Online Music Communities

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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