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1. Impressions of your online distribution

The premiere of the streamed piece Zou was on March 2020 at our venue-cum-studio Soto. Considering the situation of COVID-19, we held the concert with the audience very limited. Since we closed the venue in April, we have thought about what we can do now and came up with an idea of representing Zou on live streaming. Consequently, the live streaming allowed a lot of audiences to watch the performance which was much more than the venue’s capacity including whose in Eastern Japan and overseas who can’t come to Kyoto usually. Through this project, we could find a further possibility of our venue.

2. What did you struggle with and devise in preparing for online distribution?

The most difficulty of live streaming was the adjusting of sound. When it comes to living concert, it is not so difficult to adjust the sound because we can listen to the same sound as the audience on the same floor. On the other hand, live streaming can only stream the sound only collected by microphone. During the performance, we try to monitor the sound using headphone, but the band sound was too loud to focus on the sound from headphone. So we did test streaming of rehearsal and checking the sound after and adjusting it. It was really hard for us to make the sound similar to what we feel at the floor. We increased the percentage of air-microphone, but there is still room for improvement.

We would like to try to do better next time.

3. Utilization and Development of Online Live Streaming for Forthcoming Activities

We intend to continue the live streaming program, such as other an hour-long musical piece Organ (premiere in 2017, presented at TPAM in 2019) and also some programs like we have organized at our venue including DJ event.

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Kukangendai plays Zou

• Date:  9 May 2020
• Contents: Kukangendai plays an hour-long musical piece Zou.
• Promotion tool: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Website
• Distribution tool: YouTube
• Number of the audience: 128