Steve Benford - Singing in Chorus
The global pandemic has driven musicians online. I will describe how a local community of musicians who play traditional music together took their practices online over a period of twelve months, innovating two versions of a weekly folk club and contributing to an online music festival. Having escaped the constraints of COVID, they encountered an arguably even more fundamental barrier to their practice, that of network latency and bandwidth, so that they remained unable to sing and play together in chorus. By reflecting on their successes, innovations and problems, I will draw out implications for how we might design future platforms to better support online musical practice and revisit the concepts of liveness and appropriation.