Exploring New Perspectives in Network Music Performance: The DIAMOUSES Framework

Abstract

This article reports on the recent results of a research and development project on network music performance (NMP), named DIAMOUSES. DIAMOUSES is more than a standalone application for real-time exchange of audiovisual streams through the network, as it forms an open framework that aims to enable a wide range of applications and services for intuitive music expression and collaborative performance among geographically separated musicians. The realization of the DIAMOUSES open framework for NMP addresses several technological issues and contributes to the solution of a number of problems relating to human perception and human-computer interaction. It also contributes to the establishment of social connections between peers who collaborate through networks in which music is dynamically created, negotiated, and exchanged on the fly. This article describes DIAMOUSES in terms of technical orientation and validation, as well as in terms of user experience as revealed through a series of empirical studies. Collectively, these results provide useful insights into a variety of research questions on NMP and into a number of issues pending further attention.

Sociomaterial analysis of Music Notation Lessons: Virtual work and digital materialities

“…Arguably, sociomaterial concerns constitute a core theme in pursuing pathways for such migration. Our case rests on an existing system, called DIAMOUSES [35]. DIAMOUSES offers an appropriate research setting to explore sociomateriality for several reasons.…”

An Overview on Networked Music Performance Technologies

“…Despite these efforts, several of the currently available NMP frameworks opt for the streaming of uncoded audio data (i.e., η = 1, D c = 0), thus sacrificing the codec bandwidth savings to avoid additional contributions to the delay budget (e.g. [58]- [60]).…”

The MusiNet project: Towards unraveling the full potential of Networked Music Performance systems

“…The alternative would be to exchange media streams directly among peers, in a peer-topeer or mesh topology. The benefit of the Media Relay Server is that in this way, clients do not need to send their transmitted streams to multiple recipients (i.e., to all remaining peers) but only to a single destination (i.e., the media relay server), hence saving outbound bandwidth which is commonly low in network infrastructures available to consumers [18].…”