You heard the High Fidelity demo of multiple jazz musicians across California seperately jamming in the same virtual space, now get your headphones and hear this demo (above), showing how three separate jazz musicians could play live in High Fidelity in sync. What's seriously cool (especially in the COVID age) is how the sound changes as the avatar moves through the space, just as it would if this were a concert in real life -- but here, unlike in real life, you're able to "walk up" close to the individual musicians, to focus on a drum solo and so on. (If you did that in real jazz club, the bouncer would quickly eject your ass.)
How does it work? In this simulation created by Lucio Pascarelli, the three musicians stream their audio into a mixer, which is then streamed out into three separate devices:
Those devices are, in turn, connected to a High Fidelity server, enabling them to play in the same virtual space. While the musicians in this demo are pre-recorded, the basic fundamentals would work for a live show.
We should be seeing more experiments like this soon; I chatted with High Fidelity's Philip Rosedale about live music in his virtual world last year, and it's a challenge he and his team were working on:
"There is software from Stanford called Jack Trip that replaces the audio devices and sends audio directly between two computers with ultra low latency," Philip told me then. "And that will enable a group to play together while also playing into High Fidelity. Big pain to setup but possible. We're testing it. And the performers need to be within 500 miles of each other in real life, because otherwise the speed of light makes it impossible." (Making this yet another cool project buzzkilled by Einstein.)
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