#ljtunes

I broadcast a weekly streaming show on the Periscope app. 12 weeks in and it’s rather good fun. In fact, my #ljtunes show has picked up quite a bit of late (over 400,000 likes at the time of writing) – for those of you who haven’t visited, please do come by on a Monday night 20:30 UK time.  Or hop on through my twitter account – where links to the show are posted…

 Live – from anywhere with a piano can mean #LJtunes – more info www.ljtunes.com / or twitter.com/ljrich

It’s clear streaming has finally hit the main-stream  – perfect for the sort of concerts I give – live, interactive, conversational composing.  I love playing music while guiding viewers along genre-irrelevant leaps –  awesome tunes, fun with synths – or even performing live-composed glitching soundwalking through London – all this while chatting away to a brilliantly engaged, interactive audience.

And it’s not just playing music – I sometimes talk about the music theory behind the great tunes – what makes things catchy – why the best bits of a song work, my favourite chord progressions, original compositions and pastiches of contemporary and classical tunes, music theory, mashups, music tech and live-composing, all with the simultaneous challenge of conversing with a virtual audience!

A maximum 200 people can chat through the app (though we’ve had 1,600 people on – not sure of the upper limit of viewers).  When the broadcast fills up the chat regularly spills over onto Twitter using the #ljtunes hashtag – it’s amazing and very challenging having to process so much information while playing the piano and chatting to everyone at the same time, but even with those challenges it’s an incredibly pleasing experience.

I’ll see you online!

 

More info about Live Streaming

Background:

Periscope is an app (like Meerkat, Bambuser and predecessors Qik and Seesmic) allowing a bunch of people to watch one person’s smartphone camera – in effect turning everyone with a mobile phone and an internet connection into a broadcaster. Viewers can communicate not just with the person generating the feed but crucially with each other too – and those discussions during real-time events give a sense of immediacy to the wildly varying content.

I was (I think) the first in the world to periscope while broadcasting live on the BBC (BBC World News, April 9, 2015) but just 90 days later it’s quite normal for news outlets to host ‘behind the scenes’ clips or even integrate real-time streaming into their programming. People stream their public transport journeys, back gardens – even sunsets. I’ve seen someone sleeping and chatted with other people who were also watching that person sleeping.

Watching live streams is an oddly voyeuristic experience – an insomniac moment leaves me awake at 3am and instead of browsing a forum I watch someone else’s cat watching TV, or my friend drinking in a hotel bar or someone walking in their garden on the other side of the world.

It feels like there’s currently a sense of authenticity about live-streaming content – which will last at least until someone figures out how to spoof the camera feed.

More great blog posts on periscope here, here and here.