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At 6 pm on 13 January, Swisscom is hosting Switzerland Connected, the first decentralised live music experiment in Switzerland, featuring BLAY (Bligg and Marc Sway), Flavie Léa and a host of up-and-coming artists.
Musicians from all over the country will be connected virtually over the Swisscom network to create a unique live music experience.
On 13 January at 6 pm, BLAY (Bligg and Marc Sway), Flavie Léa and various other up-and-coming Swiss artists from Sing it Your Way will perform together from five separate locations. They will perform the new track Denkmal by BLAY for the first time – together but apart. From their respective bases in Bellinzona, Montreux, Klosters, Zurich, Bern and Volketswil, the musicians’ voices and instruments will come together over the Swisscom network to create a shared live experience.
“The big challenge is bringing everything together at the same time,” explained Bligg at today’s joint press conference. “If the artists in Ticino, for example, are just a beat faster than those in Zurich, you will be able to tell.” After a long hiatus from live performing, the artists are particularly looking forward to the live music experiment. Marc Sway said: “Bligg and I are very much live acts. We are really missing the whole live experience and the audience. The prospect of taking advantage of Swisscom’s technological capabilities to join other musicians and create a unique, live-like moment for everyone is very appealing to us.”
A shared experience despite the distance
Explaining the joint project, Dirk Wierzbitzki, member of the Swisscom Group Executive Board and Head of Residential Customers, said: “We are pushing the limits of Switzerland’s network and hope to leverage the opportunities of the networked world to bring our community a shared and enjoyable music experience.” The live music experiment represents a major challenge for Swisscom’s engineers and experts. For physical reasons, the network, transmission from the individual locations and signal processing have different response times – so everything needs to be perfectly orchestrated to bring the performance together. The experiment can only be considered a success if the viewers notice none of this.
Switzerland Connected aims to ascertain whether and to what extent the digital sphere can create genuine live experiences and shared moments despite physical distance and at the very limits of modern technology. Swisscom is committed to Swiss music: with Energy Air, Energy Star Night, support for up-and-coming talent on the crowdfunding platform wemakeit and, most recently, with the singing talent show Sing it Your Way on blue. “We would love to have more live music events and, above all, a genuine shared experience with other people. With Switzerland Connected, we are exploring what new digital formats will be possible in the longer term and whether we can bring together the best of both worlds in the future,” said Wierzbitzki.