We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jon Robertson a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Jon, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Innovation comes in all shapes, sizes and across all industries, so we’d love to hear about something you’ve done that you feel was particularly innovative.
In 2020 I began collaborating with an activist opera company, White Snake Projects. We didn’t want to shut down during the pandemic, so I got to work on finding a solution. After months of research, I developed a method for syncing and transmitting a mix of singers performing from any location, i.e. their homes. We were able to mount a fully-staged virtual opera using this method that I created. This turned into a software company called Tutti Remote. From our scrappy beginnings with me sweating behind the scenes trying to pull everything together all by myself, to the point now where we have a beautifully simple audio tool that can sync, record, and stream performers from anywhere in the world. Tutti Remote is in public beta right now. We are ironing out some kinks before we move on to the next stages of development.
Jon, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
My training in music composition began in the music department at The University of Arizona, where I was accepted into the competitive undergraduate Music Composition program led by Dan Asia. During my last year at U of A, I collaborated with M.F.A. choreographers and fell in love with intensive collaboration, truly intertwining each other’s art. I went on to earn an M.M. in Music Composition from the University of Missouri – Kansas City, studying with a diverse faculty including Chen Yi and Zhou Long. During this time, I delved deep into electroacoustic and acousmatic music. Along with a group of fellow graduate students, I helped create the Kansas City Electronic Music Alliance, an experimental music collective that is still active today. After earning my M.M. in Music Composition, a colleague and I started a small performance group called Sound Theatre. We performed avant-garde pieces of theater on small stages and at fringe festivals, using talking TVs, talking mannequins, thoughts rendered audible, dancers triggering audio, and actors “plugging” themselves into an audio cart. Everything was all about experimentation with sound. One particular Sound Theatre piece featured a recording of an actor yelling “Je ne comprends pas!”, and I believe more than a few audience members shared that sentiment. At that point in my life, I decided to steer my career towards professional theater. Since then I’ve been designing sound and composing music for theater productions, which has kept me very busy. Now, I am focussing on software with my new audio tool Tutti Remote. Tutti is the easiest way to record, layer, sync, perform, stream audio all in full-resolution with multiple performers anywhere in the world.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
For 15 years I put everything I was into being an avant-garde composer. My first love will always be new, experimental, strange, genre-bending music. I was making some radical sound art, hardly could you call it music in the traditional sense. After years of trying, I came to a realization that this wasn’t a sustainable practice for me. There simply is no market for it. I knew I had to pivot. In thinking about an industry that I could make a living in and still be passionate about. I realized that all of my sound art had some kind of theatrical twist to it. So I moved into the theater world, and it’s been great ever since (after about 5-6 years of hustling non-stop of course).
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?
The most rewarding aspect of being an artist for me is being able to rid myself of ideas. My brain is constantly spinning, and the only way to manage it is to harness an idea and ride it until fruition. Otherwise, the idea is still there bobbing around in my head and it’s hard to squash it. Then of course, once it’s out there it’s not really rewarding any longer, it is its own thing with its own life. It’s the taming of the beast, the harnessing of the energy, and the completion – putting the idea to bed – that is the most rewarding for me.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.jonrobertsonsound.com
- Instagram: TuttiRemote
- Facebook: TuttiRemote
- Youtube: TuttiRemote
- Other: TikTok: TuttiRemote Tutti Remote Webpage: https://tutti.show