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some sort of synchronization
Wednesday, July 21 2004
I paid an office visit this morning to a non-profit in Kingston that was hoping to host some sort of internet-facilitated live performance, with asome musicians playing Austria and others playing here in the Rondout. A couple of the musicians were there as I performed diagnostics on their network. The network was okay, but it seemed Time Warner/RoadRunner wasn't working. The Austrian musicians (the ones actually here in Kingston) were in a state of controlled Teutonic panic because without the internet their performance would be impossible. I suggested that if Time Warner couldn't get their internet working before their performance that they go knocking on doors to see if any of their neighbors (they were in a reasonably dense area) had broadband which could be tapped into on an emergency basis. There's no other way to obtain immediate broadband; the response times of internet providers is usually measured in days. I told them that if they needed a long cable for their panhandled internet access I could come out again and run one for them.
It seems these musicians hadn't really thought through their whizbang internet collaboration very much at all, because when I got to talking about what tools and technologies they'd be using to set up the two different audio/video streams, they had no idea. And yet they'd printed flyers and done marketing for a performance that would be happening on Friday.
I got to thinking about the technical difficulties of a live performance happening with two different sets of musicians connected by a communication technology as flawed and flaky as the internet. The latency of the connection (measured in seconds) would be such that the performance would sound very different on either side of the connection, even if members were somehow able to fall into some sort of synchronization. These Austrian musicians had told me they would be playing improvisationally, but it's hard to imagine doing it in such a way that it would be any good on both sides of, say, a two second delay.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?040721 feedback
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