10.28 - Distributed Immersive Performance Videos Online

Years ago, at the Integrated Media Systems Center at the University of Southern California, we embarked on a series of Distributed Immersive Performance experiments to determine the effect of network latency on ensemble performance. Building on earlier experiments, these were the first of their kind to use rhythmic and fast classical chamber music to test the limits of collaborative performance over the Internet.  The results and findings were reported in numerous publications including ACM TOMM and proceedings of ACM MM, AES, NASM, and CENIC.

Over the years, these videos have been shown at numerous conferences and invited lectures. In response to requests for these videos, they have been shared online: documentation of the scientific experiments that led to the discovery that tolerance to network latency can be extended by enforcing a common clock, in this case, by delaying players' feedback from their own instruments to lineup with the signal arriving from their partner.


Setup A: Delays: vimeo.com/187646226
This video shows the increasing difficulty in synchronizing over increasing delays.


Setup A: Perspectives: vimeo.com/187647682
This video shows the difference in experience of delay from different perspectives.


Setup A: Commentaries: vimeo.com/189241592
This video shows the players commenting on the experience of playing with delay.


Setup B: vimeo.com/189272144
This video shows the solution we came up with---delaying each players' feedback from their own instrument.



Credits

Elaine Chew, experiment design and analysis
Alexandre R. J. François, software architecture
Christos Kyriakakis, spatial audio
Christos Papadopoulos, audio streaming
Alexander A. Sawchuk, project coordinator
Vely Stoyanova and Ilya Tosheff, performances
Roger Zimmerman, databases

Anja Volk, systematic musicological analysis

Carley Tanoue, performance data analysis
Dwipal Desai, databases
Moses Pawar, databases
Rishi Sinha, audio streaming
Will Meyer, filming and video editing

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant no. 0321377 at the Integrated Media Systems Center, an NSF Engineering Research Center at the Viterbi School of Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, USA. nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0321377

09.09 - Isaac Schankler Assistant Professor @ Cal Poly Pomona

Isaac Schankler --> isaacschankler.com

Isaac Schankler, affiliated artist / postdoctoral research affiliate at the Music Computation and Cognition Lab at the University of Southern California (USC), and visiting scholar at the Music Performance and Expression Lab at QMUL's Centre for Digital Music (C4DM) has accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Music Industry Studies at Cal Poly Pomona in California, USA.

Congratulations, Isaac!  A composer, accordionist, and electronic musician, Isaac's electronic-acoustic composition Pheremone has received glowing reviews on Fanfare Magazine, his generative game music techniques have been reviewed on Billboard and presented at GameSoundCon, and he is founder and artistic director of People Inside Electronics in Los Angeles.  He is also an erudite writer of opinion pieces for NewMusicBox and was winner of 2013 was a winner of the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for excellence in music journalism.

Photos of Cal Poly Pomona by Isaac Schankler:

08.01 - Ching-Hua Chuan promoted to Associate Professor @ UNF

Ching-Hua Chuan, an alumnus of the Music Computation and Cognition Laboratory at the University of Southern California, has received tenure and been promoted to Associate Professor in the School of Computing at the University of North Florida. As in most institutions in the United States, academics on tenure track in computer science (and most engineering fields) are hired as assistant professors without tenure (in a probationary period), and are evaluated after five years for promotion to associate professor with tenure in the sixth year in a highly competitive process.  Congratulations, Ching-Hua!

Ching-Hua is received her PhD from the Department of Computer Science at USC, where she received a Digital Dissertation Award and was elected to Phi Kappa Phi honor society. Her research interests center on artificial intelligence and machine learning, and her projects range from style-specific music harmonization to sign language recognition. She is recipient of a Grace Hopper Celebration Best New Investigator Paper Award, and her work has been featured on Foxnews, MSNBC, the Telegraph, the Miami Herald, and the IEEE Intelligent Systems Magazine. A innovative educator, she is also recipient of UNF's Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award and has developed new courses on music informatics and on gaming and mobile app development.

Read more about Ching-Hua's work at www.unf.edu/~c.chuan.