telematic performance and entering the matrix

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

photo by al kay

Dave Douglas invited me back to the 2009 Banff International Workshop in Jazz and Creative Music where I led a number of the “telejazz” ensembles.  These ensembles were very unique – we played live with remote musicians all over the world in real time.  Envision this: half the musicians interacting live to another team of musicians simultaneously across seriously fast network lines, we used the CAnet4 network, that’s uncompressed audio traveling about 70% the speed of light yielding incredibly low latency.  In fact, the latency was so minimal that at a medium tempo, the lag was barely noticeable, it even felt as if it were part of the swing of things:

I know what you’re thinking, you’ve heard of this sorta thing before – it’s true, remote tele-conferencing has been around for awhile, but this is different than protocols like ISDN and SourceConnect, it’s way more simple, not to mention free & open source.  It really was unlike any other long distance studio connection I’ve worked with before. Professor Chris Chafe from Stanford University is paving the way for this new new technology, and if you want to try it out with your friends, you can!  Give it a shot -  it’s called JackTrip and can be easily found on Google Code.  A huge shot out to the team at CCRMA and the SoundWire group for getting it as stable as it is today!

The production for these “telejazz” events was unbelievable – we used over twenty audio engineers for each rehearsal and performance, and upwards of 10 musicians at each location.  Just to make things more complicated, we made these virtual performances open to the public.  It was quite the space-age/pioneering feat.

You will be hearing of this kind of thing happening more and more – just think of its application in rehearsing:  If your band is spread out across several cities, a telematic rehearsal could be the ticket to bring everyone together.  You don’t have to be a huge tech nerd to make this work either – it’s really easy to navigate.

The most difficult obstacle was the lack of visual eye contact with the remote musicians.  Quite often form changes, ends of solos and vamps are easily cued with a head nod or a look straight in the eye but with only an aural reference, learning how to play with  musicians in a completely different city than you took some getting used to!  It’s kind of like playing with someone in a different isolation booth in a studio, but you can’t see them at all.

We tried to compensate a little and hooked up video cams on each side via Skype.  But the video lag on skype was far greater than the audio, so we couldn’t functionally use the video reference for any inter-musician communication.

Below is a an excerpt of a podcast of the telejazz series (be sure to check out other free banff centre music & sound podcasts on iTunes U.  The music playing in the background is from the telejazz performance – it’s a tune of mine called “Opalesque” – the bass player and the tenor saxophonist were in a different city for this particular tune.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

For a great NPR Jazz post written by Dave Douglas on Jazz and Broadband technology, Click Here!