I think that live streaming will play a big part in the future of music performance. Having spent an entire year of my life driving and flying around just to be able to reach new audiences in a single country, it pains me to think how comparatively simple it would have been to organize streaming shows to reach those fans.

Commencing in about 12 hours, Visionsonic 2009 showcases Audiovisual artists from around the world. The Thursday show is “for Young Audiences”, but I’ll definitely be watching The Odyssey of Rick the Cube.

L’Odyssée de Rick le cube (extraits du spectacle) from Jesse Lucas on Vimeo.

The festival program has 20 artists performing over Friday and Saturday, which you can view on the Visionsonic TV page, or load the WMV stream in your media player of choice (VLC works beautifully).

What if, between the original classic Tron and the upcoming Tron 2: Legacy, there were another Tron movie, lost forever in cinematic history? Between the soaring score by Wendy Carlos for the original and Legacy’s Daft Punk music, what would the soundtrack have sounded like? Of course, it would have absolutely had some Journey in it.

Such a movie was rumored, but as with so many projects, leaves behind no evidence. What if it had left a score you could hear? The mysterious “Flynn 1.5″ writes to share a free, downloadable soundtrack that answers that question.

And you can argue with an album that begins out with “For the Love of ENCOM”? Indeed. You can stream the full album and download all but the Journey remix. Read the full “backstory” after the jump.

Tron moniker or no, the results are some lovely music, featuring the likes of Tiger Mendoza, Team9, artist and CDM regular reader Lilith The Kitten, and ringleader World Famous Audio Hacker, among others. (Trivia – Tiger Mendoza has his own, Creative Commons-licensed album, and Team9 earned notoriety for a mash-up collaboration with Green Day.)

The Music Bore – Video 2 from Nicholas Humfrey on Vimeo.

“I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t allow you to listen to Coldplay.”

What would radio be like if playlists were not only robotic, but had robot DJs pulling information from the Interwebs dynamically? That’s the question asked by the winning team at London’s Music Hackday last weekend, which created an epic mashup of data sources to produce a voice-synthesized IRC chatbot that researches and plays music for you.

Music Bore

Music Bore was just one of a number of projects developed in the weekend of musical hacking, some for listening, and at least one (a fantastic and free synth plug-in) for what we really like – production. With some of the world’s top musical coders in attendance, the results were amazing, even if not all projects were entirely finished. (Hey, that’s why they call it hacking.)

You can check out the full list on the wiki, but here are some favorites — and if you were there, do shout out to us as you put more documentation up of the event and projects.

With the weakened world economy, content in general faces plenty of gloom and doom. Advertising models are severely weakened. But, oddly, in the world of music, there are some positive signs that the shift to decentralized, online distribution might actually be going well — and maybe economic pressures are simply ensuring the parties involved find some way to make the adjustment.

And music distribution is becoming wonderfully weird and diverse – maybe far more so than in recording’s so-called golden age, an era in the past dominated by racial division, predatory labels, and a few dominant big businesses. (Money is tough as always, but it does make you wonder why we complain so.)

What if all the technology you loved, everything that ran on electricity, came to life and played one epic musical performance?

That’s about as best as I can sum up the “Emergence” event happening in Ontario and in an online stream. It’s a workshop. It’s a performance. It’s Commodore 64s and surplus parts. It’s cybernetic theory. There’s a robotic singer. It’s at a computer museum. Nerdtastic.

Rod Adlers describes his own setup: “3 Commodore 64’s running Cynthcart and MSSIAH, iPod Touch using Brian Eno’s ‘Bloom’ program, Korg MS2000 and M50, and Fruity Loops.” Nice – it’s like the radio station phrase, “the greatest hits of yesterday and today.”

Valentine’s Day, indeed — if you’re dating a robot / computer / nerd (or robotic computer nerd), you know how to celebrate. There’s an online stream, happily, for all of us too unlucky to be in Ontario this weekend. If you are there, “video, photography and interviews” are all “encouraged.” Please do share with us on planet CDM. Syd Bolton writes:

You can see some newspaper coverage from today at:
http://pcmuseum.ca/media/ExposFeb2009EmergWeb.jpg

The show will be broadcast live the day of at:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/emergent-behaviour

Our page for it is at
http://www.pcmuseum.ca/emergence.asp

Full details: