaps it could benefit from greater dynamic shifts, and more presence of the soundscape too? (John Oliver, Messenger chat with author, 9 June 2020)

The dialogue between the two protagonists was rather extensive. The Messenger chat from these months amounts to 21,000 words, ranging from discussions of minute detail in a track to speculations on what direction to go in with the next. Regarded as a negotiation of voice, it is an interesting process, since so much of the source material in the sampler is fine-grained excerpts of Östersjö's lute playing, now being merged with Oliver's improvisational and compositional practices. Oliver, in an interview on 15 February 2022, also reflects on these connections, connecting back to the original recording situation, and claims that,

there is a corollary here between Stefan's recording and my process. Stefan was deeply listening to two things when he recorded: the sonic environment in which he placed himself, and the feedback loop of his own playing of the strings and body of the đàn đáy. He created a beautiful interaction between these two domains: playing in response to the wind, the rooster, and other soundscape elements, while also creating his own polyphony of sounds on the đàn đáy. In the same way, I listened into this 29-min sound world, and then created my own tapestry of sound, extracting and recombining the elements … The microphone and amplification created a new type of listening to sonic detail. This had an influence on Stefan's project from the beginning, and on his manner of playing, allowing the tight integration you hear in our collaboration. (John Oliver, interview with author, 15 February 2022)

As pointed out here by Oliver, a shared factor already at the outset was the technologically driven listening afforded by recording technologies. Oliver, in the same interview on 15 February 2022, references the modes of listening proposed by Schaeffer (2017) describing this as entering ‘the realm of acousmatic listening, where the eyes are absent: with no visual clue to the sound, our listening is focussed on sound itself’. We will now turn to how such listening was employed when the two protagonists moved further into Play Time, in a telematic performance, which met a live audience in Hanoi in July 2020.

In an online chat on 9 June, Östersjö proposed to Oliver that he might join a telematic performance with The Six Tones, and that he had been thinking that ‘if you play one or more of your sampler instruments, the other two players from the group could join, and improvise with this virtual “me”’. Oliver agreed with the idea of creating a hyper instrument for the concert, but also suggested not only to play with the other members of The Six Tones, but that they should also present some duo, referencing the Isolation Journal (2020) more directly. Once this was agreed, they moved on to preparations and some rehearsals with the full constellation, most of all to test the network connections.

Telematic Performance at Manzi: Remote Interaction in Play Time

On 12 July, The Six Tones made a telematic performance at the Manzi Gallery in Hanoi, with two guest performers, John Oliver, from his home studio in Canada, and the DJ and improviser Tri Minh, on stage in Hanoi. Also on stage in Hanoi was Ngo^ Trà My, the đàn bầu player of The Six Tones. The remaining members of the group were in different locations in Sweden: Henrik Frisk was in Uppsala, Nguyen Thanh Thuy and Stefan Östersjö were in Stockholm, all connecting from home studios. Soundjack (Carôt 2009), an open-source software, was employed as a platform for the telematic performance.

The concert was produced as a part of Musical Transformations, a research project concerned with musical change, in which The Six Tones had studied how a piece called Vọng Cổ, had developed in southern Vietnam, seeking to understand the impact of the hybrid context in which the piece was created and altered through time. The central part of that work was carried out in the south of Vietnam in 2018–2019, in collaboration between members of the group and master performers from this tradition. One of these performers was Phạm Công Tỵ, who plays two versions of the two-stringed fiddle, the đàn gáo, and đàn cò, and it was decided that in the opening piece of the concert Ngo^ Trà My would play with a pre-recorded video (see Video Example 2 in the RC repository), in which the other members of The Six Tones and Tỵ play an experimental version of Vọng Cổ. This reflected a general approach to the concert, which entailed mixing pre-recorded materials with live telematic interaction. The most immediate reason for this decision was that the internet connection at the gallery was found to be unreliable and had been causing issues in the tests made prior to the event. But mixing pre-recorded and live materials would also contribute to a more convincing visual presence of all performers, since parts of the visual content would be edited as films. To further enhance the connection between audience and the performers in their respective sites, videos were pre-recorded in which the performers talked about their collaborations, and of the music played.

However, when it comes to the first piece on the programme, the performance of Vọng Cổ, there was an artistic motivation for setting up a performance that would allow for perfect synchronisation, without any issues with latency in the interaction between performers. In Musical Transformations, the analytical procedures were based on stimulated recall of audio and video recordings, carried out by all participating musicians. In the early sessions it had become very clear that for the participating masters of the tradition, perfect synchronisation of the structural downbeats in the music was an absolute prerequisite for a successful performance of Vọng Cổ. Hereby, any perceivable latency in the interaction would put core artistic qualities at risk.

The laptop-based setup that Henrik Frisk used for the performance has been developing since 2010 through the various intercultural interactions in which The Six Tones had been engaged. Though the computer is obviously overwhelmed with musical and technical constraints it is also, to some degree, more open ended than a traditional instrument, and this undetermined aspect of the computer as instrument was explored in developing the instrument along with the collaborations the group engaged in. One of the main goals was to avoid what may be best referred to as cultural masking, i.e. electronic sounds and musical gestures that are so strongly tied to a western musical culture, should not dominate the sonic space. While the ambition was not necessarily to create sounds that would be similar to the Vietnamese instruments, it was essential to develop the electronic instrument in dialogue with the other musicians engaged in the artistic collaboration. The collection of instruments used are a combination of generative programmes, sample-based playback and real-time sound manipulation. Problems with synchronisation made sound manipulation less useful so in this performance it was primarily the generative and sample-based programmes that were used.

Despite the mentioned exceptions, the major part of the concert consisted of live telematic improvisations. As mentioned above, the internet connection in the gallery space was not reliable and in the early end of the concert, the remote performers found themselves thrown out of the interaction on several occasions. For the two performers on stage, this was frustrating, but they felt a strong need that the show must go on, not the least since they were playing to a full house. As Ngo^ Trà My describes her experience, in an interview on 17 February 2022: ‘I must admit that I was extremely stressed and worried before the concert. I recall many challenging moments’, as when the internet connection caused dropouts of one or more of the remote performers. However, she continues to state how,

all those factors played a role in how I performed in that concert and actually somehow it made the concert unique and interesting. Although my feeling was extremely tense at times, so that I almost couldn’t breathe, I was absolutely focused on playing with the sounds from other musicians which I could hear before the interruption, and at the same time being aware of how to interact also with the space, and with the audience at Manzi, to make sure they didn’t feel the gap in the music, until the moment of internet drop out was over. In my experience, this made the concert really special and unique. (Ngo^ Trà My, interview with author, 17 February 2022)

We will return to these observations in the discussion, for now it may suffice to suggest that the incompleteness of the performative experience, which goes to the extreme with the more extensive dropouts which were experienced in the Hanoian end of the network connection, are also a characteristic feature of telematic performance in general. As observed by Schroeder (2013, 225), in telematic performance, musicians are typically devoid of the visual information from other co-performers, and experience a liminal situation, in which the performer ‘needs to listen intently while being in a rather fragile, unstable environment’.

In order to further consider the interaction between the participating musicians we will now turn to an excerpt from the performance at Manzi (see Video Example 3 in the RC repository), drawn from the last minutes of the concert. This video combines a recording of the Soundjack feed with a local recording of the two acoustic instruments in Stockholm. Unfortunately, the video and audio recordings at Manzi failed, and therefore, the only reference to the sounding outcome is drawn from these files, which also include local video recordings from each of the remote sites.

The excerpt starts with a soundscape from the recordings in Bắc Ninh, but with an intensified dramaturgy drawn from the combination of electronic sound, played by both Oliver and Frisk. This soundscape appears to shape the form of the entire piece, giving way for short tremolo phrases, most often in the acoustic instruments, and the duo of đàn đáy and đàn tranh also brings in incantations of short melodic fragments. In a stimulated recall interview on 16 February 2022, Nguyễn made a series of observations, related to the interaction: When listening back to the recording, I remember that I felt it was a very nice opening. Through the interaction between the four players (I cannot hear the đàn bầu), the resulting music sounds like sounds that just happens in nature, in the forest. The sound of leaves, of water, with the sound of the đàn tranh played on the left hand side of the bridge, which blends in with the soundscape.

However, she finds the second part of the piece to be ‘not so well structured’. At 1:52 into the clip she notes, in the same stimulated recall interview, how,

it feels like Stefan wants to build a crescendo. Everyone seems to respond to that, we can see it both in the image of people playing as well as in the sound, but eventually it’s like we do not get there together. I was kind of expecting either a second movement, or another second build up, but actually we’re kind of going to the end while we were only half way into the piece. From 2:34 the music starts fading out already, and the end of the piece is at 4:42, structurally that is too long for a coda, the piece is fading out too early. (Nguyễn Thanh Thủy, interview with author, 16 February 2022)

It may be observed how the interaction in the video is characterised by a certain hesitance before each individual phrase, perhaps partly due to the difficulty in hearing all players expressed by Nguyễn, but also, perhaps partly as a response to the latency. While most of these instances of preparation and hesitation are short, some are longer, the longest being Östersjö's preparation starting at 1:08, which results in a tremolo chord initiated only twelve seconds later. This hesitant and careful playing could be described as characterised by attentive and searching listening, through which each performer makes sure not to interfere with any new initiative, while the soundscape from Bắc Ninh creates a continuity, and continual identity, in the first one and a half minutes.

It is essential to bear in mind how each location affords a different listening situation. Not even the two performers who are physically in the space at Manzi can claim to hear the same as the audience does, but they certainly are the closest to that listening situation, compared to the remote performers, whose listening is defined by their local network connection, with its specific latency. In an interview on 17 February, Ngo^ Trà My describes how she remembers that she was playing already in the start of this piece, although her instrument is not heard in the recording. At the same time, she says, ‘I remember when I played this piece, I only heard the sound of the đàn tranh, now and then there was the sound from the đàn đáy and I heard very little from electronics’. The fact that she didn't hear them made her hesitate at first, but then she decided to keep the music going for the audience. But she also recalls how audience members came up to her commenting on the ending of the piece, in which the đàn bầu plays the final melodic lines, and she herself notes how ‘although the sound of đàn bầu only appeared very short at the end of the piece in the recording, the ending with the đàn bầu sounded quite interesting. It seems to make the piece complete’. In other words, judging from the stimulated recall interviews with two performers, it is clear that perceptually, there were several rather different performances going on at the end of the concert, one heard as represented in Video Example 3, and one projected in the performance space at Manzi, which we only know from Ngo^ Trà My's description. Furthermore, each performer experienced many different variations in timing and balance between instruments. At the same time, an image emerges of a performance situation in which all musicians were deeply engaged in making the version that they were listening to work out musically.

Discussion

What then were the opportunities for creating tele-copresence in the Play Time of the concert at Manzi? Let us first consider what the impact of the physical performance spaces may have on the relation between performer and audience. While the performers in Canada and Sweden were all in private studio spaces—with the potential for distracted perception that playing a concert in a place not intended for performance entails—the two performers in Hanoi experienced a concert space, playing to a full house. Further, the visual interaction between performers was very limited since there was no video link from Hanoi in the performance. Hence, video from the remote locations was projected at Manzi on the back wall, but from Hanoi, only audio was transmitted. This also entailed an even weaker connection between the remote performers and the audience. Still, given the play back of pre-recorded videos, the audience experienced a much richer representation of all performers than did any of the musicians.

What then with the transmission of audio? We have already seen several examples of how the telematic connections created partial representations of what was played in the different locations, to the extent that moments like the ending—in the version heard by the remote listeners—the đàn bầu emerges towards the end to bring the piece to a close. This ending, which Ngo^ Trà My found ‘to make the piece complete’, constitutes a moment of serendipity, considering how the đàn bầu was in fact playing continuously, but dropped out of the Soundjack-feed for some minutes, hereby creating this late entry. On the other hand, also the listeners at Manzi came up to Ngo^ Trà My commenting on how the ending worked nicely. Hence, different listeners heard different musics but, serendipitously, it appears that each version worked musically.

If we think of telepresence in music as representing the intentionality of the technology, then the affordances for listening, particular to telematic performance, can be related to acousmatic—and micro-sonic listening. The design of the electronic instruments performed by Oliver and Frisk provide opportunities for engaging in acousmatic listening, as illustrated by John Oliver’s observation, in an interview on 15 February 2022, that when working in his studio, he experiences being in ‘no place, or rather, I am in the place where the sound is. My visual space disappears: virtual blinkers go on, to focus on the instrument I use to create. I listen to the sound for what it is, then I work with it’. We have seen above how another feature is the incompleteness of the listening situation and how it urged Ngo^ Trà My and Trí Minh to engage even harder in creating a sense of continuity and copresence with the audience in the physical space. Following Schroeder (2013), we may conclude that a certain form of attentiveness, based on the fragility of the performative situation, may be typical of telematic interactions. Perhaps we may assume that the intense experience of these forms of listening in a telematic performance situation is transmitted to and shared with the audience. Perhaps—as the physically present performers strive to interact with the virtual presence of several other co-performers—an experience of tele-copresence emerges also for the audience?

Perhaps an essential aspect of tele-copresence, as it may be experienced through telematic music-making, is how it allows both performer and listener a fragile space in which we may choose between the perspectives afforded by the technology, as we relate to sounds, and the performers that make them, as we choose. Tele-copresence then emerges as a liminal experience for listeners seeking the Other in the fragility of the sonic event.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation under Grant number MAW 2016.0118.

Notes on contributors

Stefan Östersjö

Stefan Östersjö is a leading classical guitarist specialising in the performance of contemporary music. As a soloist, chamber musician, sound artist, and improviser, he has released more than twenty CDs and toured Europe, the USA, and Asia. He has collaborated extensively with composers and in the creation of works involving choreography, film, video, performance art, and music theatre. He is a founding member of the Vietnamese group The Six Tones, which since 2006 has developed into a platform for interdisciplinary intercultural collaboration. Stefan Östersjö is chaired professor of Musical Performance at Piteå School of Music, Luleå University of Technology, guest professor at Ingesund School of Music, Karlstad University of Technology, Professor II at Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, and associate professor at DXARTS, University of Washington.