Telepeasants - Remote Performances, Collaboration, and Open Source Music - The Lorenzo's Music Podcast (Transcript)
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Tom Ray: Hi and welcome to another episode of the Lorenzo’s Music Podcast. I’m Tom and this is a show where I talk with musicians, and I talk with people who create things for musicians and we have a focus on Creative Commons and open source and things like that. And today on the show I have one, my first time, two different people calling in at the same time guests. And also they are musicians who perform in different locations. We’re going to learn all about that. So why don’t you tell the people who you are and what it is you do. Let’s start with the one on the left, the one in Canada. Let’s start with that one.
Michal Seta: That will be me.
Tom Ray: Yes.
Michal Seta: so yeah, so not only we are you know in, in your show simultaneously but we’re also in different time zones. so there was 13 hours difference between, between us right now. so my name is Michael and I, I am a tele performer. Anonymous. Not so anonymous anymore. so I have background in music basically and that took me through a, a lot of stuff, including technology. I got interested in computer programming and making my own software. And I’ve been a Linux user since 1997. Oh you get maybe and open source, enthusiast, basically. I haven’t touched anything, well I used to be on the Mac actually and I haven’t touched. I switched completely to Linux at the time of the Apple publicity campaign called Think Different.
Tom Ray: So you’re like think different. How dare you.
Michal Seta: Yeah, so I figured okay, I’ll do it. So I started thinking different and so that took me through a lot of technology related things. Things and I’ve been working with artists doing multimedia art, installation. I did installation art, music. I basically never stepped on stage without a computer. Interactive music and stuff. So I was always interested in interactive sound. So like interacting with machines, playing with machines and stuff like that. And then I ended up at the place here in Montreal called Societe des Art, Society for Arts and technology, the SAT. And at the time that was like 15 years ago, their flagship was telepresence. they were developing software so I got on the team developing the software for telepresence. Artistic telepresence. And we were doing all kinds of projects mostly between Montreal or Quebec, the province of Quebec and Europe, mostly French speaking countries. So like you know France and Belgium and Switzerland. And so we were doing all these all these things. and I started, I got interested in Doing telepresence as well. So, so it’s been with me now for for a number of years.
Tom Ray: Intellipresence is the group that, I guess. I don’t know if it would be a group so, so both of you were in it. And before we go any further on this too, let’s also introduce the second person that’s on the call and this is Dirk. Now Dirk, where are you located? We already specified that you were both in different locations. Me of course too. But both of you work together and you’re in different locations. Tell us about yourself and where you are and what you do.
Dirk Stromberg: Hi, I’m I’m Dirk Stromberg. I’m based in Singapore. I’ve been here for 17 years actually and about 20 in Asia in total. And I’m ah, an audio engineer in part. And then also I work, I’m interested in free improvisation and instrumental practice. So I build, I basically build instruments and then I work with him for a number of years developing them and myself and my, and, and working through kind of improvisational voice. And so that’s, I, I, when I can, I’m on tour playing a lot and then But I have a university job here teaching audio engineering. I teach lifestyle production usually at large scale. that’s what I do. so it’s quite fun. And Yeah, not, not so much to say but, but I play a lot. I’ve been ah, I’ve been a linux user since 2006 which, which was still pretty gnarly back then. There you go.
Tom Ray: Where I was.
Dirk Stromberg: Yeah, yeah. See 1997 was too early for me because even in 2006 compiling kernels and that kind of stuff wasn’t always that much fun.
Tom Ray: Well in the 90s I was still learning how they worked before I was just like, I dove in, like I, Yeah, it didn’t start making sense to me until the mid 2000s. There was more of the Web 2.0 before the bubble, era and all that kind of stuff. That’s when I was like, let’s figure this out. Let’s learn how this all works. How can I make my own home recording studio?
Dirk Stromberg: Yeah, and I switched to Linux because I’d actually, I mean I was a Mac user and I had a hard drive burnout and I had all sorts of issues getting software reauthorized, like software purchased things like you know, Pro Tools, Max, msp, Sibelius, all these things. And I was like hey, Fine.
Tom Ray: Right.
Dirk Stromberg: Yeah. Then I’m done with you guys. Because I’ve paid, you know, I mean, a lot of money for that stuff. And I was especially for. For, you know, being in my early 20s or mid mid 20s, something like that. Late 20s. yeah. And so. So I’ve. Yeah. Although professionally, working production, you still run, into, commercial software. But yeah, in my.
Tom Ray: I was gonna say it’s very strange for a person who does. Who teaches live audio at a school and everything to use Linux while it makes sense in us people that use it, we’re like, oh, you can just do this, this and this, and you can, you know, reconfigure, it or kind of hack away at it to make it do what you want. But, the thing is, is in the real world, most people are not doing that. Yeah, most people are like, oh, pro tools.
Dirk Stromberg: Yeah, yeah. And where we are, we teach pro tools. Exactly. But also, Yeah, and. And, and, you know, smart and things like that. Although we. I. I’m getting away from smart, which is an optimization software, to use rew, which is a really cool software, for, acoustic, Acoustic alignment and optimization out of Italy. So it’s. And it’s a cool little pet project of a guy. So that’s worth checking out if you have a chance.
Tom Ray: Nice. All right, now, going back to. You guys were describing, and you had mentioned, that telepresence, was what it was. I kept thinking it was telepeasants. I don’t know why I thought that was the name. That’s just how I kept reading it. Like my mind was just finishing the word for me. And then when you said it, I’m like, oh, telepresence, that’s much better.
Dirk Stromberg: Telepresence, is what we practice. Telepeasants is the name of our band.
Tom Ray: Oh, it is. Okay, good. Okay, I heard you say telepresence. Okay, now tell me the, distinguishing marks between the. To what. What is the difference? Since I clearly didn’t even follow that. So explain that to me.
Michal Seta: Well, the. Telepresence is a term that was. Maybe. I’m not 100% sure, but I. Maybe it was coined by the people who started developing the software for, you know, collaborating online in. In real life. I mean, real time, remotely. so the software was actually made to handle all kinds of things. Not only music, but, theater performances. Like, we’ve done theater and installations. Theater, type of thing. So it was basically made to transmit an arbitrary number of ah, audio channels and video channels and MIDI and Oscar. And at some point we also had point clouds. So we were doing volumetric video Remotely in 2013, I think.
Tom Ray: So this was, you’re saying telepresence is the name of the concept of what it is.
Michal Seta: Yes, exactly. So it’s basically, like teleconference. Right? That’s a term that everybody.
Tom Ray: Okay, now my mind just went. There you go. It turned out.
Michal Seta: So it was to differentiate the artistic practice from, from like a teleconferencing, you know, like in a kind of a, you know, business way or, you know, or, or newscast way. Right?
Dirk Stromberg: Yeah, yeah.
Michal Seta: So that was telepresence. And there is also. I discovered a new term recently. It’s called teleperformance.
Tom Ray: Yes, it makes sense. Yeah,
Dirk Stromberg: telepresence, what we’re trying to do is, is kind of re. Think about how we are together in these new spaces, you know, so we, so sometimes it’s, you know, so what is our, what is our sense of presence, whether we’re in the same space, if we’re in different spaces and then we work with other people, sometimes hybrid. So a couple of us might be together and then we might be in different spaces. So we could be, you know, you could have up to, I think we, you know, with counts epit, we had up to, I don’t know, 17 people in 10. 10 people. Is that. That was the most. Always seemed like a lot.
Michal Seta: No, I think, I think the most was 11.
Dirk Stromberg: 11. And what is this experience? And then how do you present that experience? Is it just watching a video online or, you know, so we’ve been working with virtual spaces and different ways of trying to create a different way, of existing and being together. What is our presence over the, you know, network.
Tom Ray: And so to give some background on how we got into this, how I came to learn about you guys was I’ve been posting, I’ve just been sharing like short videos about how my band sets up our livestream and about how we use open source in Ubuntu Studio and all this kind of stuff. And just sharing it, just making it just one of those things where it’s like, hey, we’re an open source band and it’s like, I want to share what we do. And you guys saw one of my videos and had replied to it and then were telling me about what you were doing and about a setup that you do and about, I Don’t even remember what the exact conversation was, but essentially it was you were talking about working remotely. And I’m like, okay, really? And you were saying actual remotely. Like I had created a way to work remotely with my band by I discovered a way that we could actually share full daw Adour sessions on GitHub with each other and collaborate and be able to mix like the full session and the whole thing where everybody had responded to me. Sorry, just a little backstory. Everybody had responded to me. Of course you can do that. And I’m like, yeah, but are you doing it with other people? And they’re like, well no, I back up my own stuff. And it’s like, then you’re not recording remotely, you’re just saving it and versioning it. The trick is, and this was an ah, aha moment is you create branches and then you continue to create branches from that branch so you never have to merge code. That’s the. Because I it was like, oh, I was thinking about it like GitHub. The way to actually collaborate online with, with GitHub or Git in general is go, okay, I’m going to record a guitar line, then create a branch for guitar line, then everybody moves to that branch and then when somebody wants to record something else, you create a branch from the next one and you keep going. And then also you have this nice little like actual timeline of you can go back in any time and redo it. Anyway, that was my remote concept. And then I spoke with you guys and you’re like, well no, we’re actually collaborating remotely. And I was like, well let’s talk about this because you told me about telepresence and then the concept of the fact that it’s actually remote with midi. And I was like, duh. Of course, that’s real time stuff. So now explain to me how this came about and how you do it.
Michal Seta: yeah, so the, the genesis of this is that when the Pandemic hit, a, Network music festival reactivated. So there was this network music festival that was running out of Birmingham in the uk, where people were gathering and doing stuff remotely or almost remotely or something like this. And with some colleagues that I was working at the SAT at the time, we participated in the 2013 or 14 edition. And then they shut down because they had no funding. And when the Pandemic hit, suddenly they got funding and suddenly this kind of practice became pertinent. Right? Like everybody was stuck at home and a lot of People were trying to make music. And so we submitted a project. we formed a kind of a collective called Kon cpt. and we submitted a project. there was just a description. They took it. And so I composed a piece that used a kind of a score that was shared between the musicians, and started recruiting people to play with me. So I was kind of hand picking people that I knew. So there was this group that I knew that were kind of tech savvy, here in Montreal, and they were all on board. And then I was picking out some people who I knew were not afraid of technology because it was kind of like you needed to do a bit of. Not be afraid of the computer, right?
Dirk Stromberg: Yeah.
Michal Seta: And so I’ve recruited a bunch of people and one of my friends who lives in Alberta, Canada, he said, oh, can I invite this guy, Dirk Stromberg, he lives in Singapore and I think he will love it. And so we met online in 2020 m for this project and we, the, the project took place, we played that festival, we played a bunch of other festivals. I think we did like six or seven gigs with that project between like 2020 and 20.
Tom Ray: Like you were all in the same place festival or you were doing it with people coming in remotely festival.
Michal Seta: It was all remote.
Tom Ray: It was all remote.
Michal Seta: Yeah, so we were all playing from our living rooms or whatever, you know, place. We, we had, we, we, we were spread over 14 time zones. So from Singapore and once there was someone in Japan. so from Singapore or Japan all the way to Portland, Oregon. Okay, 10, 10 piece band. We had two concerts in Europe and so that was hard to coordinate. Dirk played like at 3am or something like that. and so after, after that, that thing. So then, then we did another piece and like we played a bunch of festivals and then from that, the three of us, me, Dirk and Andrew Stewart in Alberta, we kind of continued doing this practice. we played New Interfaces for Music, Expression Conference in 2022 and some other things. And we did also a residency at the SAT, which was, which was the first time, in 2022 that I and Dirk met personally in Montreal. And so we played in the same venue with Andrew playing remotely, in a virtual space. we used Mozilla hubs at the, at the time. And it’s funny, I listened to the to the other podcast with the guy playing from the VR, cafe or something, VR thing. And so that was like, oh yeah, we did that.
Tom Ray: You Know, and that’s what’s interesting about this is when you explained, the concept of this and you sent me some videos. Now the other thing too, and I’m assuming that some of the videos were captured inside of the VR spaces that you were using and they’re laid out like, it seems like something you would see in a museum, an experimental piece that you would see in a museum. So the one of the videos you sent me was there were just, ah, projection screens behind a person performing in the middle. And do you record those with one person in real life? And the projections, are those all done in VR? both. How do you get these actual recordings of these performances?
Dirk Stromberg: Well, everything we do is real time. Well, real, time. Ish. We’re usually a few hundred milliseconds
Michal Seta: away from each other up to 10 seconds.
Dirk Stromberg: Yeah, we don’t want to. Let’s just say real time and not talk about the details. But yeah, and so what we’re doing, is so what we would be doing, we’d be doing our compositing in our places. So for a while we were working with green screens and things like that. And then we would actually then stream individually into virtual reality spaces. So we would do multiple streams into spaces and things like that. eventually what we did is we actually part of the residency, we built our synthesis into the space. When you as an audience member logged into the space to watch it, actually the synthesis was happening on your computer and we were just sending control data to your computer. And what that meant was we could, We didn’t have dropouts, these things that you were talking about before, you know, dropouts of audio and things like that. Why? Because it’s being synthesized on your computer. So we found a way to do that. and that was quite fun. and then what we decided to do was, Michal and I got, I think we took about a year off totally. and then we decided what we wanted to do was, I’m very much interested in live production and production value and things like this and lighting as well. And so I said, well, how about we just start to work on like, can we do just a good production? You know what I mean? Maybe no VR, but just like, what is it? The video, lighting, sound, you know, let’s just work on that. And we kind of, in a way started. Started a very basic system and we started to kind of build up from that back. Build back up. And, and that’s been an interesting process that we’ve been Working on now for over two years now of rebuilding it. If I’m over two or over three and a half years.
Michal Seta: Yeah, it’s been since. Yeah, 20, 23. Yeah.
Dirk Stromberg: so we’ve been working on rebuilding that. And so it started off really from a production perspective of just how do you create a good performance online? And. Yeah, ah, just audio, video, nothing fancy. and then just in the last few months we got back into building a new virtual space. But now with everything that we’ve learned through our process, and virtual space also having kind of a different function, it’s more of a way for us instead of kind of presenting us in spaces with videos with, you know, it’s more like actually us being within kind of more of a virtual space. So it has some elements of our original idea. A lot less latency. It’s a lot. It’s a lot, more efficient, a lot slicker. and we can actually now have better production values within what we’re doing as well, which was something I think we wanted to look at and so on. Yeah.
Tom Ray: Is this something you’re building all yourself? Are you using other elements? Because I know, when we did speak, on through messaging on Mastodon, and, And you both are. You shared the, you shared the doc with me that you had. You guys had been working on for this process that you’re talking about explaining the process kind of go. It was kind of like, I want to say thesis. I don’t know what I would call it. But it was you. You sent me a doc that explained the concept to me more. And first of all, a lot of reading, but you know, I got it. Did you actually read homework? But no, no, I did, I did. And a lot of it, I know a lot of it was based on Mozilla hubs, which I looked up. I’m like, I’ve never heard of this and looked it up. It seems that it’s not around anymore. So now you’re talking about rebuilding the space in the virtual reality. Are you actually building your own version? Are you taking elements from other things and creating your own? Like is this fully a let’s start again from the ground up process, or are you using other elements elsewhere?
Michal Seta: No, I mean it would be it would be silly to start from scratch. Everything that we’re trying to do. So. So we’re actually building pipelines with. With software that, you know, that we know and all this. So for me personally, it always was very important to use Open source software. So that’s one of the reasons we used Mozilla Hubs because it was open source. It still is. M. Mozilla dropped the project, but other people have picked it up and it’s still being developed. It’s like a community development happening right now. but it had all kinds of limitations as well. So it was good for some things, but not so good for other. so we use basically software that we know and then we just write, we just do the plumbing, we write some code that we need to write, scripts or whatnot. So for example, for audio, schlepping, for collaborating with audio, we use Sonobus right now. So it’s a project for collaborating, playing, online. we’ve used Jack Trip. at some point I was going
Tom Ray: to ask you about that. I only just recently learned about Jack Trip.
Michal Seta: Yeah. So, Dirk is a Jack Trip Ninja.
Tom Ray: Oh, really?
Michal Seta: Okay. And for the ten piece band, we used a plugin in Reaper called Ninja, which, which makes you play with the click track and you can actually play in time.
Tom Ray: How does that work? Tell me more about that. I’m sorry that you just piqued my interest there. What’s that?
Dirk Stromberg: You play in displaced time. So everybody, everybody plays beat one, but your beat one might be a measure ahead or a measure behind my beat one. So what it does is it resyncs everybody and so it figures out everybody’s latency through pinging and then places them within a measure. That works.
Tom Ray: That makes sense. that’s kind of what I was going to guess.
Dirk Stromberg: Okay.
Michal Seta: Yeah. So basically you define what is that delay, which usually it will be like a measure or two measures or something. It’s a musical time that you define that this will be the, the boundary and everybody is on a downbeat, but not necessarily in the same measure.
Tom Ray: Yeah, like it’s a lot of math, calculating over bandwidth and all that kind of stuff and guessing that I suppose that guess that’s my, that’s my loose interpretation of what you’re telling me.
Michal Seta: Yeah, I think there was not much guessing, is just deciding who I will delay and. Yeah,
Tom Ray: okay.
Dirk Stromberg: All right. Yeah.
Michal Seta: it’s pre. AI.
Tom Ray: Okay, now you’re doing these. well, actually, I guess I didn’t really catch, what kind of virtual, what kind of VR you’re actually using nowadays.
Michal Seta: Yes, so now I’m using a game engine called Godot.
Tom Ray: Godot.
Michal Seta: Yeah. Yeah. So, it’s basically an environment for developing games, Video games. And you can do both 3D and 2D. and so we were using Godot to build like a 3D scene inside it. And then through some custom software developed by a friend of mine, we’re schlepping video into Godot in real time because Godot is not yet there. So we had to do a bit of hacks to make it happen. So we can put the So we usually like when we started playing with Dirk a couple of years ago, back, you know, trying to think as he described. so we also got into using several video cameras at the same time. So we can switch between different points of view and things like that. And sometimes it was crazy, like we had up to five cameras up and yeah, we’re doing crazy, crazy things. And so this is something that kind of becomes tricky when you’re trying to do, especially while performing, right? We don’t have a tech crew so we’re trying to manage all this.
Tom Ray: Most fans don’t to be honest.
Michal Seta: So it’s a bit of gymnastics. but so what we do is that we basically have the audio going through the audio software, whatever we decide to, to use, and then the video that goes through the VR space. So that we started building now in Godot. And then the output of the game engine is being sent to, you know, broadcasted to whatever venue that we are playing in. Okay. Now there was one interesting fact that Dirk didn’t mention when he was describing is that we also started working together because the pandemic is over and we can now play in venues. And part of the thinking behind it is how do we make a sonography that can work in a kind of a hybrid way. So that we have already played gigs where Dirk was on stage physically and I was playing into the venue remotely. So this is also part of the work that we’re doing. We’re thinking about how to make the remote work hybrid enough so that it doesn’t it doesn’t feel remote kind of thing. That’s the ultimate goal. We haven’t solved that problem yet.
Tom Ray: Yeah. And the one. How do you approach a venue with this concept? How do you go, hey, hey, let us play here. Great. When can you be here? Oh, we won’t be here. I mean you said sometimes you are, but, but still like how do you approach. Because you guys, I’m looking at your. There’s a lot of events, festivals and things that you’ve played At. So how. How do you approach these people? And also, how do you find them?
Dirk Stromberg: Well, we find one, one. Michal finds them. I mean, he’s got. I don’t know. He’s got, like. He’s.
Tom Ray: He’s,
Dirk Stromberg: He. He finds that in truffles. I don’t know how he does it, but. Okay. no, he’s got a good nose for them. but, But what we did find was, conferences are always happy to have us, although we do. We’re doing a lot. Few of them for a number of reasons, which we don’t necessarily need to get into today. But, But then I think we look at festivals, and we tend to find festivals are a lot happier if you have somebody in person. And it was really interesting that during COVID it was like, this is cool. And. And we’d been doing telepresence work for, you know, a long time before. Before COVID you know, and so when Covid happened was like, oh, cool. I got,
Michal Seta: Right.
Tom Ray: You were already prepared. You’re like, yeah, okay. So, I mean, not so. But you get what I mean. Like, yeah, Covid was.
Dirk Stromberg: Was really cool because it also got a lot of things moving. I mean, there was a lot of things had been kind of quite stagnant. You know what I mean? Yeah. I mean, even something as simple as,
Tom Ray: like, it made people think ahead. And what I think is really funny. Short tangent here.
Dirk Stromberg: Yeah.
Tom Ray: I love how Skype didn’t survive it. Isn’t that the strangest thing? Literally, they were the people that started it, and, like, they went out of business right after that and everybod. But he was using Zoom, which was like the new kid on the block. Anyway. Sorry, go ahead.
Dirk Stromberg: No, no, I mean that. That the. I mean, Zoom’s a good. You know, with all of its problems. I remember using Zoom, I think the first time for a telematic thing in 2018, and being like, what is this? Why does this exist? And, oh, it’s pretty good. And then, you know, I, mean, I still still use Zoom. It’s, you know, still part of my. My, work and so on. Yeah. but we do find that post Covid people like, no, no more. I mean, there’s a. I think there’s a definite trauma that people have from. From Telematic work because it was this. It was this other. It was this thing that everybody’s forced into, and it’s. It’s reminiscent of that. So we do find that doing hybrid performances where someone is in the Space, whether it’s one of us or another collaborator that we then, rope into it and forced them on stage with us, you know, remotely waiting. but we do find that that is the case, M. That there is a lot less stomach for purely hybrid work than there has been in the past. But there are a few really cool exceptions of people who are like, this is interesting, this is cool. and it’s nice because some of these places we play at every year and it gives us also a platform to develop because every performance brings its own challenges. We rehearse quite a bit. We have to do a lot of testing. There’s a lot of time spent, you know, going, hello, are, you there?
Michal Seta: Can you hear me now?
Dirk Stromberg: Ten seconds later, yes.
Tom Ray: Oddly enough, when we were setting up for this call, we had a good two minutes of that, didn’t we?
Dirk Stromberg: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This guy Dirk couldn’t figure out he had like seven. He had seven instances of Google. he’s trying to patch him, to his headphones. but yeah, I mean that’s, you know, and so I think, I think, you know, this iteration that we’ve been going through, we do, you know, kind of iterative work. you know, kind of each year we have a new project for the iterative work it seems to be by, by just kind of the way it’s worked. and we kind of every year we go, okay, we’ve got this new thing and we. And then we develop it for a year. and that’s been really kind of fun. But yeah, there’s. We’re always looking for more places to play, so keep your ears out for us as well. All right.
Tom Ray: And one of the places that I saw was a place that I almost went to. I actually was approved to do a talk at it, but I ended up not being able to go. and the. It was at the, Linux Audio Conference in, in France. Did you guys. Was anybody physically there or was that an all remote?
Dirk Stromberg: I was in Melbourne, I think, at the time.
Michal Seta: Yeah, yeah. And I, I couldn’t go. I wanted to.
Tom Ray: Yeah, but no, I wanted to.
Michal Seta: Yeah. So I think in 2013 or 2014 at Linux audio Conference, when it, when it took place in Graz, I did a telematic performance with my, the people here in Montreal. We had a, we had a project, the same one that we’ve shown at the Network Music Festival, you know, in 2013. so, yeah, that was. Linux Audio Conferences is a great platform for this, because, because usually it’s hosted by, you know, some kind of a, usually some kind of university, some kind of academic institution. there are a bunch of geeks behind the organization and, and they, they are not afraid of, you know, jumping onto this kind of, you know, adventure where there are a lot of unknowns. Right.
Dirk Stromberg: Yeah.
Michal Seta: the festivals, it’s a little harder because a lot of people are, I mean, that’s just my theory. They are not used to this, so maybe, they don’t want to take that kind of risk. And then also, when we apply to festivals, we send them a tech rider and we ask for a very robust Internet, connection. Some venues just don’t have it. I approached the venue here in Montreal once. we wanted to do a gig where we both were on stages somewhere, and the venue told me, well, no, our Internet connection is not gonna hold up.
Tom Ray: What’s the minimum that you need? Usually out of curiosity, I think
Michal Seta: that the bare minimum would be like 50 megabit a sec. Well, 30. We could make it with 30. 30.
Dirk Stromberg: Make it with 30.
Michal Seta: Yeah. Symmetrical and, but no WI fi. Right. Like, we need to plug in, you
Tom Ray: know, to direct connection. Okay.
Michal Seta: Wired. Because, because we’re sending audio and video, you know, both ways.
Dirk Stromberg: But we did a really interesting one. We did. And this was, I really like the spirit of this one, which was working with Apple Tontois in, Nantes in France. and they, they did not have a wired connection. And in fact they didn’t even have WI fi. They were running off like a GSM signal, like, like a 3G, I think, even signal.
Michal Seta: Okay.
Dirk Stromberg: And, and it was wild. And I, what I liked about it was like, oh, no, we’re going to make this happen no matter what. I mean, vague memories of how well it went. But, but it was really, I, I, there is this kind of guerrilla, like, well, why does it have to be this way? You know, we’re very much, okay, we want this, this, this Internet signal. But then I love working with people who are like, no, but we want this to happen and it won’t happen otherwise. And I like that. You know what I mean? Because, because, you know, if, if it’s only, if it’s, if it’s only for people who have fast Internet connections. And you know, we’re, we’re, we’re limiting on so many things. So it’s quite, you know, things like that are quite fun too. they’re very different, though. They’re very different experiences that, you know, you have to start to kind of think, well, what’s important to you? And sound. Basic video, you know.
Michal Seta: Yeah, exactly. And Dirk. And Dirk is an audio engineer, right? So like he, you know, when he shows up at the venue, he says I’m not playing up on anything below, you know, 48,000hertz and you know, 96 bit, you know, and, and then you know, with Apple 33, in, in Nant. They’re like basically punks, you know, doing noise lo fi stuff and, and stuff like that. So, so, you know, so it was like a good experience, you know.
Dirk Stromberg: Yeah, but, but, but definitely symmetrical, Internet. It’s always a problem. We find. I mean Singapore is blessed with, I mean I think I have 5.5Gigabit Internet at home. yeah. I mean, not that I have any hardware that supports it by the way.
Tom Ray: I mean, but it’s there if you need it.
Dirk Stromberg: It’s there if you need it. And if you could, you know, it’s all running at gigabit, at home, but the whole network. But but yeah, But then of course like in most places in the world it’s much more problematic. and I thought, you know, like I was at Linux Audio Conference. I was actually visiting my friend in Melbourne. So my, my, my joy was how do I set this up in my friend’s son’s room? You know, set up all the lighting and everything and do it at three in the morning, somewhat coherently. That’s how I ended up Upside Down.
Tom Ray: Oh, that’s right. He told me about that, video.
Michal Seta: Upside down was a different gig.
Dirk Stromberg: Oh yeah, no, that was. That one.
Michal Seta: Okay.
Dirk Stromberg: Yeah, yeah. but it’s, you know, so I mean those, those are the fun things. The idea is that it’s a, it’s a living project. It’s not just we have to be in our space and it has to be this, this, this, you know, sterile, studio. But this idea of like, well, you know, how do we do it in this venue or while I’m on the road, how can I make it work? do. We did a series where Michal was in his van performing and that was wildly fun. So he had his whole lighting set up and he performed in the back of a van, like a kidnapper. It was amazing.
Tom Ray: Kidnapping himself, kidnapping the music. But here’s another thing too now, while yes. Setting up remotely, clearly, it’s one of those things where everybody’s like, oh, it’d be so great if I don’t have to go anywhere. But it also is. You also don’t have an excuse if you’re saying, you know, oh, I’m not home though, how am I going to do, do this?
Dirk Stromberg: So you have to set up.
Tom Ray: But the other thing too is with performances, and you guys using Almidi, you’re not a traditional. Like you don’t. You’re not two guitarists and a drummer playing remotely. You guys have your own MIDI instruments. Your own. The style that you do is not like straight up rock and roll band. So tell me about first of all, the instruments that you both use.
Dirk Stromberg: I have an instrument called the Fryprone. Ah. So I started building instruments, let’s say by my current perspective about 2009, was when I started building instruments. And so I build an instrument that is, designed to be flexible, agile, tourable and controllable. It’s basically my guidelines for it. so it can play kind of. It’s very wild or quite melodic or anything. And this instrument that I built, 2000, 2021, I think. 2021, yeah. and that’s. And so that’s my main instrument and that’s what I’ve been working with for the last five years and developing and so on and iterating through. and it basically works as an access point that my laptop logs into. so it works as a controller, I think, is what people would say. Although it’s quite, it’s quite integrated into the software to a point where it’d be to extract it without having to redevelop something. Pretty, a bit tedious. Yeah. So that’s. So that’s my main instrument. that’s what I tour with, as much as I can.
Michal Seta: Okay.
Tom Ray: And how about you?
Michal Seta: Yeah, and I reappropriate, things. I don’t build my own instruments. At first I played with a guitar, an electric guitar, maybe with some effects and stuff like that. And then also at some point I was playing. It’s called the T stick.
Tom Ray: Okay.
Michal Seta: it’s a kind of a prototype. it’s been a prototype for now probably over a decade. it’s developed at McGill University in Montreal. And so it’s basically a PVC pipe with a bunch of sensors inside, you know, accelerometer, gyroscope, touch sensor. So like, you know, it, it matters where you touch it and a force, force sensor. So it, it matters how, how you squeeze it.
Tom Ray: Okay, so now you’re saying touch it, squeeze it or. Everything I just said sounded perverted, but you get what I’m saying. It’s touching. But so what?
Michal Seta: How?
Dirk Stromberg: I don’t know.
Tom Ray: I don’t even know how to phrase this question. I’m just going to say how.
Michal Seta: Yeah, so. So it’s those bunch of electronics and they send signals. It’s basically they send osc. Messages, with values, you know, like tapping on it. yeah, I mean you can, you can, you know, you can swing it, you know, you can job, you know, you know, you can caress it like this, you know, or, or go like that, you know. And so, and so basically when
Tom Ray: you were talking about it, it reminds me of that Nickelodeon toy that was called like, Bop It, Squeeze it, kick it. It was just this thing that just made a bunch of noises. And when we’re talking about it, that’s what I keep thinking of while we’re saying it.
Michal Seta: Oh, I never knew about that one. I’m gonna have to research it. so. So that was part of my, my adventure. I did, a couple of pieces of this and I was also improvising with it. And then at some point I got a Steam Deck. I don’t have it here with me, but, you know, it’s a handheld gaming console. Yeah. And so the nice thing about Steam Deck is it runs Linux. and so you can use it like in a desktop mode. basically. So when my laptop died, that was my laptop. Basically that was my, you know, my computer. And so, and so I figured, okay, now like, I do all this work with you know, Godot game engine. And I do my synthesis with Super Collider. So okay. And I developed this very complicated software for in Super Collider to do audio specialization. So it can adapt to any configuration of audio speakers. So it can play, you know, like on multiple audio speakers and things like that. And it connects to a 3D game engine. So basically I treat sound as an object that they schlep around in space. And so I figured that’s like a perfect thing for me. And so this is my instrument now. I play the Steam Deck, that runs Super Collider and Godot, and basically just doing synthesis, on the instrument directly. And I can connect to the Internet via, there is a USB C jack. So with a dongle I can connect wired Internet. So I’m not limited just to WI Fi. And that’s how I do it.
Tom Ray: Now, now this discussion that we’ve had about what you do and how you create and then plus with the background that you, you both have, I feel like this is the type of project that gets funding. do you guys find funding for this? Do you just do it for fun?
Michal Seta: I don’t know.
Tom Ray: It sounds like an experimental thing where people be like, we got a grant from some arts organization, but with the guffaws, you’re doing what most musicians do and go, you don’t get paid for doing this.
Dirk Stromberg: We have the, we have the first part of funding. We have a lot of fun, but we’ve not done well.
Tom Ray: Word play.
Dirk Stromberg: I’m sorry. No, I mean, you know, I’m lucky. I do get funding from my university to work on projects and we’ve had a few. A few. We’ve had some residencies and so on. but yeah, yeah, not. Yeah, some, less than you would think.
Tom Ray: So no grants or anything like that. You’re not being awarded art grants or, having. I guess it wouldn’t be an installation somewhere. Well, it could be. See, the reason I bring that up is because some of your performance, your performances the way they are in VR and what I spoke of earlier with the different things happening, like they’ll be on the wall, but it’s actually in a VR place. It looks like an installation that would be at one of the museum, like the Milwaukee Museum here or something like that. It just looks like something that would be there. So my mind instantly went to, oh, is this something where you’re able to utilize that and actually go when people go, but is it art? You can go, yes, it is. We have funding.
Dirk Stromberg: That’s how you too. we finally found a good definition of art. Was it funded by somebody or not?
Tom Ray: That actually just popped into my head as I was doing it. And I’m like, this is going to be funny. And it was. Thank you. but, I was just curious if that was an option, but it sounds like no. So there you go.
Michal Seta: Yeah, I actually tried. You know, in Canada there is a bit of, of public funding.
Tom Ray: Canada has funding for all kinds of art things. I’m almost jealous of the funding people get from Canada a lot of the time.
Michal Seta: Yeah. But, in, in some cases the complication is that Dirk is not Canadian, doesn’t live in Canada. So they, they, you know, some. It’s. It’s hard to find a project that’s, international in this, in, in this way. But I also haven’t putting. I, I haven’t put a lot of effort into, into that. I, I tried one, one Avenue. And, and it was, Yeah, it was very complicated. So. So, so basically, yeah, I. On my end, I just funded myself. But. But we actually made some money Since. Since, since 2020. We. We did like, you know, we made about $300.
Dirk Stromberg: Think.
Tom Ray: There you go.
Michal Seta: All right.
Tom Ray: Actually, in musician terms, especially indie musicians, that’s. I mean, you guys can quit your day jobs now.
Dirk Stromberg: We’re considered good. Yeah.
Michal Seta: Yeah.
Dirk Stromberg: Cost of living in Singapore is so low.
Tom Ray: Exactly. No, it’s. And, now, if people wanted to check out a lot of how you do this or possibly even wanted to try it themselves, is there a place where people can learn more about this process you do, or is it really just something you’re both or not both, but you and the people you work with kind of work on, and it’s like, it’s not really readily available yet. I mean, I guess if people are really curious about this whole concept, how would they go about researching what you do, if that makes sense.
Michal Seta: yeah, that’s a. That’s a good question. I, At some point, I. Like, we do have a GitLab repository somewhere, but most of the projects are private. there may have been a project that. That was not private. The, the problem is that we’re using the repository to also exchange some notes and, and things like.
Tom Ray: Right.
Dirk Stromberg: You’re using.
Tom Ray: You’re actively using it for what you do. There’s no, like, separate public one where it’s like, okay, here’s the main setup. And then you have a private one. Kind of like if you had a website, you wouldn’t have a public repository, but you might have one of the template that you made for it.
Michal Seta: Yeah.
Tom Ray: Sort of thing. Yeah.
Michal Seta: Yeah. And at some point, I was thinking about maybe, you know, describing some of these things or publishing, or maybe publishing the setups, you know, that we’ve done is just. I never got around to it because, you know, with a. With the day job live and this, it’s kind of, you know, I have to prioritize what I would be working on.
Tom Ray: Right.
Michal Seta: But, yeah, I mean, yeah, it’s. It’s weird. We don’t even list the software that we use. We should, we should do that.
Dirk Stromberg: We do have a website and so
Michal Seta: we do have a website.
Tom Ray: And that was going to be what I was going to next. I’m like, okay, if there’s nowhere to do that. I know there is your website. And also I learned about the previous stuff that you had used because you had written that. I just want to call it a thesis. I still don’t know what to call.
Michal Seta: It was an article for a.
Tom Ray: It was an article.
Michal Seta: Okay.
Dirk Stromberg: Yeah. All right.
Michal Seta: Yeah. So there was this conference called New Interfaces for Musical Experience Expression.
Tom Ray: Okay.
Michal Seta: Where, Where, you know, like, all kinds of things related to music and instrumentation, like, you know, technology involved in. In musical expression are presented. And we. And I wrote that article that describes one of the. One of the experiences that we did.
Dirk Stromberg: Right.
Tom Ray: And that’s where I was going with this is. So then if people did want to just see what it is you do, where could they go do that?
Michal Seta: So we have a YouTube channel called Telepeasants. so that’s basically the only place right now where people can go. But we put everything there. we do a performance, we record it, if we don’t forget, and then it ends up on that video channel. And then, of course, via the website and the YouTube channel, people can reach out to us. we love, talking to people who are curious about this or who would like to collaborate. We’ve collaborated with other artists. We did some. Three songs.
Dirk Stromberg: Right.
Tom Ray: And the website is Telepeasants. space. Correct.
Michal Seta: Exactly. Yeah.
Tom Ray: Okay. All right. And that’s Telepeasants, spelled A, E. Yes. And.
Michal Seta: Yeah, yeah, the old school.
Tom Ray: Yes, yes, the proper. The proper English. Before we got hold of it and made everything, we were like, why said it over there? You know, I don’t know.
Michal Seta: Yeah,
Tom Ray: I know how dumb us Americans sound. Don’t worry about it. Okay, now, this, actually has been. Actually, that makes it sound like I wasn’t expecting it to be, but that’s just the way it came out. This has been great, is what I was trying to say. And I want to thank you both so much for talking with me today.
Dirk Stromberg: Thank you so much. Tomorrow.