Talk: With covid-19 restrictions on indoor gatherings, it has been difficult for musicians to get together for in-person musical performances or practice sessions.  However, there are a number of networked system applications that potentially allow on-line "virtual" jamming.  The key to good performance is low-latency network connections and audio systems with low-latency ADC/DAC components and computationally efficient algorithms for network communications. Another stumbling block for many musicians is that the technology is often hard to understand or use.

Working with John Lombardo, an IEEE-Madison member and leader of a local Jazz group, SwingTime Music, the author built and tested a number of "musical appliances" based on the Raspberry Pi with sound cards or USB connected DAC/ADC boxes.  In addition, Anton Kapela and 5Nines, a Madison-based data technology company, put up virtual servers and helped establish low-latency routing from local musicians to the server.  The result is an acceptable level of delay that supports virtual jamming.

A second goal was to develop a simple appliance that students of music could use with little or no fuss  and that could be controlled by a simple browser.  That goal was met by using a pre-built operating system (Jambox) with real-time preemption and a VNC interface that is accessed with a browser. The system supports both client/server jamming and peer-to-peer jamming without having to configure complex firewall routers on the typical home ISP box.  It does, however, have to be connected via a wired Ethernet cable for lowest, consistent latency.

 

More technical details will be discussed after the demonstrations. Anton Kapel intends to speak to the general question of "what contributes to latency?" Part of it is due to current oversampling ADC/DAC techniques, USB, SPI, and other ways latency creeps in. He will discuss the current work and previous work in codec and forward error correction spaces with regards to multipath networks; re: the wifi + wired + other "network coding" work going on at MIT, and related to multipath TCP IETF working groups.

Bio: Tom Kaminski is a retired instructor of Automation from Madison College. He has been working on using SoCs to solve system integration problems for years and has several products using SoCs under development, including a Sonic Boom recorder for use by NASA, a Community Noise Monitor, and a Light-Rail Ride Quality device. The music applications from this talk are a natural extension of the previous sound recording work.

 

Anton Kapela is CTO and co-founder of EdgeMicro, his most recent venture into exploring the limits of Internet architecture through the lens of edge networking and services. Previously, Anton co-engineered and built the lowest-latency microwave relay network between Chicago and New York city for high-frequency trading clients. His background begins in EE, winds through physics, and ends up in applied computer sciences and communications networks. His latest research work and activities have been focussed on integration of global Internet-scale routing with mobility networking, and is now the subject of an accepted US patent entitled "Data routing in communications systems."