Telemersive Audio Systems for Online Jamming

This paper focuses on aesthetic approaches, specific projects and tools for online jamming involving immersive audio. By ‘online jamming’, we refer to the widespread practice of individual performers located in different spaces collaborating via the Internet in near real-time. By ‘immersive audio’, we mean the capture, processing and delivery of sound with three-dimensional directional characteristics — specifically, through binaural rendering via headphones. The first part of the paper focuses on the spatial dimension of telematic performance practices, which, compared to the temporal dimension of said practices, is under-conceptualised in the relevant literature. The second part highlights some perceptual requirements that need to be considered when musicians play together and interact with each other via binaural rendering. We then analyse a number of tools, technical applications and artistic projects that can be subsumed under an expanded understanding of online jamming with immersive audio, two of which were developed in our own research unit. The analysis namely draws on how these projects aesthetically deal with spatial categories and how they respond to the perceptual challenges. The paper concludes by measuring the latencies of spatial audio plug-ins and streaming utilities. The results show that the potential of such telemersive approaches is promising and that such tools can be designed to address latency issues, which are critical for online jamming.