eJamming: Skype for musicians

[jst5150]

http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-6154616-7.html

eJamming (http://www.ejamming.com/), which makes software that enables people to practice music together if their instruments are Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_Instrument_Digital_Interface))-enabled, is announcing a service that works for non-MIDI instruments too: drums, guitars, voice, violins, etc. The idea is to let musicians practice together even when they can't get together physically, or to let students and teachers work together remotely.
There are really interesting technical challenges to making this work. Not only do you have to transmit very high quality audio, but you have to do it with extremely low audio latency. The eJamming founders, Alan Glueckman and Gail Kantor, told me their audio processor and peer-to-peer technology solves these issues, and they're going to demo their new product on Wednesday at the Demo '07 conference (http://www.demo.com/conferences/demo07.php).

[ChunkyC]

Interesting, though I can't see how you could possibly solve latency problems unless they can compress and stream multiple full 20~20,000hz audio streams around the world in a fraction of a second.

[III]

I used to work for a company that manufactured player piano kits and they did something kinda similar where a person would play a piano in one part of the world and it would transmit the signal to a piano in another part of the world to make it play, so one person could be playing a live concert in multiple places. But like Charlie was saying, there was enough delay that it wasn't exactly live.

[ChunkyC]

Yeah. If there's the slightest delay, then I'd be hearing Jay digging into his part of the dual guitar solo in Hotel California a smidge after he played, which is what I would be playing to. Then my harmony licks would be similarly delayed as they went back to Jay, and what he would end up hearing me play would be two smidges behind what he was playing. Then he'd slow down to let me "catch up" which I'd hear delayed and slow down to match with as well and around and around we'd go until we sounded like we were playing the 78 rpm version of the song at 33, and always slightly out of sync to boot.

Unless this round trip can be completed in a shorter amount of time than the human ear is capable of detecting, trying to jam over the Internet will always be a sloppy mess.

What would work despite a noticeable delay would be if Jay couldn't hear me, and I just played along with him while our systems recorded it. Then he could hear my part in playback. It would be an interesting way of collaborating in a nearly real-time way, but one person would always be cut off from what the other was playing during the recording phase.

[Writer???]

Amazing. Digital signals, fiber optic lines, "super" new technologies...
and it still can't beat a microphone and speakers, earphones, whatever, used in conjunction with and played over a good old fashioned phone call. :D
.

[ChunkyC]

Ha, no kidding. The good old days of learning tunes with a cheap cassette player.... *sigh*

[benbradley]

The systems I've heard about for doing this "well" generally use some backing track that both ends hear The 'jams" from each end might be turned a bit down in the mix.
Amazing. Digital signals, fiber optic lines, "super" new technologies...
and it still can't beat a microphone and speakers, earphones, whatever, used in conjunction with and played over a good old fashioned phone call. :D
.
"packetized" signals are by definition buffered, so have extra built-in delay vs. analog signals, though both have a speed-of-light delay (and the signals in wire or the light in fiber optics so at a significantly SLOWER speed than light in a vacuum, what's usually meant by "the speed of light.")

Digital TV (DirecTV, DishTV and the new digital broadcast stuff) is buffered by several frames so the compression can be used (much of video signal compression involves sending the differences between successive frames, rather than just each frame compressed on its own - this gives greater compression than compressing each frame by itself, and yes it takes lots of fast computers to do it), so there's a significant (maybe 1/4 to 1/2 second) delay added vs. old-fashioned broadcast TV.

The only viable solution to this is transporter technology to get everyone together so they can play in the same room. That's the old-fashioned way music has been made for decades centuries.

[III]

The only viable solution to this is transporter technology to get everyone together so they can play in the same room. That's the old-fashioned way music has been made for decades centuries.

That's right. If it's good enough for ABBA, it's good enough for Ben.

(sorry, that avatar is still distracting. i miss the self-portrait.)

[RG570]

Hmm, still waiting for that cure for cancer.


High-tech crap and music don't mix, except in the case of the Synthaxe.

bring back the Synthaxe, please.