An Overview on Networked Music Performance Technologies

Abstract

Networked music performance (NMP) is a potential game changer among Internet applications, as it aims at revolutionizing the traditional concept of musical interaction by enabling remote musicians to interact and perform together through a telecommunication network. Ensuring realistic performance conditions, however, constitutes a significant engineering challenge due to the extremely strict requirements in terms of network delay and audio quality, which are needed to maintain a stable tempo, a satisfying synchronicity between performers and, more generally, a high-quality interaction experience. In this paper, we offer a review of the psycho-perceptual studies conducted in the past decade, aimed at identifying latency tolerance thresholds for synchronous real-time musical performance. We also provide an overview of hardware/software enabling technologies for NMP, with a particular emphasis on system architecture paradigms, networking configurations, and applications to real use cases.