Network Music

[megatechbodyco]

I have it running. Just waiting for someone to host a server

[beem]

netpd provides a server so nobody else has to (although the server setup can be downloaded from github if you do want to have a private server)!

if no-one else is logged on you can still play around with the instruments and whoever joins will then download those instruments when they ‘unpatch’

so, to give you the netpd basics…
main.pd launches netpd with a chat window
unpatch opens up the instrument panel.
the instruments:
‘master’ - start/stop and tempo
‘mx’ - the mixer (add effects ‘e-lib’, ‘rfxlib’, ‘dynlib’) (click aux for aux channels)
each synth (‘sine’, ‘lilacid’, etc) has an unstep for sequencing or is triggered by ‘qseq3’
live audio can be streamed with ‘evil’

this is all the ‘readymade’ stuff but of course as it is pd the idea is also that you could build your own instruments and so on. they would just have to be given the netpd wrapper in order to become shareable.

[jasonw22]

Innovations and Experimentations in Distanced Choral Singing

Because the software being used for remote choirs is LOW-latency, not NO-latency, perfect rhythmic unity is nearly impossible. Similarly, the unified choral sound typically asked for in traditional rep is also difficult to achieve. These two factors inspired C4 to curate, solicit, and create repertoire that embraces timbre, improvisation, and asynchronous performing, sometimes juxtaposing such sections with moments of metric unity in rhythmically simple and homophonic textures that don’t sound out of place with a little lag.

As I’ve written about previously, such aleatoric writing where individual performers have some creative control over their parts is not new to the music world, but it is uncommon in much of the choral world. Ensembles interested in shifting to a remote choir format, however, seem to show a surge of interest in pieces that allow for dense textures outside of the stereotypical four-part polyphony.

I think it’s fascinating that the technical constraints of network music are inspiring new forms of composition.

On another topic: did anybody get a chance to check out the Network Music Festival last weekend? I’m frustrated because my attention was elsewhere and so I missed it…

https://networkmusicfestival.org/

[carltesta]

I’ve been learning a lot about JackTrip and other audio streaming tools. I’ve been very impressed with the cost effectiveness and ease of using a cloud server for setting up JackTrip network music sessions. I’ve written up some instructions on how to do this in the gist below. I figure I’d share here in case folks are interested in how to do it.

https://gist.github.com/carltesta/2fe997abb681d0166038955eba7ac71c

[carltesta]

I haven’t seen SonoBus mentioned here yet but I’ve been experimenting with it. It’s very promising and offers a more user friendly experience than JackTrip but is in some ways takes more fiddling to get low-latency. I’ll likely write up a tutorial to get a SonoBus server working on Linux as well.

SonoBus

[jasonw22]

@carltesta can put some numbers to “low latency”? Have you experimented with the effect of distance on latency?

One of the things I like about NINJAM is the ability to sync latency to a musical interval, but doing so suggests a certain cyclical style of composition. If I didn’t have ninjam’s ability to sync to the one, I might have to consider other adaptations to the effect of latency on the music (but I’m a bit hard pressed to imagine what that might look like).

Would love to hear your thoughts about the musical implications of network music techniques.

[carltesta]

Last night I was testing sending audio back and forth from my home computer in southern CT to a dedicated server running in NYC, so a rough distance of about 80 miles and I was able to obtain less than 30ms roundtrip latency using SonoBus which is equivalent to what I was experiencing with JackTrip (JackTrip might be slightly faster).

Most of the music I do doesn’t rely on tight synchrony persay, though there is something to be said for the ability to quickly react to musicians in an improvised context even if a rhythmic unity isn’t required.

I’ve never used NIMJAM, but syncing the latency to a musical interval sounds very useful.

I’ve really only recently started to learn about network music techniques but I think that we are perhaps overly focused on achieving low latency in an attempt to do what we used to do musically (just transferred online) while ignoring the novel musical possibilities and questions that network music brings up. I’m particularly interested in the collage possibilities of networked music and large numbers of people making sound together. I’m also interested in distributed electronic instruments that can be controlled by a large number of people at once. @infinitedigits 's new norns.online is really starting to push this idea. If we can enable audio streaming to a website that is as close to realtime as JackTrip or SonoBus, then people could visit a website with instrument controls and hear the changes in realtime, they could also hear other people controlling the instrument as well at close to realtime. We seem very close to achieving this.

[jasonw22]

I highly recommend downloading JamTaba and giving ninjam a try. It’s kind of “easy mode” for all the things you’re describing. Since you have so much experience with JackTrip and SonoBus, I’d love to hear your thoughts about whether low latency in the 30ms range, or much larger latency synced to the bar, provide more musical results.

I often collaborate with people thousands of miles away, which is another reason I’m not really thinking too hard about low latency.