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Bang & Olufsen at the opera
It does not sound like a typical Bang & Olufsen Project: an Opera Concert in cyberspace, through an unlikely pairing of engineers and classical singers. It happened though on May 11, when Bang & Olufsen participated in the first live performance experiment carried out at the Music School in Struer and New York University at the same time. The key of the World Opera project is to develop a world-wide opera of the highest standard with singers and orchestra placed at three or more physical locations; a set-up which demands technologies that can diminish the delay between sending and receiving sound and visual data.
The project started when Jeremy Cooperstock from McGill University in Montreal visited Bang & Olufsen as a part of an ongoing collaboration with Bang & Olufsen perception specialist, Søren Bech, who is also adjunct professor at McGill.
Jeremy was returning to Montreal after having attended the first World Opera Symposium in March 2008 in Tromsø, Norway. Jeremy Cooperstock is a researcher with the Centre for Intelligent Machines at McGill participating in this study. This research will ensure opera's jump into 21st century technology but would also provide lessons for less challenging cyber-endeavours, improving everything from video conferencing to telesurgery and many other areas.
Pushing technology to its limits
 Conductor, Niels Muus |
Jeremy suggested that Bang & Olufsen got involved in the project and it was immediately recognized that this would be a unique possibility for being at the forefront of some rather interesting technologies. The key of the World Opera project is to develop a world-wide opera of the highest standard with singers and orchestra placed at three or more physical locations; a set-up which demands technologies that can diminish the delay between sending and receiving sound and visual data. |
"Music is one of the most challenging applications for technology to support", explains Prof. Cooperstock, "because it involves incredibly tight constraints on timing and places extensive demands on our cognitive and perceptual systems. The technology must therefore be highly responsive, but also highly reliable, even when faced with unreliable networks. In this sense, some researchers joke that music is actually more demanding than military applications."
Søren Bech who is the Bang & Olufsen coordinator of the project explains:
"If we are able to create the artistic “space” that the performers need to interact, then the task of creating “connected” users of Bang & Olufsen products e.g. connecting families and relatives in different countries, is a fairly straight forward and simple task. The additional benefit of being able to simulate, with a very high degree of realism, a performance space in people homes is of course also quite useful."
| For the engineers, the project is about serving the artists' technological needs. Bang & Olufsen has therefore invited the Danish Professor, historian and opera aficionado Niels Windfeld Lund and his team to stay one month at the R&D dept. in Struer. The World Opera project is the brainchild of Niels Windfeld Lund and he will interact with Bang & Olufsen engineers within areas such as control of sound fields, advanced video processing, the creation of credible A/V experiences and extension of the user interaction experience at Bang & Olufsen head quarters in Struer, Denmark. |  Conductor, Niels Muus |
The first test performance took place at the Music School in Struer on May 11 late afternoon in connection with the three days World Opera Symposium on May 11-13. It constituted of a small performance of three parties from Mozart Cosi Fan Tutte, Verdi’s La Traviata, and Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. The clue was that while Violetta in La Traviata is in New York, Alfredo is in Struer – the loving couple is on each their continent only connected via the internet. The small performance was a great success and bodes well for the opportunities that lie ahead of this project.
Ideally, you could state that classic opera scenes belong in a theatre but if the art form is not to become a complete museum, it has to be developed into this individualized computer world that we live in. This is why high profiled opera houses such as the Metropolitan Opera and Carnegie Hall in New York have expressed their interest in the project as well.
Niels Windfeld Lund is looking forward to broadcast the World Opera first dedicated work – A World Opera production in three acts based on Ludvig Holberg’s satirical science fiction novel "Niels Klims subterranean journey" from 1741 with music by 3 composers from Denmark, Russia/Germany and China/Canada. Full scale premiere plans to be in May 2012 as the first transcontinental distributed opera and already in May 2010, a pre-premiere will take place in Struer, Tromsø, New York and Montreal.