Online Music Communities

Administrator wrote this in the late afternoon:

I have recently discovered a very new and unique way for musicians to collaborate online. Imagine 2 or more people, connected only by a broadband Internet connection playing improvisational music in ‘real-time’ together. Ninjam facilitates just such a situation.

So, how can people play music on the Internet in real time? Anybody who knows how the Internet works knows that the TCP/IP protocol breaks information into packets. These packets can take different routes and arrive at their destination at different times. So, there is an inherent latency, or delay, built in to the infrastructure of the Internet. Any body who has played with a bad drummer knows that this small delay can create a nightmarish situation for musicians playing together.

To compensate for this, the Ninjam interface exaggerates this latency, stretching it into an entire musical measure. The interface includes a metronome to keep all of the participants on the same beat, but they are not playing on the same measure. A quote from the Ninjam.com site might make it a bit more clear (or cloudy for that matter. You really need to experience it to fully appreciate the ramifications.)

The NINJAM client records and streams synchronized intervals of music between participants. Just as the interval finishes recording, it begins playing on everyone else’s client. So when you play through an interval, you’re playing along with the previous interval of everybody else, and they’re playing along with your previous interval. If this sounds pretty bizarre, it sort of is, until you get used to it, then it becomes pretty natural. In many ways, it can be more forgiving than a normal jam, because mistakes propagate differently. Ninjam.com

This system certainly complicates the music improvisation process. Yet, once you get used to it, it is actually quite enjoyable.

Another interesting aspect to this system is that everyone records their own version of the jam on their own machine. Since everyone is hearing each other playing during a different measure, each recording will be unique. While researching this for my paper, I hope to obtain the recordings that other players make and compare them with what I have recorded on my end of the collaboration. It is almost as if each participant is reacting to and experiencing their own personal reality of the improvisation.

So, the real question is, if Schrödinger’s cat was one of the participants, would the jam exist or not?

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Administrator wrote this in the early morning:

Ok, here is the abstract for my paper. I know that I should have been ‘exploring’ my ideas in the blog first, and then coming up with the abstract. But, that didn’t happen. What I will do is explore some of the details of what I am researching in future blog posts. I will keep you updated on how some of my online musical collaborations turn out. I might even post some mp3’s for you to listen to.

I will just post the PDF, because the text is just too long to read from a blog post.

Larry’s Abstract

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Administrator wrote this around lunchtime:

I just discovered this document while poking around online. It looks like an ‘official manual’ for Ninjam. The creators refer to the ‘semi-syncronous’ nature of Ninjam as ‘fake time’:

Ted, Steve, and Rob are all musicians jamming with Ninjam. Ted is playing the drums in time with Ninjam’s metronome, Steve is playing the electric bass, and Rob is playing an electric guitar. Each of them plays a “measure”, the length of time it takes for the timing bar at the bottom of their Ninjam window to go all the way across the screen. This measure of music is sent to the Ninjam server as it’s recorded, and then each user’s measure is sent to every other user to be played the next measure while recording the subsequent measure at each user. That is: While Ted records his drums for measure 2, his computer is playing Steve’s bass and Rob’s guitar recordings from measure 1, in tempo. While Steve records his bass for measure 2, he’s playing along with the recordings of Ted and Rob from measure 1. Likewise, Rob is listening to Ted and Steve’s previous measure (Measure 1), while recording the measure that will get sent to them next. On the measure after that, Ted will record measure 3 of drums while he hears what Steve and Rob were recording for measure 2. And so on. This continues as long as the users play, whatever Ted records, on the following measure Steve and Rob hear it, starting exactly as Ted’s measure stops recording, and the same experience is had by the other users.

I am hoping to get the creators involved in the reaserch of this project. Hopefully they will reply to my inquiry soon.

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Administrator wrote this in the late afternoon:

When most people think of music improvisation, they think of Jazz greats from the 50’s such as Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane. This type of music improvisation usually involved a structured ‘song’, arranged by the composer. The difference between orchestral scores and s jazz scores is that jazz scores are open to the individual musician’s interpretation of the music. For instance, in an orchestral score an instruments individual part is written out note for note, and the pitches, rhythms and dynamics are adhered to strictly by the player. In a jazz score, the instruments individual part is usually indicated by a chord, and maybe a loosely followed rhythm. Some main melody parts are spelled out, with significant sections of the song left open to improvisation, or soloing. Where traditional orchestral performances will differ only slightly from night to night, a jazz performance is rarely duplicated.

Eventually, musicians of other genres began to pick up improvisational techniques from both jazz and blues players. Bands like Led Zeppelin and Cream would often drift into long, unstructured ‘jams’ during live sets. The band the Grateful Dead is well known for its freeform improvisations interludes, sometimes stretching a song for an hour or more. This new type of improvisation is devoid completely of any type of structure. Since rock and roll music is rarely written down, improvisations have become much more organic and intuitive. Every person in the band must be listening to every other person, and be able to anticipate chord changes, tempo changes, and overall changes in the mood of the music. Bands such as Phish and Galactic have taken this type of improvisation to new levels of complexity.

A band that I recently played in also used to do improvisational music, yet our style of jamming was a bit different than any other band that I have encountered. Often, when we would improvise on stage, we would just start playing and what sounded like a ‘song’ would come out. Our singer, Steve Janiak, could improvise words and melodies so well, it was hard to tell that he was making them up on the spot. The rest of us knew each other so well musically; we could improvise whole song structures that sounded like they were completely pre-planned. Eventually, we started recording these jams in our makeshift recording studio.

Here are two examples of the band ‘The PubSigs’ improvising music. Both of these songs where complete improvisations, with no pre planning what so ever. If it wasn’t for the magic of digital audio, nobody might have ever hear them again. Enjoy.

Half Drunk Limo Driver
Put Out the Warning

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Administrator wrote this in the early morning:

I have found that trying to round up people to participate in a planned Ninjam session is a difficult task to accomplish. This could explain why there is very little traffic on their message boards. Part of the allure of using Ninjam is just dropping in when ever, and jamming with whoever happens to be there.
My Virtual Band (MVB) is another great way to collaborate on music online. This site supports asynchronous music collaboration through the use of an FTP site and a message board. Here is how it works. Suppose you have just completed the recording of a killer groove with drums, bass and guitar. You want to complete the track, but you vocal abilities are not the greatest. This is where My Virtual Band comes in.
The site contains a message board where people post projects for others to collaborate on. To start a collaboration, you upload your tracks to the MVB server and start a new post on the message board. This post will contain links to the tracks that you previously have uploaded. Now, anybody who is interested in adding new tracks to the project can simply download the tracks and add there own.
The great thing about this site is that it is platform independent. A collaboration could include tracks created with a high end recording system, such as ProTools, combined with tracks recorded using free, open source program such as Audacity. Anyone can collaborate with anyone else, and all can hear the results of the collaboration.
And, there is no need to get other people to show at a certain time to collaborate. Could it be that asynchronous collaboration is a more productive platform?

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Administrator wrote this in the early morning:

Here is a link to the survey I have sent to the members who use Ninjam and My Virtual Band. The more information I get, the better. So thank you to everybody who has already responded. And, if you haven’t responded yet, the survey is very short—it should only take about 10 minutes to fill out. The information I collect will help shape the research for my paper.

Happy jamming!

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Administrator wrote this just before lunchtime:

So, I have been collaborating musically on both the Ninjam and the My Virtual Band sites. I thought that I would post some of the results of these collaborations, and analyze the results. It turns out that that the resulting recordings are very different, as you will soon hear.
First up are some improvisations from Ninjam. Remember, Ninjam is an improvisational real-time platform, so all of there recordings are free-form collaborations.

heavyWah_twoBasses.mp3

This is one of the first collaborations that I participated in on Ninjam. The recording contains me on guitar, two bass players and a drummer. Having two bass players is kind of an odd situation, but because of the ‘work with who happens to be on the server’ paradigm that Ninjam uses, it is common to have unusual instrumentations in a collaboration. For instance, this collaborations contains drums, vocals, bass and flute. The flautist is quite good, actually.

Vocals_flute.mp3

After listening to a few of these collaborations on Ninjam, you will begin to notice that the improvisations tend to work around a single musical riff that repeats over and over. This is common in face to face improvisations. Because of the semi-syncronous nature of Ninjam, it is difficult to do a lot of rapid chord changes. For example, if the guitar player decides he is going to play a typical 16 bar I, IV, V chord progression, the bass player isn’t going to here the chord change until 1 measure later. So the guitar player has moved on the to the IV chord, and the bass player is still playing the I chord for an entire measure. Typically, to instruments playing different chords sounds really bad, and in the case of a blues jam this is no exception.

An exception to this is evident in this recording.

slowHeavyDurge.mp3

Here, the guitar player is doing cord changes. It works in this case because the chord changes all have the same root note. So, the base player can really just jam around on the E minor chord, and the guitar player can play their chord changes based on that E minor chord. So, in this case, chord changes do work.

All of the audio in this post is covered by the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License.

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Administrator wrote this around lunchtime:

Now, I will let you hear some examples of collaborations I participated in on My Virtual Band. For my first example, I would like to walk you through the process of collaboration on MVB. Since MVB is an asynchronous collaboration platform, there are various versions of the recording throughout the collaboration life-time.

A typical interaction on the MVB bulletin board goes like this:

• -Person A starts a new thread on the MVB bulletin board, posting a link to a single track


• -Person B downloads that track, imports the track into his/her recording software, and records 1 or more of his own tracks along with the original.


• -Person B then posts a mix of the original track and his/her tracks.


• -Person B also posts the individual tracks that he recorded. For example, if he added drums and a bass line to the original track, he would post the drum track and the bass track separately as well. This allows future collaborators the option of using Person B’s bass line, or adding their own.


• -Person C downloads all of the individual tracks, and adds his own, continuing the collaboration cycle.

For example, on June 28th, Bryan starts a new thread on the MVB bulletin board. He posts this little track of him playing acoustic guitar.

Tall_1.mp3

One day later, on June 29th, Mullr adds a bass line to the original guitar track, and posts both his mix of the two, and a track that contains only the bass line that he added.

Tall-bass.mp3
Tall-mix1.mp3

Then, on November 5th, over four months later, drumkey87 adds piano and drums, posting both a mix of all of the instruments, and the individual tracks that he contributed.
talldrumkeymix.mp3
Piano.mp3
HiHat.mp3
Kick.mp3
Snare.mp3

Seven days later, on November 12th, I add a little lead guitar track.

Tall_lerbleMix.mp3
Tall_lerble_guitarOnly.mp3

You can view the message board thread for this collaboration here.
Some other collaborations that show off what is possible on MVB are as follows:

Ruby-martyMix1.mp3
Silentshoutnewremix1.mp3
Jazzy-marty-mix2.mp3

All of the audio in this post is covered by the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License.

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