Internet rooms from internet audio

Abstract

Music rehearsal and concert performance at a distance over long-haul optical fiber is a reality because of expanding network capacity to support low-latency, uncompressed audio streaming. Multichannel sound exchanged across the globe in real time creates “rooms” for synchronous performance. Nearby connections work well and musicians feel like they are playing together in the same room. Larger, continental-size, distances remain a challenge because of transmission delay and seemingly subtle but perceptually important cues which are in conflict with qualities expected of natural rooms. Establishing plausible, room-like reverberation between the endpoints helps mitigate these difficulties and expand the distance across which remotely located musicians perform together comfortably. The paper presents a working implementation for distributed reverberation and qualitative evaluations of reverberated versus non-reverberated conditions over the same long-haul connection.

I am Streaming in a Room

“…In 2013, a LAIR system was implemented consisting of three simultaneous freeverb "rooms" running on Stanford's campus-wide network. Participants at three endpoints were interconnected through LAIR portals (Chafe and Granzow, 2013). In 2016, the system was improved for wide area networking and demonstrated with four endpoints in a nationwide WAIR mesh.…”