Tapping into the internet as an acoustical/musical medium

• Published in: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 2007-11, Vol.122 (5_Supplement), p.3080-3080
• Main Author: Chafe, Chris
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0001-4966; 1520-8524
• DOI: 10.1121/1.2943002

Recent work in network audio transport transforms advanced networks into a new kind of acoustical medium in which sound waves propagate, as if traveling through air, water, or solids. Waves sent through the medium are reflected or altered as they bounce between hosts. Propagation delays are used to create echo chambers and build the resonances for ‘‘distributed musical instruments.’’ As a side-effect, tones created by network resonances can be used to monitor the quality of the underlying network. The presentation presents three areas of research: (1) Auditory methods for monitoring QoS, especially for networks supporting real-time, interactive, bidirectional flows; (2) remote musical collaboration using professional-quality, low-latency audio; (3) empirical study of human factors affected by some unique acoustical properties of the medium network latency; jitter and delay asymmetry affect the speed of sound and are never uniform. By creating distributed virtual sound objects like instruments and rooms, and by studying distributed ensembles, we can begin to understand this new sound world. Some effects have been measured empirically and the results contain some surprises.