Aloha? It’s how singers rehearse remotely with pianists
OperaFrom Fast Company:
Resident artists for the San Francisco Opera will perform the first in a series of open-air concerts later this month at San Rafael’s Marin Center. It will be one of the largest live musical events in the Bay Area since the coronavirus pandemic began, according to organizers. By the time they’re ready to belt out enduring classics by Rossini, Puccini, and Verdi in front of a real audience, the singers and musicians will be on key, finely tuned, and well-rehearsed thanks to a brand-new collaboration platform called Aloha, from Stockholm-based Elk Audio, which is aimed at reducing the technical hiccups so often faced by live performers in a virtual environment.
The technology is still in beta, but Matthew Shilvock, SFO’s general manager, says it’s been a godsend for the opera’s artists as they’ve rehearsed remotely and worked behind the scenes to prepare for their triumphant return to a physical stage.
“It allows a singer and a pianist to essentially be in the digital space together making real-time music—which is just transformational for us,” Shilvock tells Fast Company. “A pianist can now hear a singer breathe, and that may sound very basic, but those breath cues are the things that allow the pianist to really mold their sounds to what the singer is doing….”
Read on here.
If the hype is true, this could be a very interesting bit of software. But *why* does it require a dedicated piece of branded hardware? Is it really the only way, or are they trying to make more money and tie people to their product (and, when said hardware becomes obsolete or broken beyond repair, make the already unmanageable mountain of electronic waste even higher)? Even if Microsoft, Apple, and Google were not co-operating, they could have made it compatible with hardware running an open-source operating system that does not censor third-party application developers (such as most Linux distributions).