Online Loop Jam

David Russell, The Fusion Works <david@thefusionworks.com>

While many activities in Cambridge have transferred reasonably smoothly to the online world, music has not at all. It’s not even possible to sing Happy Birthday properly via videoconference, let alone coordinate choirs or band rehearsals. The Web RTC standard does provide support for time synchronisation of asynchronous messages, so together with interfaces such as Web MIDI, it should be possible to get better-timed music performance. Of course latency doesn’t go away (we still have the speed of light to deal with) so music made online can naver be like playing in the same room. Instead, we need music that can be played in cycles, so that each player contributes content that sounds good to their own ears now, and still sounds good after a fixed loop interval (perhaps 4 bars, perhaps 12, or even the next song verse), when the same notes are distributed and mixed in to the jam that everybody hears slightly later.