Do you anticipate streaming text in this project? or is it your intent to develop through sound and a graphical score a new kind of language that will be understood by us all?

-- Helen Thorington (newradio@interport.net), February 27, 1999

Answers

We hope to gradually incorporate many data-types into the visual score for the piece - streaming text, captured from live interactions on the Internet, would seem to be one of the more interesting possiblities.

One of the aims of the piece overall is to communicate to the audience their own connectedness to the network itself - to move beyond a passive audience role and to explore the various levels of interactivity that the Web allows. This might take the form of sudden, unexpected questions that would demand responses from viewers, which might then be incorporated into the score.

A primitive example of this would be a question that would ask the user for a web site. A CGI program would process this and retrieve data (text, images) from the page. This data would be entered into the pool of images that would make up the score, creating a "wild card" effect, with unpredictable results.

Ideally the composer setting the rules, or, perhaps, the "initial conditions" of the piece would be able to respond to this data in real time. By doing so s/he would assign a musical meaning to the data-

Silly example - someone submits http://www.ups.com

A page appears to the composer with all of the images from that page displayed. Composer views this and selects one, submits form with description of musical meaning... The image is entered into a pool, along with the instructions for interpretation. When the image appears for the first time on the score page a window appears with the musical instructions.

This is a simplification, but could clearly apply to text as well. Perhaps one composer could select the data, another in a different location assign the musical meaning... The possibilities are intriguing. Text, of course, would be a bit different, and would rely on the musicians making an interpretation of their own.

-- Jesse Gilbert (jgilbert@mail.wesleyan.edu), March 09, 1999.