NowNetArts 2018

• Place: Stony Brook, New York
• Date: 2018-04-19 to 2018-04-22
• Programme: https://nownetarts.org/conference/

The following sections are Otto J Wittner's notes from presentations and demos at the conference.

• 100G ot Internet2 and 20G to “commodity” Internet
• 10G fibers to rooms
• 100G within building (!?)
• 10G out from building
• Nicer-net provide backbone in NY state, peers with Internet2
• Public load diagrams: https://status.noc.stonybrook.edu

• Excellent presentation.

• Rebekah Wilson
• Background: STEIM Amsterdam, Chicago, now New Zealand
• Can't play music together on commodity Internet
  • Can play, but not synchronously
• WebRTC applied for music experimentation
• Can't play old kinds of music, but can play new
• Locations are out of sync ⇒ experiences at the different locations will be different
• New instruments based on classical ones (e.g. pianos) may be constructed when interconnecting them via networks
  • E.g. two pianos going in and out of tune
• Composer need to write music which is “allowed” to sound different each time it is played
• The digital tools do not need to be hidden / transparent.
• Adding selected “drop-out-sounds” to the audo stream too make packet drops more audible.
• (Technical problems during demo, but webrtc was to be used.)

• Naithan Bosse (PhD candidate)
• iPad app for processing / management
• A lot of tools applied in composition, e.g. ping and traceroute output mapped to produce chords and sounds
• Stopwatch applied as conductor supplement
• Synch opportunities added frequently in music score
• One anchor musician (master clock)
• Composition performed in 3 site setup, theater, “wet” studio and “dry” studio
  • Audience in all locations, surrounded by speakers
  • Noe video between sites applied, intentionally
  • Immersive experiences created (via surround effects)

• Michael Richison
• A composition installation based on two turntables
  • Infraread sensors detect distance to spining stack of slices of shaped cardboard
  • A percussion machine is controlled by the turntable speed and the sensors
  • Projectors project graphics onto the slices

• Chris Chafe, Trever Henthorn, Sarah Weaver
• Jacktrip origin
  • A sw packages to connect three sights running the Jack sound server sw, hence Jack-triple or Jacktrip
• Measurements showing jitter issues with different network connections
  • Wifi show up as rather messy ⇒ wires still recommended to keep losses low
• What to replace lost packets with?
  • Jacktrip applies zeroes of a copy of last packet (waveform mode)
  • Should there be many small glitches or few larger ones…?
  • Clock drift between peers a problem not at all solved
• …

• Yoon Jeong Heo, Hilary Finchum-Sung
• Korean Music across the Globe
• Traditional Korean instruments and music
• Historical info, north v.s. south …

• Paul Ferguson et al
• Intro to Lola
• Lola a tool to enable real-time recording for studios
  • Instead of todays practice moving audio files between remote musician and studio
• “3rd room” meaning the virtual room created by Lola rigg and the network
  • What are the musical rules to play in such rooms?
• Gareth Dylan Smith (drummer) experienced a feeling of improved audio quality when video resolution was increased during a Lola session.
• Quality of Lola audio stream is good enough for playing together, but not for recording
• Funky demo with drums (local) and sax (remote from Edinburgh)
  • Almost in sync, no doubt two musicians playing together
  • But mix of live audio from drums and PA only audi from sax made experience for audience lesser
• Success with synced recordings one both peers combined with Lola as “cue”-stream for musicians
  • When recordings stop they are pushed and shared in cloud storage

• Maria Minaricova, Paolo Girol, Kristina Lillemets
• Geant expansion eastwards in Europe
• Services: Eduroam, EduGain, Prefsonar, Lola as a service (!)
• Lola as a service includes equipment and support in getting nodes operative
• Lola sessions to GARR (Claudio) and Estonia
• Samples of misc master classes for classical music

• Rebekah Wilson, source-elements.com
• Ref:
  • Gabrielli & Squartini “Wireless network music performence”

• Walk trough of Internet2's number and basics
• Services
  • InCommon (ref eduGain)
  • eduRoam
• Historical walk through of networked performing arts work 2000-2018

• Chris Chafe
• Online 6 weeks course teaching Jacktrip, offered by Standford (?)
  • Kandenze MOC
• Internet acoustics (for network reverbe)
  • Even though audio streamed of internet paths are impaired with added delay, the audio itself is unchanged.
  • Musicians reactions to Internet delay may change the audio
  • Internet applied as FDL (feedback delay loop)
    • (Some delay added locally to avoid all audio streams to have identical delay
  • Resulting reverberation resembles some kind of “Internet room”.
  • Feature is added to Jacktrip in upcoming version
• Repetition of results from delay experiments with clapping
  • Model for human clapper was poor in 2012. Still being imporved
• New experiments based on web page where user attempts to tap in sync with adaptive tapping algorithm
  • user taps along with metronome, sine wave driven metronome, adaptive alg and delayed adaptive alg.
  • “When do you sense your partner is listning?”

• Ian Biscoe
• Historical perspective on presentation of networked performances
• Run through of Ian's projects including
  • Danish royal academy of music in 2017 performance
• New visual project has premier April 25th in Miami

• Zurich University of Arts and Onsite
• Performance
  • Some local bass fed to local speakers to merge remote and local musicians better
  • Tables put up right applied as projection screen for single-person projection
• Telematic rooms open doors to new musical performances
  • Care should be taken to not only “drive our new space shuttle down the highway the usual route”.
• System applied
  • Jacktrip for audio and Ultragrid for video
  • “TPF server” developed to manage it all
    • Software packages required are organized by TPF package
    • Written in Pure Data and Python
    • Available on Github
    • Seems to reinvent STUN and TURN functionality
• Staging the telematic space: Videos in telematic space
  • Telematc space not only a technical space, but also a mental space…
  • Proportions
    • Imitate the life size of people, e.g. table based projection surface
    • Tech-choreography required
  • Apply a T-screen to offer monitor screen for on stage musicians and screen for audience
    • Additional projector and screen ⇒ complexity increase
  • Transparent screen
    • Musicians behind screen may still see projection
    • Impression of remote person being present is imporved
  • Embodyment
    • Monitor towers showing each remote musician, included audio monitors
    • Audience could walk around, between the musicians
  • Moving in space
    • A movable speaker represented remote person
    • Movable live size projection screen, applied for dancers
      • Creates opportunities for explore the “telematic space”
• Transcending place but not time zone
  • Who has “prime time” when collaboration takes place across time zones ?
    • Time of day influences how a concert is experienced by the audience

• Q1: To what extent is remote presentations given in music conferences?
  • Still unusual. Only occasional. A fear for lost informal social interaction.
  • Important topic. Network-musicians do meet “informally” and “deeply” through online collaborations.
    • Upcoming online event illustrating CO2 evolution on earth. icewalkeath.org ?
• Q2: What does it take to offer ti?
  • Given the venue is in an academic institution, infrastructure and support tends to be available
  • Hotel venues may refuse you/charge extra if Internet is to be applied for presentations
  • Zoom seems to be a game changer with respect to multi-participant on-line meetings
  • Avoiding a centralized system (relying on a hub/management node) would be preferable
    • Ideally there should just be presistant rooms where people join and leave over time (WebRTC?)
• Q3: What is required to make a better user experience for VC?
  • The community has talked to Zoom. No enhanced audio mode on the road map yet…

• Tom Beyer
• Manages a generous infrastructure including 3 theaters, 9 classrooms, 4 recording studios
• Teaches courses including workshop in networked music collaboration in summer term
• Historical summary.
  • Collaboration with UiT in 2012-2015
• Upcoming concert
  • http://wp.nyu.edu/immersiveaudiogroup/concert-links
  • 29th April 15:00 EST
  • Dancer with avatar on stage
  • 360 video and ambizonic audio
• Apply clapping exercise with increasing tempo to measure which tempo works with respect to latency
  • Given tempo and “on-second-beat” situations, students are asked to come up with playing strategies

• Brain waves applied as input to audio generators (brain wave soundification)
• Presentation summarizing work done while sounds of speakers brain activity is mixed into the audio stream
• Tool applied to share (peer-to-peer?) brain wave data flows
  • Two prosessed streams (meditation and one other…) as well as raw data
  • Raw data show significant pulses on eye blinks
• Concert project where audience were asked to ware EEG equipment
  • Questions were posted on projection screen, and EEG data from the audience drove audio generators when they answered questions in their brains

• Improvisational concert i virtual version of a 100 year old water cistern in Zurich.
• Very long reverberation time
• Cistern concert also made in NY shopping mall successfully using the mall's built in info-speaker system

• Ethan Cayko
• Delays in the order of 50-150 ms are to short to attempt applying shifted rhythmic patterns, e.g. a shift by an 8th at 122 bpm requires a delay of 250ms
• Earlier work on “staying in synch”
  • The “staying in synch”-time window is interpreted rather differently by e.g. percussionist and string players
• Tool/patch in Max developed which adds the “missing” delay to enable wanted/usable off beat rhythms.
  • Needs calibrations. Applying a metronome is recommended.
• Three node rhythmic piece written with different delay between the three percussionists
  • Sometimes human error cause up to 20ms miss hits
  • Occasionally perfect synch happens ⇒ outputs a “strange” crisp sound
• How to create rhythms for more than 2 nodes…?
  • A Toporhythm visualizer made available to help compose
  • Algorithm generates notes for additional nodes when rhythm for “master” node is prepared