Audio Flash Experiment - Volunteers Needed.

Audio Flasher is planning a future Experiment that needs your help! The Hypothesis to be tested is to build a collaborative improvised group composition.

The Methodology will be simple. Enlisting the help of at least 4 (more than 4 would be awesome!) contributors, each contributor will be asked to record an improvisation of 1-2 minutes of music. It can be coherent, or whacky. Each volunteer will record one track, but the choice of instrument is left to their discretion (a VST/AU instrument converted to an audio track, a live instrument track, a piece of 'found music' from your environment, whatever you choose). The framework will be a D drone note and we'll use 80bpm in 4/4 time, although divisions/multiples of that are welcomed (e.g. you can use 2/4, 3/4, 5/4, 7/4, etc, or set the bpm in your recording setup to 40bpm,or 160bpm - 7/4 at 160bpm would be really interesting for one track*). Once recorded, each volunteer will send their audio track here, and I'll take all the contributing tracks and mix or blend elements to develop the composition*. The final mix would then be posted. The aim of this Experiment is to test group improvisation under conditions where improvisers have minimal information about the contributions of the other participants. I'll be doing the mix within one day, and wont be listening to any submitted tracks until the day of mixing, so I wont have any chance to prep**. The more contributors we have for this, the more interesting it will be (the final mix may exceed 2 minutes), so please get involved!

To sign up for this, just post in the comments section below. We'll figure out a timeline for the duration of this experiment once we have an idea of how many contributors will be involved so, if you're busy for a week or two but still want to be involved in this, please post and give an idea of when you might be able to do your track, and we'll figure it out. And if you know Audio Flasher personally, but you lack recording equipment, buzz me and we'll fix a way for you to use my gear to record your track.

All contributors will retain the full rights to their individual submission (by submitting a track to this Experiment you are granting permission for it to be used within the framework of this Experiment). Rights to the final composition, the final mix (or mixes, if people volunteer to do alternate mixes), and the recording of that mix, will be held equally by all contributors. For the final mix (or mixes), production credit should be given to the individual responsible for that mix, and composition credit should be given to the Audio Flash Lab Rats (the official name for the group of contributors involved in this Experiment).

Have I missed out anything important? If you think so, post in the comments and I'll update accordingly. Thanks.


*All contributors could do their own version of this step in the experiment. In fact, I'd positively encourage it - the results of the different tracks would be very interesting to hear.

**We may have to organise it so that I don't receive the tracks until the day of mixing. I'll have a think about that.

***Brief Update: Later today, I plan to post an update with links to a couple of sites I find useful/interesting/inspirational in relation to the Audio Flash Project. I'm hoping to include these sites in a handy links tab on the side of this site, but I want to check I have permission from some of them to link in this way before I go ahead with it.
Also updating with a quick clarification of terms. As this Experiment discusses ownership rights over a group composition, I should clarify stuff like "The Audio Flash Project", "Experiment", "Methodology", etc., so that there's no ambiguity there.
Also contacting a few people privately about some other collaborative Experiments we have planned for the next few weeks.
And, if there's time left after doing all that, drinking lots of cups of tea (I prefer Ceylon, if that matters), faffing intermittently, and practicing music, I might get into doing another quick improvised experiment.