INTEGRA OUTREACH REPORT Outreach Event, Birmingham Conservatoire, UK 22-23 November 2010 Balázs Kovács, Assistant Professor, University of Pécs, Institute for Media and Applied Arts, Pécs, Hungary From 22-23 November 2010, Integra hosted a number of electrocoustic music professionals, many from the education sector, from across middle and east(ern) Europe. It was the first time that this group of 10 people had met. In this report I summarize my opinions on the project. Context: The city of Birmingham provides an ideal context for artistic research in the field of integrated electronic music. Three different schools conduct several study programmes, involving students and professionals in performance, programming and experimenting. In this context, Birmingham Conservatoire provides effective coordination on both local and macro levels. On the project: Integra is a big software-development project, funded 50%-50% by the EU and co-operating partners. The rate of grant vs match funding seems to exclude a lot of small institutes who are in need of development, but cannot obtain local funding or cover the costs of administration. This could be problematic because big institutes often can't operate as effectively or dynamically as smaller organisations. It’s also important to note a general risk in running large-scale projects, which is that the main partner spends all their time coordinating other partners, rather than utilizing the results of research. A way foward could be for the management team to embrace the size of their undertaking and involve an open source community who could help develop the project within certain exisiting frameworks such as PD, vvvv or Processing. This could lead to a new cooperation mechanism. In general, I recommend that more professionals should be employed in the administration, management and communication (PR) of the project. On the software: The main goal of the Integra project is to produce a useful piece of software. I think it is successful: the software could find good responses in wide range of muscial activites. When finished and mostly bug-free, it is primed for success. Some comments:

- porting 1: it needs to be ported to other platforms like Windows, iPhone, iPad - porting 2: it would be useful to realize a two-directional porting of the

patches between Integra Live and MaxMSP/PD/Live. To my knowledge, this is heading in the right direction, because Integra's back-end is PD.

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- competition: to aid the successful dissemination of the software, it could be useful to organize an artistic competition among current users of the software and other artists.

- It would also be useful to start a community behind the project, sharing block libraries and tracks.

In summary, the Integra Live software is aiming to establish its own place in the arena of several, graphically-based composition applications. I have great hopes that it will keep its unique features of ease-of-use, intuituve interface and high-level, customisable, block elements. I’m sure I will find people who will be interested in using it, especially as a way of starting their investigations into live electronic music and as a bridge to more complex applications.   Balázs Kovács Assistant Professor University of Pécs Institute for Media and Applied Arts Damjanich Str. 30 H-7624 Pécs Hungary