- Part of 'A topology of musical encounter' (summary) -
We balance in between two opposing forces – we aim to create stronger and more productive connections for a local community, being the musicians in Amsterdam, and at the same time establish global embedding. For effective and influential embedding online we have to create a delicate infrastructure between many existing formats in the digital space. Such a network goes beyond the concept of a website which is not appropriate for our goals. Websites usually serve a useful purpose when it concerns information about a single musician or group, or one specific subject. Although a homepage is needed as an ‘entrance’, a public face of the initiative, our purpose would be to connect many of those websites in an intelligent and thorough way. Therefore we have to consider how our initiative relates to many different formats and locations online that can be helpful to establish exchange of musical knowledge and encounter between musicians and listeners on a large public basis.
The existence of musicians in digital reality means musical information attached to their personal profile can be found worldwide through any online search-engine. Through semantic network of hits, we are able to bring together diverse musicians into dynamic collective dimensions. We narrow this search to the borders of Amsterdam with the use of Google Earth or Google Maps. Everyone who hits upon musical information is provided a collective of all the musicians who connect to this HIT, and overviews the place in Amsterdam where they live or work. These formats visualize and emphasize the relation to the physical space of the city. This is the outside-in method of embedding – from a worldwide perspective we zoom in to the level of individual reality of musicians, their position in the city and their musicpractice.
The opposite direction is a further engagement with the interior content of an ITEM. Information about the musicians background, work and ideas that is important to include in our network should be published on WIKIPEDIA, instead of a separated piece of information. In this way, an online community exists not only in itself, but is embedded in the large and public attention of a general format like WIKIPEDIA. Videos about the musicians and the collaborative working process are published in YOUTUBE format. These are easy to transport to any location in the digital space, and through the usage of a common medium gain a higher public attention in the digital sphere. Any further elaboration into one single ITEM can lead to a variety of LINKS to the website – to the websites of individual musicians, to promotional information around the music or further information related to the ITEM by any association. This is the inside-out method – we use the personal perspective of a musician and his music to open a search into global knowledge.
In between these two ways of embedding the online musical community of Amsterdam, there is the online performance of the musical collaborations resulting from the functioning of the network. There are two major categories of audioformats that both have different advantages. The concept of 24/7 streams is comparable to an ongoing radiobroadcast on a specific frequency in the ether. Besides its own portal to broadcast, it could connect to other ether channels or radio channels that have an interest in broadcasting part of our programm. In that case you share the ether frequency to increase your audience. Additional techniques like Podcasts provide the possibility for listeners to subscribe to the stream and receive new audio at the moment they appear online also on media like I-Pods and mobile telephones. The opposite approach of musical experience in the digital sphere is MP3 . This is comparable to a CD player, consists of separate tracks that can be listened to and/or downloaded. This format focuses the attention of the listener to the unicity of one track. Because of the compact format of MP3, these tracks can be promoted on several online music stores like I-Tunes, Amazon and MYSPACE.
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