June 2 & 3, 2003: IMSC was hosting its bi-annual Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) meeting and its annual NSF Site Visit. We demonstrated our Distributed Immersive Performance system for the first time. The photo below shows Dennis Thurmond (Accordion) from USC's Thornton School of Music and Elaine Chew (Piano, remotely on screen) performing together "Le Grand Tango" by Astor Piazolla.

 I. Performances

• September 24, 1998. Shinji Kanki: "Mélange à trois" (Blue - Version III) INTERNET CONCERT. Audio-only three-way collaboration: For cyber string trio on the Internet by means of live-media streaming technology. The violinist is in Warsaw, the viola player in Helsinki and the cellist in Oslo. The geographic distances: Helsinki to Warsaw 950 km, Warsaw to Oslo 1050 km and Oslo to Helsinki 800 km. Document contains details of technology for stabilizing network latency. Performing with latency appears to be part of the artistic effect.

• Masataka Goto: "A Distributed Cooperative System to Play MIDI Instruments" Remote Music Control Protocol (RMCP), which is an extension of MIDI protocol; it supports information sharing by broadcast and time scheduling using time stamps, for example. This system was implemented on workstations connected to Ethernet. In our experience, several users were actually able to play an ensemble. " Repetitive tonal and rythmic patterns (as in 12-bar blues) are used to help synchronize the ensemble (see here). Evaluations of latencies and the effect of latency are not available. Goto is a leading expert in audio beat-detection and synchronization, so his work is well worth noting.

• McGill Advanced Learnware Network (go to Reports). Their original goal was to create a "shared reality" environment for music broadcast, collaborative music performance and distance music education. Their focus through the various documented milestones is on distance music education -- see here. They are at milestone 7 -- their latest system incorporates realtime gesture (pointing) recognition and context-sensitive video zoom. Milestone 3&4 focusses on choice of video and network interface cards -- the good news is we now have better equipment available...

• Stanford CCRMA's SOUNDWIRE group. There are MPEG3 files of their June 13, 2002, jam session with the McGill group. The best of the three samples is the first, a jazz piece apparently titled "My Romance" -- the performers appear to be having some difficulties keeping time. The other two are a bit messy, the last even sounds random. Schuett's 2002 thesis (found by Chris) comes from this group -- he measures latencies in coordinating the clapping of a pair of simple rhythms.

• GDS (Global Delayed Session) Music --- new improvisational music with network latency Yoichi Nagashima. Why worry about latency? Make it a feature!

• And of course, we are all familiar with the Internet2 event.

• This page has some nice references to distributed music environments dating back to 1999.

Get the PDF reader from Adobe.

• Loss Concealment for Multi-Channel Streaming Audio.
  R. Sinha, C. Papadopoulos and C. Kyriakakis. Presented at the workshop on Network and Operating Systems Support for Digital Audio and Video (NOSSDAV 2003), Monterey, California, June 1-3, 2003.
  Abstract PDF (571 KB)
  

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• Retransmission-Based Error Control in a Many-to-Many Client-Server Environment.
  Roger Zimmermann, Kun Fu, Nitin Nahata, and Cyrus Shahabi. Presentated at the SPIE Conference on Multimedia Computing and Networking 2003 (MMCN 2003), Santa Clara, California, January 29-31, 2003.
  Abstract Postscript (272 KB) PDF (1,380 KB)

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Last updated: Wednesday February 4, 2004.
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