Meny
Stanford PhD candidate Mike Mulshine’s TechLab residency with ShareMusic is divided in two parts: in June 2023 he has been working in Jönköping, and in August–September, he will continue his work in Malmö. On Monday September 11, you get a chance to experience Mike’s collaboration with ShareMusic in a public sharing at Mitt Möllan on September 11 2023. Find more information about the sharing here.
In the first part of his TechLab residency with ShareMusic, Mike worked with musicians Peter Larsson and Joel Mansour, and dancer Lovisa Larsson. Mike’s goal was to create a musical performance experience that incorporated and merged all of the participants’ unique expressive interests.
– I asked each musician involved to bring whatever musical setup, props, or ideas they were currently interested in, passionate about, or attracted to, says Mike. As artists, I believe the most valuable thing we can do, for ourselves and for others, is express ourselves the way we most desire – follow our light, so to speak. Our lights merged in Jönköping, and we began to make music together.
This was the starting point for a most creative and playful process that included improvisation led by lamps turned on and off, controlled by the participants, lots of music but also dance and theater. A truly interdisciplinary exploration where Mike encouraged the participants to challenge their comfort zones. The creative space at Kulturskolan (the Municipal Music and Arts School) in Jönköping, also offered useful props like ballet beams that formed music stations, yoga blocks that became a large structure, and rubber kick balls that produced intriguing sounds. Contact mics were fastened around in the room, on furniture and on people, inspiring Peter and Lovisa into a duet where the sounds of Peter’s wheelchair and other movements were caught by the mic. Mike summarizes the experience:
– Without too much intentional effort to adhere to the theme, I was surprised that many of our decisions related deeply – striving and failing: to build, to dance, to bounce and contain kickballs, to keep up with Lovisa's movements musically, to play and then be cut off by the dimming of a light. All of this was still very beautiful, and I absolutely loved this process of spontaneous generation of performance and theater!
– Any time anyone was excited to offer an idea of their own... That's how you know the process is working! And the smiles and simultaneous joy and exhaustion we seemed to all share after the first complete run-through of what would become the final set for this part of the residency.
During the second part of the residency, musicians from ShareMusic’s ensemble in Skåne will join the work.
– The goal is to incorporate the additional musicians via a similar spontaneous, fun, agency-diffuse style as we achieved in our working process here in Jönköping, Mike explains. I also aim to find a reliable and comfortable way to incorporate the audience more directly in the work.
– I used two distance sensors attached to my computer via an easy-to-use chip called a Teensy, explains Mike. They track the distance from it to an object in front of them, using ultrasonic sound. I also used three light sensors (fashioned from photoresistors), which also streamed data to my computer via a Teensy. With these pieces of data, I was able to make dynamic and changing soundscapes mapped to our movements and actions in the space using Max MSP. I want to explore this more in September.
– I hope to continue to explore this workflow and develop a rigorous understanding of it in relation to how we traditionally have made music.
Mike Mulshine is a composer-songwriter-performer and music technologist whose work rethinks traditional musical relationships and explores themes of emotional vulnerability, identity, and group belonging. He produces interactive audiovisual works that aim to expose accessible, engaging, and empowering new modes of experiencing or (co-) creating media. Please visit his website for more information.
Take part of TechLab Stanford in Malmö on September 11 2023
ShareMusic is part of the project MuseIT, which is co-funded by the European Union and runs from 2022-2025. MuseIT stands for "Multisensory, User-centred, Shared cultural Experiences through Interactive Technologies." ShareMusic's role in the MuseIT project focuses on the part that concerns cultural co-creation, and we are working, among other things, on the development of a "Remote Performance Platform" that will enable musical co-creation at a distance. We are involved in other parts of the project, not least in creating an accessible archive of cultural assets.
In total, twelve partners from nine EU countries and three non-EU associated partners are involved in the project. The project coordinator is the University of Borås. All project partners are part of so-called work packages that have different focus areas.
ShareMusic organises a number of activities during the project, where different features and technical developments are explored in co-creative settings. Activities are often arranged together with other project partners.
