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
