Aesthetic and technical strategies for networked music performance

Abstract

Networked music is no longer a future genre: the global quarantine event of 2020 launched the concept of performing together over the Internet into the mainstream. While the demand for performing at a distance may be a new imperative, musicians find themselves faced with technological and performative processes that do not appear to be suitable for performing music together online, due particularly to network latency which disrupts the ability for musicians to synchronize. The research presented in this paper investigates and challenges the reasons why networked music is not readily embraced by musicians and describes how that might change, by way of interviews with practitioners and an in-depth review of the technical constraints. Limitations that might cause frustration are in fact shown to have creative strategies that give rise to aesthetic approaches, distinct to the platform. By exploiting the constraints, in tandem with developing technology designed specifically for remote performance, aesthetic implications arise that not only accommodate the inconveniences of latency and acoustic feedback but can help us adapt and transform how we engage in real-time online, towards a future where we can imagine performing together over even more dramatic distances such as high-latency, low-bandwidth locations outside of urban areas—or even over galactic distances.

Benchmarking Networked Music Performance Tools With the NMP-Bench Model and Architecture

“…NMP-Bench model is intended to evaluate if the performer is satisfied, while there is limited or no attention to the experience of a potential listener. This is generally in line with the current application of NMP tools, that is still mostly for recreational initiatives of group bands, but it cannot be neglected in a long-term perspective, e.g., it has been also strongly pushed by the recent COVID-19 quarantine [37].…”

Improvising Inside a House of Cards: New performance and music-making through a collective networked instrument

“…Because we had not played together before and latency was problematic for coordinated actions, both jams started with a large degree of horizontal contribution to the musical interplay; in other words, we played 'after one another' in a kind of callresponse manner, inviting each other into the musical conversation. This is a different approach from the suggestions outlined by Wilson (2020) in which she references composed music when presenting strategies to enable vertical harmony despite latency in NMP. The approach in our internet jams is also very different from how we (Magnify the Sound) perform networked music together from separate locations in Trondheim.…”

Technology-Mediated Hindustani Dhrupad Music Education: An Ethnographic Contribution to the 4E Cognition Perspective

“…As technological advancements in networked music performance have seen a significant acceleration, extensive work has been published on technical, perceptual, and aesthetic impediments and challenges restricting the overall performance experience [51,52], also including folk music [53]. The surge in distance learning applications and dedicated e-learning platforms, especially prompted by the 2019 pandemic, has led to a significant body of scholarly literature on distance music education and related pedagogy strategies [12,[54][55][56][57].…”