SGER: Music Telepresence

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Internet mediated telepresence has the potential to transform society by eliminating the physical barriers to collaboration. However, it has yet to reach the ideal of providing a medium-transparent, immersive visual and audio link between remote locations. The goal of this project is to begin to address issues and tradeoffs between latency minimization and quality of service in the context of Internet mediated musical collaboration. Specifically, the PI will focus on real-time distributed musical rehearsal and performance, which is highly demanding in terms of both audio/video quality of service and communication latency. The technical challenge to be tackled in this project is related to the development of efficient and reliable multimedia Internet protocols linked with low-latency multimedia compression. The PI will employ and build upon the ITU-T developed H.323 open standards to address the interplay between, and joint optimization of, the compression methods and the transport protocols. The team, which includes researchers from the University of Rochester (including its Eastman School of Music), from the University of Miami (including its Frost School of Music), and from Wright State University, will develop a test-bed system linking the three sites that will be capable of supporting three-way musical collaboration. Because the ultimate success of this interdisciplinary project, which involves multimedia coding and immersive environments, depends upon the experience of the end-users (musicians), a key component of the work is involvement of musicians not only in final assessment of the technology, but also from the earliest stages in the technical developments. Broader Impacts: The impact of this research extends beyond its benefits to distance music collaboration and education. In addition to bringing music into the lives of members of underrepresented groups, the project also will enable individuals with physical limitations and those who are geographically isolated to participate in a range of essentially interpersonal activities from scientific and engineering collaboration to health care delivery and, of course, to joint artistic endeavors. The PI will seek to maximize the impact of the work by building upon existing widely accepted open videoconferencing standards.