Synchronous Collaborative Music Lessons and their digital materiality Demosthenes Akoumianakis Hellenic Mediterranean University da@hmu.gr Chrisoula Alexandraki Hellenic Mediterranean University chrisoula@hmu.gr Dimitrios Milios Hellenic Mediterranean University dimitris.milios96@gmail.com Alexandros Nousias Hellenic Mediterranean University ta2238@edu.hmu.gr ABSTRACT It is increasingly acknowledged that digital artifacts of any kind may be crafted from a variety of materials that include programming languages, notations, scripts, code generators, etc. As these materials are digital natives, they are distinctly different from conventional instruments. In an attempt to grasp their full potential and to gain insights into what constitutes their materiality, researchers have recently engaged in useful argumentation about the properties of such digital materials. Using an evolving case study on Synchronous Collaborative Music Lessons (SCMLs), we seek to contribute to this argumentation by showcasing how designated digital materials and their transformative capacity can re-organize the conduct of a jazz improvisation music lesson. 1. INTRODUCTION In recent years several scientific and research communities have advocated the call for a ‘material turn’ in the design of interactive computer-based systems [1][2] as well as the compelling need for understanding properties of digital materials and immaterial artifacts [9][10][11][12] that shape design-oriented decisions and practices. This paper rests on these scholarships and attempts to (a) establish a vocabulary that guides design inquiries towards an appreciation of the role of digital materials and (b) assess the value of this vocabulary by elaborating on a particular virtual work setting – that of Synchronous Collaborative Music Lessons (SCMLs). Before engaging with our main line of argumentation, it is perhaps appropriate to justify what we mean by SCMLs. In general, SCMLs are shared co-engagements between two or more human collaborators with the aim of learning music. This is achieved by entangling individual performative capacity (understanding symbolic forms of music, competence in using a musical instrument, etc.) with designated material settings across sites (personal versus shared space, specific instrument, surroundings, temporal sequence of events, etc.). Noticeably, these entanglements may result in improving, augmenting or even creating new opportunities for working with music (e.g., co- creating, improvising or experimenting with music). Another key feature of SCMLs is their material context. This is interesting and challenging because the physical space where musicians operate (i.e., private or shared physical space, local instruments) is intertwined with the digital space (i.e., computing infrastructure, representations, tools and digital equipment). Again, such intertwining creates new opportunities for action since digital representations of music are continuously re-aligning the way in which music is articulated. It is therefore argued that SCMLs constitute a case illustrating how an assemblage of embedded agencies established through sensory-based media migrates to a new digital assemblage which is amenable to virtual work. In terms of materialities, SCMLs in the broader sense of the term may engage computational embodiments of music-specific artifacts such as visual symbols (i.e., symbolic notation), sound (that may stand for certain visual symbols), human gestures on musical instruments, as well as digital infrastructure (i.e., cloud settings, desktop, WWW, mobile, digital services such as file- or photo-sharing applications, etc.). The intrinsic ways in which these artifacts are implicated in practice, time after time, justify the claim that SCMLs possess malleable and emergent digital materiality. As an example, let us consider a hypothetical scenario where gestures of a digital music instrument (e.g., messages of the MIDI protocol) are rendered as an audio file as well as an SVG image, i.e., an engraving of a score. It is worth noticing that although there are interdependencies between these materials, the desired equivalence is usually impossible, as different materials have been designed to reveal different music qualities. For instance, rendering a MIDI file to audio discards expressive deviations intentionally introduced by performers. Furthermore, converting one symbolic format to another is usually not a reversible process. Indeed, rendering a MIDI representation of a musical piece will usually produce a different SVG image than rendering the same piece from a MusicXML or Humdrum file, especially in the presence of multiple voices/instruments. From the above it becomes evident that under the term ‘material’ we are considering not only the digital artifacts per se, but also their affordances and the ways in which these affordances are configured by non-human actors, such as computational embodiments for capturing, rendering and manipulating sound and / or graphics as well as dedicated algorithms for music Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). Attribution: owner/author(s). Web Audio Conference WAC-2022, July 6–8, 2022, Cannes, France. © 2022 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).