Here's a seemingly simple question: Can quarantined musicians play music together over an internet connection? These days, we've migrated birthday parties, happy hours, and church services to video calls, so couldn't we do the same with band rehearsals? In ubiquitous video conferencing tools like Zoom, FaceTime, and Skype, it takes time for audio to travel from person to person. This small delay, called latency, is generally tolerable in conversation – except for some overlapping stutters – but when it comes to playing music online with any kind of rhythmic integrity, latency quickly becomes a total drag.

This video follows pianist and composer Dan Tepfer down the rabbit hole. Tepfer often occupies the intersection of music and innovative technology (just see his Tiny Desk concert) and, by proxy, has served his fellow musicians as a sort of tech helpline. A public inquiry on Twitter led him to jazz trombonist Michael Dessen, also a researcher at the University of California, Irvine, who has focused his work on networked performances for more than a decade. The solution: open source software called JackTrip, developed by Stanford University researchers Chris Chafe and Juan-Pablo Cáceres more than a decade ago, capable of transferring high-quality audio data over the Internet with sufficiently high latencies weak, within a geographic radius, to imitate someone playing music about 30 feet away; this is the threshold at which most musicians can still play together in synchronization. It requires a bit of hardware and a solid internet connection, but the setup allowed for near-instant latencies for musicians who want to improvise together online.

Tepfer has spent part of the last few months building a community of musicians using JackTrip at home, so they can practice together, work on new music, and even perform live concerts for fans as a source of income while concert halls remain closed. pandemic. And while it's not the same as playing in the same physical space, it's a close second in the age of social distancing.

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