Output details

50 Fanfares

Fifty Fanfares was the result of research in developing a mobile app for music cueing and synchronisation. The app uses a wireless infrastructure to sync and co-ordinate with with a central time server and individual cues and instructions are distributed to the musicians. The first implementation of the system was in Fifty Fanfares, a work which opened the 2012 Belfast Festival at Queen's. The research process involved developing musical materials which capitalised on distributed performance where musicians did not need line of sight to synchronise during the performance. It is intended that the musicians should be distributed in an open space at different heights and pointing in different directions to enable an audience to walk through the space during the performance and thus hear the work from a range of musical perspectives. The research was supported by Apple Education UK and by Ecliptic Labs, a Belfast-based mobile app development company. Michael Alcorn was responsible for the app design and specification and the composition of the Fifty Fanfares.