Hi all, just noticed your comments, sorry for the delay, we are still working here on the platform.
The one you see is simply a Beta experimental platform and we would like real musicians / singers to try it and give feedbacks, there is a contact form please use it if you would help.
Latency is a big problem in many countries/cities, we are 100% conscious that this will not work for all people unfortunately.
The aim is to use the best of web technologies for realtime communication (webRTC) and enable new ways to collaborate in music, so we thought to create a simple "rehearsal room" where people can plug themselves, but it's not really a definitive version.
We all are mostly musicians making things for musicians so feel free to contact us by the contact form.
We are listening all of you and we will try to adapt all your needs and suggestions to the platform!
That's the kind of stuff I might be interested in, but the lack of any video (or even screenshot) showing me what the thing is like before I have to sign up is a bit off-putting imo.
Too bad they don't explain how it works. True real time jamming is impossible, but you can jam in pseudo real time by delaying everyone's audio by an entire measure. It's been done before by Justin Frankel: http://www.cockos.com/ninjam/. Actually I've always had dreams of recreating it as a web app... would be cool if that's what they did here.
One way to make a site like this work would be if instead of hitting notes / recording in real time, you would interact with a tracker. Just like playing around with an 808, people would be able to click to set drum hits or notes. It would get played next time the track loops around (after a few seconds), by which time hopefully everyone would be synchronized.
Or the realtime could just be an illusion, like in plink http://labs.dinahmoe.com/plink/ (pretty fun little tool, even though you are quite limited because of the forced pentatonic scale and tempo)
Yeah, I don't see how it could be done.. unless all the players got optic fiber or something, and even so I'm not sure.
I would be very interested in a collaborative sequencer though. Let's say drummer record a first loop, then everyone can hear it, guitarist plays a chord progression over it and record it, then the singer can add his part. The drummer then decides to add a special part at some place to go together with the singer and he edits his sequence so it's not 100% loop anymore, etc etc...
Fiber has great throughput, but doesn't guarantee lower latency. Distance, number of hops, and contention (for shared infrastructure transport) are more relevant when it comes to latency, and these are much, much more difficult to overcome than throughput challenges.
There are other solutions, however. Just have a look at any FPS (first person shooter) game. These types of games are extremely latency sensitive, because a win/loss in any direct engagement comes down to milliseconds. There are entire areas of study dedicated to working around latency in games. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the techniques could be applied to this type of real-time collaboration.
Yes, but music is even harder. I doubt most FPS shooters would suffer much at 60ms latency, but that's an 1/8 note at 120bpm. I would guess that for a jam session to feel OK, you'd want to be <15ms.
Musical tracking has to take special measures to keep the latency low enough even when its all local; see the need for ASIO, jackd, etc.
<pedantic> 120 bpm is 120 quarter note per minute, so a 8th note is 500ms, a 16th note is 250ms, a 32th 125ms. </pedantic>
that said having played with a midi controller on badly configured linux machines i agree 15ms would start to be an issue.
Audio syncing over Skype can be done. We (http://SpeakerBlast.com) accomplished this with recorded media. We haven't attempted live audio yet, but think it can be done by caching/delaying the audio. It wouldn't be truly live, but the user wouldnt know. Over course if you lose Internet then the party is over either way.
I think a degree of latency can be conquered, but it is going to be difficult. Musicians need to maintain synchronized internal clocks. This is because you can't really be in sync if you are reacting to sound.
For example it is going to take about 80 milliseconds for sound to cross an orchestral stage (Wolfram: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=speed+of+sound+to+trave...). That is roughly east coast to west coast round trip latency: (http://serverfault.com/questions/137348/how-much-network-lat...). Then you add reaction time to that. In this situation musicians already have to use visual cues combined with anticipation to synchronize. There is also usually a conductor (making things better or worse :-) ).
So with strict time (no rubato), strong internal clocks of each musician and maybe some compensation I think this is possible - latency just makes it harder because it is harder to correct your internal clock and it has to be strong.
But you also have other issues such as sound balance as well as video and sound quality. I suggest maybe reaching out to the distance learning department at CIM. They have a distance learning program and were doing music over teleconferencing ~ ten years ago over Internet2 - someone there can probably point to some resources on tackling these issues.
The other thing is will people want to use this. My guess is not usually, but for friends at a distance, or lessons with teachers (advanced teachers, or places without music teachers) it could be popular.
My hypothesis is the latency will make it difficult for musicians, especially without significant practice over this medium. So initial impressions will be bad. If that is the case it will be important to set accurate expectations.
does any musician believe this could even be possible? considering how hard it seems to be to establish consistently reliable audio connections for simple conversations, i have a hard time imagining how you could make music, which requires incredibly low latency.
The one you see is simply a Beta experimental platform and we would like real musicians / singers to try it and give feedbacks, there is a contact form please use it if you would help.
Latency is a big problem in many countries/cities, we are 100% conscious that this will not work for all people unfortunately.
The aim is to use the best of web technologies for realtime communication (webRTC) and enable new ways to collaborate in music, so we thought to create a simple "rehearsal room" where people can plug themselves, but it's not really a definitive version.
We all are mostly musicians making things for musicians so feel free to contact us by the contact form.
We are listening all of you and we will try to adapt all your needs and suggestions to the platform!
Thank you a lot.