START HERE: Types of Remote Music Making

This post is intended as an overview about the types of techniques that exist for remote music-making.
This post is a work in progress.
This post is a wiki post, which means anyone can edit it. Please help improve it!

Contents

  • Pre-recorded Music
    • Virtual Choirs
  • Live (aka “synchronous” or “realtime”) Music
    • Working Around Latency
      • “Zoom Rehearsal”
      • Near Real-Time Collaboration in BandLab
      • Embracing Latency
        • Aleatoric Music
      • Minimizing Latency
        • Low-Latency Music Apps
  • Socially Distant In-Person Music
    • Socially Distant In-Person Music

Pre-recorded Music

In general, pre-recorded (as in not live) will result in higher quality performances but requires more time to create. The higher quality is for several reasons:

  • Performers can do as many “takes” as they like to get the performance they want to show off
  • the performances can be edited to line up multiple separate performances, to do sound processing (equalization, compression, etc), to edit pitches and rhythms, and to balance and mix the separate recordings
  • Also, unlike live digital performances, the raw sound recorded doesn’t need to be streamed across the internet in real-time, allowing for higher quality sound to be recorded in the first place

Virtual Choirs

One type of pre-recorded performance: A Virtual Choir is usually a video that feature many singers who have each recorded their part separately. The separate performances are edited together resulting in a final product that simulates the “real thing.” Often these are lined up in a grid in the video.

Live (aka “synchronous” or “realtime”) Music

The primary barrier to making music live over the internet with other people is the idea of latency. Latency refers to the delay between when one person makes a sound or movement and when the audio or video of it reaches the other person or people. It’s not possible to entirely eliminate latency. Some technologies can minimize it while other approaches try to work around latency or to embrace it.

Working Around Latency

“Zoom Rehearsal”

Conferencing apps like Zoom, Skype, Teams, or Google Meet are great ways to meet together with a performing group, allowing everyone to see each other through webcams and hear each other. These platforms are designed to be accessible by as many users as possible and to optimize for video and sound quality at the expense of latency. These conferencing apps are not suitable for most live music applications because the latency is too high.

However, many groups are still using conferencing tools and working around the latency. Generally this involves having only one person broadcasting their sound to the meeting at a time, while everyone else performs along on mute.

Near Real-Time Collaboration in BandLab

Embracing Latency

This approach involves musical forms or music-making processes that can accommodate latency.

Aleatoric Music

Minimizing Latency

Low-Latency Music Apps

These apps specialize in trying to minimize latency between the participants in a session. The apps use a variety of technical approaches to try to solve this problem. In all cases remember that you can never eliminate latency altogether and that the geographic distance between the participants has a minimum possible latency due to the time it takes for information to travel over the internet (ie the speed of light).

  • JamKazam
  • Jamulus
  • Soundjack
  • Jacktrip

Socially Distant In-Person Music

Outdoor Singing

@nathanielgranor funny that you use the term “Embracing Latency”. That is the title of the piece I composed for a high school strings group to perform live over video telephony. Great minds… haha.

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Amazing! I’m not sure where I absorbed the term over the past few months. I might have gotten it from the C4 folks?

That’s a fantastic video. How would you feel about posting it as its own Topic in the How-To category, perhaps with a title like “Embracing Latency - About Aleatoric Music”?

@dylantran, I’m so glad you posted this! I would love to see this in the How-To category. If you’d like assistance with that from the mod end, let me know!

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@KatieOConnor Should I post it as it’s own thing “I wrote this piece and here’s how it works”.
Or should I start a thread of low latency, aleatoric repertoire for folks to add on to?

@dylantran I think the first would be great!

(The second thread would be cool, too, but I think the first might be more useful in the short term…get people curious, ya know?)