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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