CHRISTIAN MCBRIDE: Getting a band together to play is hard enough already,
but playing together on a video call?
That might be harder than you think.
And here’s why:
Every time you talk over a video call,
it takes time for your voice for your voice
to travel over the internet
and for the people on the other end to hear you.
That's called latency.
We can tolerate it in conversation
but it makes playing music together almost impossible.
And for jazz musicians, improvising is our lifeblood.
Without other musicians to play with,
there's no improvising.
To play together we have to hear each other
at the exact same time,
or at least perceive it that way.
And it takes time for sound to travel any distance,
but a study showed that in-person
musicians can still play in sync up to 30 feet apart.
Sound travels that 30 feet in about 30 milliseconds.
Over a video call? It usually takes
about 500 milliseconds or half a second.
Now this is what a 30 millisecond delay sounds like.
[clap]
It's there but it's hard to notice.
Now this is a 500 millisecond delay.
[clap]
Big difference right?
With that added latency, playing
in sync becomes impossible.
So if video calls are too slow,
is there a way for musicians in
quarantine to play together?
DAN TEPFER: I remember when I was a teenager,
I once tried to do like a little rehearsal
with a bassist over the phone
and it's just like — it's hopeless
because you're getting at least
half a second, you know, often over
a second of latency and it's just terrible.
MCBRIDE: Dan told us that a few weeks ago,
another musician asked him if someone in Hawaii
could play with someone in New York City.
TEPFER: Well nothing can travel faster
than the speed of light. Right?
This is like a basic tenet of physics. Nothing.
And it does take light some time
to get from place to place.
And so I got like a little piece
of paper out and I wrote down
"New York to Hawaii is 8,000 kilometers
and light travels at 300,000 kilometers per second."
MCBRIDE: And if you do the math,
it takes about 52 milliseconds
for light to do New York to Hawaii round-trip.
And remember, for musicians to play together
they need latencies of 30 milliseconds or lower.
TEPFER: So at the end of the day, there
is no possible way,
unless literally the fundamental laws of physics change,
that someone in New York could play
in real time with someone in Hawaii
in any kind of meaningful like real
rhythmic interaction type of way.
MCBRIDE: OK so it sounds like New York City
to Hawaii isn't gonna happen.
But Dan tweeted about this and somewhere
in the comments there was a beacon of hope.
A link to a video made by another
jazz tech guru, Michael Dessen.
DESSEN: As a musician, I compose and
perform and deal with different kinds of technologies,
but one area of my research
is this networked music-making.
And it went from being a curious novelty for people,
to suddenly being an urgent necessity to learn about.
So my phone's been ringing off the hook.
MCBRIDE: Since the early 2000s,
Michael has been using an open-source
software created at Stanford University
called JackTrip to rehearse and
perform music remotely with other musicians.
DESSEN: What it does is it moves audio data, specifically, in a very efficient way at very high quality.
Meaning you can capture
really high quality sound recordings
and move them immediately, very quickly,
across networks with minimal travel time.
One of the things we found was
that up to around 500 miles —
if the conditions are right, if we have enough speed —
we can actually play in time together
with no perceivable latency.
MCBRIDE: So once Dan learned about
JackTrip, he had to test it for himself
with his friend Jorge Roeder,
who was quarantined a couple miles away.
TEPFER: Neither one of us had played, had improvised,
with another human being in over six weeks.
And you know remember,
we're professional jazz musicians.
We're used to doing this like all the time.
And so we were like in withdrawal
and I don't think we fully realized how much
in withdrawal we were.
[music]
And man we started improvising together
and it was just like tears were
coming out of our eyes practically.
You know, when we stopped, we were just like,
"Oh my god, that feels so good.
I've missed this so much."
[music]
TEPFER: Woo. Yeah man. [inaudible]
MCBRIDE: After Dan's own success with JackTrip,
it was off to the races.
He started teaching other musicians about it
to build a network of people who can play together
while they're still in quarantine.
So with all of these musicians playing in
sync over the Internet,
will we be in the new age of virtual concerts?
TEPFER: Will it actually replace live performance?
I hope not.
Because it's totally next level when
you're in the same space together
and you can talk afterwards and you can see
the expressions on people's faces
and you have that palpable feeling of, you
know, if everything's going right,
of everyone breathing together at the end of a phrase.
You know?
That's just amazing.
I think if there's one thing that music is for,
is to bring us together
and live performance in the same physical space
does that more than anything else.
MCBRIDE: So playing online isn't
quite the same as being in the same room.
But for now, while concerts continue to be postponed
and musicians are keeping a distance from one another,
technologies like this might have to do.
[music]
