Written by Marco Amerotti

On Wednesday 22nd of October 2025 we had the final performance of a six-month artist residency with Rosie and Jamie Rutherford, held at the Djanogly Recital Hall at the School of Music (University of Nottingham). Over multiple workshops, they have been interacting with the performance system LOERIC and writing new music for it, steering its development and creating the performance which featured three pieces, each exploring a different way of playing with LOERIC.

Setting up

Adrian Hazzard and I collected various pieces of equipment from the Mixed Reality Lab and took them over to the venue for an early start! As we’ve previously set up it was fairly straightforward, however what ended up taking most time was fixing the parts LOERIC was supposed to play.

The setup consisted of:

A LOERIC laptop (a MacBook pro)

a TASCAM US 4X4 audio interface

DI from Jamie’s guitar and Rosie’s clarinet to the interface

a MIDI keyboard to quickly try out sounds

a Novation Control XL to perform

First Piece: “Artificialism”

This is a minimalist piece exploring how LOERIC could arbitrarily move to different sections in the arrangement and how that would affect its human partners trying to catch up with it or steering it to change at specific times. LOERIC played different sections a random number of times (input by me before the performance), with the exception of some with a fixed number of repetitions and some that waited for Jamie to trigger the next section through a footswitch. Whilst the piece had worked until the day before, we started experiencing bus that took quite a bit of time to fix (until 20 minutes before the actual performance!).

When we first tried this piece, LOERIC had no support for this mode of interaction, hence it prompted me to build a “scheduling” system that allows it to play different tunes in sequence, each with its own configuration. Thankfully, the performance worked smoothly, as we had practiced.

Second Piece: “Klezempo”

The next piece was Klezempo, exploring the control of tempo, articulation and dynamics. Jamie and Rosie chose Klezmer music as this type of music features very wide changes in tempo.

Using an expression pedal, when the pedal was all the way down, the system would play very slow and legato, and all the way up translated to staccato and very fast. This coupling was very effective enabling Jamie and Rosie to experiment with extreme tempo and dynamic variations.

Third Piece: “Side Winds”

The last piece was new to Jamie and Rosie, and it explored how LOERIC could play unconventional time signatures (7/8 in this case) and introduce errors and ornamentation. We originally had tried this piece through the “conventional” ways of interacting with LOERIC (e.g. audio input and expression pedals), but during the rehearsal we decided LOERIC should be controlled through the MIDI mixer, with different sliders connected to different parameters. For me, this turned out to be the most fun interaction, as I was not only “manning” LOERIC, but playing it collaboratively with Jamie and Rosie.

After each piece we had a short discussion about what was happening and then played the piece again so that the audience could listen actively and better grasp how the interaction was working out.  Overall, it was a great experience, with the system running nicely, a good sound setup, a beautiful venue and an interesting performance. Stepping into a theatre steps up the game somewhat. It was the first time LOERIC had been introduced to a performance context and it felt more professional, with a good sound setup, extensive planning, music composed specifically for the event and professional musicians.

This experience is the first milestone in the Traditionable Machines project and in my newly started PhD experience, and it will be vital to what we create next.

Special thanks to Rosie and Jamie, for being great performance partners and making this happen, and all the patience during our long sessions. Thanks also to Steve for enabling this whole experience and all the planning and support that came with that; to Adrian for all the support throughout the experience and for fixing all the logistics of the event, together with Hazel and Lynn; Glenn and Michael for the excellent sound setup and mixing, and Pat for filming during the day.