San Francisco Opera

Overview

The San Francisco Opera’s classically trained artists’ in-person music collaboration had been put on pause during the pandemic. With Elk LIVE, they were able to overcome remote collaboration latency obstacles that had plagued coaching and rehearsals to prepare for their first live performance in more than a year.

San Francisco Opera was one of the very first arts organizations to use Elk LIVE to move its performance program safely forward during the pandemic. In doing so, they have become pioneers of groundbreaking music collaboration technology that will expand accessibility for artists and ultimately reshape the future of creative collaboration.

“Elk LIVE presents many opportunities and increased accessibility for music-making on a remote basis now and into the future. Coaching with teachers who might be in another part of the state, workshopping a new piece with singers in different cities, and just making music together for the sake of making music! Elk LIVE opens up incredible flexibility and freedom for music-making, and that flexibility is here to stay. Elk LIVE has the ability to transform how people think of making music together in the future.”

Matthew Shilvock, General Director, San Francisco Opera

At Intersect of Art and Technology Is Magic

Traditional video conferencing technologies cannot keep pace with the real-time interaction musicians require for practice and performance alike. Musical collaboration using these platforms is often impeded by frequent buffering due to spiky internet bandwidth availability and inconsistent connectivity.

During Amazon Web Services (AWS) re:Invent 2021, the San Francisco Opera delivered a real-time opera performance showing how this challenge can be overcome with a combined solution from Elk Audio, an award-winning audio technology developer, and AWS edge compute on 5G. In the demonstration, the Elk LIVE service used AWS Wavelength Zones on Verizon 5G Ultra Wideband to connect artists more than 560 miles apart in real time. The event featured San Francisco Opera soprano and Adler Fellow Anne-Marie MacIntosh in Las Vegas and pianist Andrew King in the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco. During the performance, the artists synchronized their performance as if they were standing only a few feet instead of hundreds of miles apart.