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Put your headphones on and click play to hear a group of quarantined jazz musicians improving together in High Fidelity, the 3D spatial audio virtual world. Uploaded by music theorist Rob Ewing, you can hear different groups of improv happening at the same time; there were seven performers in this session, he tells me, located throughout Northern and Southern California.
Despite being relatively close together in the real world (making their latency relatively low), Rob doesn't think it would have been possible for them all to play the same song in sync together. However, he believes collaborative live music performances are still possible in High Fidelity:
"Tight rhythmic synchrony is still pretty hard to pull off," as he puts it. "JackTrip [syncing software] comes closer, but a lot depends on each user’s set up. Still, a lot of cool music can be made that doesn’t rely on tight grooves!"
Here's what he means:
"With these online platforms that introduce significant latency, I tend to think about music that works well with musicians spread far apart, like at opposite ends of a football field or aircraft hanger. So music that is more ambient/textural and less groove-oriented can be a good approach."
I'd love to see more experiments in that direction. Imagine a High Fidelity space where each location is "shaped", so to speak, by the live music being played by a different musician -- for instance, a virtual version of a neighborhood in Paris that hundreds of people can explore at the same time, gathering together to hear any nearby street corner musician or singer that happens to catches their ear.
Hat tip: High Fidelity's Philip Rosedale, who has some thoughts:
Could musicians potentially design new live musical forms that can accommodate latency? Any thoughts from other musicians? https://t.co/NIDAEU9Zq5
— Philip Rosedale (@philiprosedale) January 5, 2021
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