Just came back from a three days in-depth workshop at Pierluigi da Palestrina Conservatory in Cagliari, Italy. This time the course focused on dataflow practices for Live Media.
The course has been organized by Spaziomusica Association during the annual festival Music in Touch, which every year creates new connections among traditional musical composition and new technologies featuring concerts and installation projects by established composers and new media professionals.
The atmosphere in Cagliari was cozy and warm. We could enjoy an early spring, a shiny sun and almost 20 degrees.

Participants were MA students of the Electronic Music, Music and New Technology and Electroacoustic Music courses. They were extremely interested in Pure Data and dataflow techniques, although for most of them it was the first direct approach with a graphical programming environment. After a brief audiovisual review of some interesting works ranging from live performances to experimental videos, we started with the basic of Pd, building simple processes in order to give a clear idea of real-time data processing.
Then I slightly forced them to get their hands dirty with some real-time video processing and few common idioms for audio synthesis and manipulation. I used the term “forced” because I did not give them any ready patch, but explaining step-by-step simple processes we built together useful examples.

Their responsiveness was awesome and with my great satisfaction we went through the main topics of the course pretty fast. In the end we also had time to have a chat about network data exchange, i.e. OSC, wi-fi server and client communication protocols, and later on few participants were already having fun exchanging data through the conservatory network or talking to a Monome.

In the end I made a brief talk explaining the most typical setup for live audiovisual performance and how to implement all the techniques we just learned into an actual audiovisual concert; single player with a musical instrument controlling MIDI and/or OSC hardware, two players exchanging audio and video data over a network and a quintet including different instruments, a server machine receiving and organizing data coming from few clients, creating feedback interactions among each player of the group.

On the first night I also had the chance to attend to an amazing concert of a traditional choir from Sardinia. Apart from the breathtaking location – S. Saturnino’s church – the experience of listening to a live performance of this kind is something unbelievable. The strength of their five voices, the incredible harmony they were able to create was something I can’t describe. Perhaps I felt the same feelings when for the first time I had the chance to listen an organ playing in a cathedral. Your body physically “feels” the sound, the acoustic energy in all its force.

I have to say I really enjoyed my time in Cagliari, probably I was missing a beautiful sky and a “normal” temperature, but for sure the wonderful hospitality of few friends played the most important role. Thus I have to say thank you to the Signorafranca guys and Riccardo, and Fabrizio Caglia for the excellent organization of the course. Hope to come back soon to Sardinia and maybe see some works of my students…