Collaborating online and in person
How we used free technology to create a jam session you could join online and in person.
On 1st May 2021, CLIP took to Culver Square in Colchester to pump out beats to the general public using the collaborative music making website Ocean, as part of the inagural Colchester Fringe Festival.
Having moved all our education work online, the pandemic has meant we’ve been experimenting with ways to meaningfully collaborate using the restrictions of video conferencing software. When we were introduced to Ocean, we could see exciting possibilities for online workshops like ours, specifically solving how to improvise remotely as an ensemble without having to worry about dreaded latency.
Ocean is a fun and simple way to make beats with friends & share your creations with the world – all in your web browser.
When you begin composing your sequence in Ocean it generates a unique URL which you can then share with others, allowing them to join the same page as you and compose sequences together. Since all the audio is rendered locally, meaning each visitor controls their own play/pause button, it mitigates any latency issues.
Ocean allowed us to tap into our repertoire of improvisation games and exercises, creating some fantastic jam sessions. One participant noted that the anonymity Ocean offers allowed her to feel more confident and subsequently be bolder with her musical choices in a group improvisation setting. Because she was user-xyz123 rather than *name* she didn’t fear being judged by changing the tempo or adding a certain melody/beat the same way she might have in a face-to-face group improvisation environment.
Creating a sample pack for Ocean
In summer 2020 we ran our House Music project, where we created a series of provocations for young creatives to explore their environment, discover its unique sounds and share them with us via the hashtag #CLIPHouseMusic. The response was brilliant and lead to some incredible recordings, from rhythmic and melodic dripping taps to soundscapes of the weekly NHS clap.
Through a subsequent workshop we took these sounds, and fresh ones, and edited them into samples for the Ocean website – so the young musicians could create beats with their own sounds on the website. Whilst also making the sounds availale to anyone else who uses the site. For the editing process we used the browser based audio editing software Bandlab (also free, but does require an account) to trim the recordings, add compression and EQ and then export them as a variety of hits and loops ready to be imported into Ocean.
Collaborating online and in person
When we were invited to take part in the first ever Colchester Fringe Festival, we saw this as an exciting opportunity to further our experiments with Ocean. With this type of event we would usually coordinate an ensemble of young musicians to perform, however with social distancing restrictions still in place we knew we could explore using Ocean to fasciltate distanced and remote collaborations.
We invited members of the public to visit the site, by scanning the QR code or typing the URL, on their own device (or one of our iPads) and join in with the jam session – with our CLIP members contributing from the safety and comfort of their own homes on their own devices. With a big TV setup and a laptop hooked up to the Ocean website, we began to jam with the general public. For some it was their first ever time experimenting with a beat sequencer, and for others their eyes lit up at the possibility of being able to jam with friends and families as soon as they got home.
It was incredibly rewarding for our CLIP members to join in remotely throughout the day and collaborate with the general public joining in. They also particularly enjoyed the short videos we took of their beats being blasted into the town square, and the public dancing along, which we posted into our shared online classroom environment.
Whilst this setup does have its limitations, it offers a really exciting way of collaborating online and in person in meaningful ways. We’re incredibly grateful to both the Ocean and Colchester Fringe Festival team’s for working with us on this ambitious experiment and we’re excited to keep pushing the possibilities further.
