New tech helps locked down musicians play together
Musician creates software enabling locked down performers to jam together
Like most musicians the world over, bassist and bandleader Adrian Cho looked for new ways to perform for people after the pandemic last year effectively killed live gigs and concerts.
He and his wife, vocalist Diane Nalini, jumped on the livestreaming bandwagon and began broadcasting shows from their Ottawa home. But it continued to bother Cho, who has a background in technology, that musicians in different households couldn't easily play together online in the way that families and workers use video conferencing technologies to meet.
Never one to avoid a challenge, Cho decided late last summer to throw himself into creating a virtual platform that would allow musicians at different locations to play in real time. Now, he's on the verge of launching a business for musicians in Ottawa and beyond who are starved for opportunities to play together, as well as a concert series that will bring these new collaborations to online audiences.
“If you asked me four months ago, I had no intention to do this as a business,” Cho says. “It just happened because there's a need, right?”
Cho, whose tech resumé includes 15 years at IBM and three years at Shopify, developed a web-based solution that he's dubbed syncspace.live. The solution leverages existing third-party technologies, notably Jamulus and Jacktrip for sending audio between musicians, and involves a broadcast engineer overseeing sessions remotely so musicians can focus on playing.
For years, there have been technologies that enabled musicians to do long-distance collaborations and jamming in real time. But Cho says they were not on the radar for most musicians before the pandemic. When the pandemic made these technologies more meaningful, most were found to be extremely hard to use, set and configure.
“The usability has always been a big issue,” he says. “The main thing for musicians who are not very tech-savvy is to try to make it as easy as possible.” Cho says most of his musical test subjects were able to get their setup running in an afternoon.
Any internet-based musical collaboration must tackle the problem of latency, which can delay audio and video transmissions between musicians to the point of rendering playing together somewhere between incredibly frustrating and impossible. While those delays are measured in milliseconds, they still throw off the best musicians trying to synchronize with one another. Cho says he has taken pains to reduce latency at every possible point in the signal chains of his platform.
Cho also says one of his big innovations was to split the audio and visual feeds. The musicians watch video that's of a lower quality so as to minimize the latency of transmissions between them. But then, the broadcast engineer re-synchronizes the audio and a higher-quality video feed and sends out the finished product, with a slight delay, for the enjoyment of viewers.
Internet speeds can be a factor, and Cho says musicians in rural areas might not be able to use his platform. Even in his city of Ottawa, there are problems with routing that Cho says he had to figure out by testing the latency of servers in a data centre.
It was no mean feat to build syncspace.live, but Cho is used to going all-in on his projects. Years ago, he created the Ottawa Jazz Orchestra, which had developed a large local following. In 2019, as a recent retiree from Shopify, Cho became a globe-trotting wildlife photographer before the pandemic scuttled travel plans. He devoted his energies to real-time music-making with a similar fervour.
“I probably worked pretty much day and night,” he said, adding that he found himself writing software code for the first time in 20 years.
For the last few months, Cho and a small group of Ontario jazz musicians have stealthily tested his technology.
Their coming-out party was a New Year's Eve concert that involved five musicians in four households.
Cho and Nalini were the broadcast engineers, mixing audio and video and determining what viewers would see, from Zoom-style multi-screens to single screens showing a featured musician in action.
Guitarist Justin Duhaime, who performed on New Year's Eve from his Centretown, Ont., apartment, says Cho has pulled off “an incredible feat of technology. “There's still some room for improvement with regard to consistency in quality. But at the best of times, the latency feels like playing in the same room as the other musicians and the sound quality feels like listening to a CD,” says Duhaime.
Trumpeter and New Year's Eve gig participant Ed Lister said he had tried several similar programs “chasing the elusive low latency.” Cho's rivals were all inferior, said Lister, who is based in Gatineau's Aylmer, Ont., sector.
Cho says there are lots of uses for his technology, from teaching to rehearsing to recording during the pandemic, and he plans to monetize his project by selling monthly subscriptions to musicians.
“The thing I'm most interested in is performance — real gigs, paying gigs,” he continues, and he will feature Ottawa-area jazz musicians in a slate of weekly concerts that will begin Jan. 16.
He can also imagine his platform enabling collaborations between a band in one city and a special guest in another.
While mass vaccinations should foster the return of festivals and concerts at some point, Cho says his technology should live on post-pandemic.
“There are certain things that are not going back to the way they were,” he says.