[linux-audio-user] Re: Net jamming

On Thu, 3 Mar 2005 22:15:11 -0500, linux-audio-user-request wrote
> just taking this a bit further - has anyone experimented with
> live-jamming over skype?
..
> (just to make sure it didn't drop out) - but with the headphones on,
> listening to the band up on stage being broadcast back out to me, there
> was at least a half-beat delay (mind you, i couldn't take the headphones
> off, because this delay turned what was an average reggae band
> onstage into a dubbed-out head-freak).
>
> even still, perhaps in an electronic music environment, a delay like
> this would be manageable via quantization or something?

Shayne,

I believe that Net jamming is just over the horizon. For full duplex audio, it
seems, latency is the big issue. Data takes time to move. The dynamics of how
that works seem to vary with Net technology, but there will always be some
latency.

Since you brought up Skype-- Matthias Grob (inventor of Echoplex Digital Pro)
and I recently had a conversation over SkyPe. At one point, we tried some
percussion with household objects.. but I found his Brazilian beats + latency
hard to follow!!

Your suggestion to use this latency as a feature is interesting to me. This is
a major direction I want to go with FreeWheeling- the live looper I'm working
on. Basically, FreeWheeling lets you capture and play with multiple loops in
real-time.

What I want to do with FreeWheeling is to have users able to connect to a
common jam room. As different users capture loops from their improvisations,
the loops become available to other users in real-time. Since the loops are
syncronized to a common downbeat and tempo, Wolfgang in Germany can take
Latifah in Brooklyn's loops and add them to his own improvisation.

There are a lot of possibilities with both live collaboration and storing
loops to form larger pieces of music that persist over the Net. It is a type
of collaborative improvisation I am going for. To make this happen I need to
find some volunteers- people who want to try jamming together through loops. I
have been working on other features in FreeWheeling because I'm not certain
that I have the user base to pull this off yet. But with a few genuinely
interested people, we could make this a reality.

I'm most interested in the power that music has to cross borders and touch
people. In this world seemingly fragmented, I think it is important for us to
hear each other's stories. If I can play music with someone from another
culture, that to me is much more interesting than producing an album or going
after a certain style. I see music as a social process, a healing tool-- and I
think we have an amazing opportunity to use grass-roots technology to create
communities of music.

Thanks, Shayne, for giving me the nudge I needed to write this-- it's been
brewing in me and this thread over net jamming has been my catalyst.

Blessings,
Mercury
Received on Sun Mar 6 08:15:03 2005