TO MY COLLEAGUES, AND CALLING ALL GENIUS TECH FRIENDS AND AUDIO MASTERS:
I issue a challenge for collaboration on a realtime solution to the problem of remote-participant ensemble rehearsals in a time of temporary enforced social isolation. Most ensembles I know have postponed or canceled concerts and stopped rehearsals. Schools are making this mandatory. But folks still need to make music together, or at least “together” in a way that feels enough like live ensemble. We might be able to create a decent ersatz for this activity. In this time of increasingly-acute social media separation, we are already used to communicating remotely with our friends and groups from our isolated devices.
THE CHALLENGE:
Come up with a hybrid of real-time telecommunications and live audio mixing that puts each participant adequately in a “virtual real-time ensemble” without being colocated physically.
DETAILS IN THE ATTACHED DOCUMENT (TLDR if put in FB post)
IDEAL FEATURE SET
1. All participants can be heard in the mix.
2. All can hear the mix (as in a good live show monitor speaker)
3. Timing is nearly-instantaneous (minimal or no lag)
4. Individual volume can be throttled/managed into the mix that all hear (central control)
5. Conductor/leader can be both seen and heard.
6. EXCEPTION: Not all player/singer participants need to be seen, or see each other. This reduces the problem by, say, an order of magnitude (no split screens or toggled views).
7. Solution is not too expensive either to ensemble/institution or individual participants.
All these elements are available in at least partial form in existing technology for live audio recording and mixing, and video conferencing.
OBSTACLES/ISSUES
1. Big-brand teleconferencing and video-phone platforms have bad lag and generally awful sound quality. Video-phone requires all to be on one camera at one end.
a. Are there better platforms less known? Not expensive.
2. All individuals are likely to have widely different microphones and acoustic environments.
a. Partial solution: set minimum standards for both, not ideal or expensive.
3. Individuals have their own volume controls.
a. Partial solution: Set standards, desired levels, do sound checks on all individuals before starting; like meta-tuning.
4. Not all instruments sound their best close-miked.
a. Partial solution: Provide guidelines per instrument type; adjust in the mix.
5. Ditto voices. Plus, choral singers who lack soloist vocal quality or temperament are often more likely to sing out when with others, losing themselves (and their inhibitions) in the crowd.
a. This freeing effect will be hard to replicate remotely in isolation, even when folks can hear their section in the mix.
b. In our favor is that more and more folks, especially youngsters, are comfortable on solo mike making a mix or a cover or a youtube spot. Pop to the rescue.
6. You need a genius at the mixing board, but you need that in a live miked performance too.
7. Individuals need to wear headsets to hear the group mix.
a. Studio instrumentalists and singers are used to this, but normal choristers and orchestra/band players probably less so. It changes how your voice or instrument sounds to you.
These are only my initial observations. I’m sure plenty of other folks are chewing on some sort of approach to this problem right now. But I bet it can be done, to a satisfactory (B+) level, mabye not well enough to replace making music all together in the same room in the long run (what could ever do that?), but well enough to tide us over the current pandemic isolation at least. And the next . . .
I welcome inputs; perhaps somebody wants to take up the task of creating a collaboration site and a test bed. And a consortium of ensembles and schools to support, contribute, even underwrite this effort.
Warm regards to all,
David Avshalomov
Composer, Singer, Guest Conductor
Santa Monica, CA
www.davidavshalomov.com 310-480-9525
altojo says
So it’s now June. Have you guys solved this yet?? Our community chorus is chomping at the bit to sing again. Do you think JamKazam is worth trying? even just for a subgroup of 6-8 singers to do some kind of singing together???? Or is there a better one? I have a Mac, otherwise I would be tempted to try Vmix, but it’s pretty expensive to get up to 8 call-in inputs, so not for a whole chorus.
fiddlercrab says
I did a little internet research on this question for one of my choirs–here is what I concluded. Note that this is not based on any actual attempt apart from a Zoom get-together of 15 or so Bach Cantata Choir members, which was a technical failure despite being fun to see each other.
The bottom line is that a real distributed online rehearsal is probably not practical for a large choral group. Most members would have to spend money on equipment, and it’s unclear whether more than 5 or 6 singers could participate at one time. Possibly, with audio only (no video turned on except for the conductor) a larger group could be made to work, but the rate-limiting factor is the speed of each choir member’s internet feed, which is a relatively fixed constraint.
I only found one software system that can sync everyone in real time with good sound quality, JamKazam. (As far as I can tell, the supposedly distributed large-group performances one sees on the web have been post-processed, e.g., that high-school mariachi band from South Texas. Other remote jamming solutions work by lengthening delays until all delays are equal, sort of like playing a mechanical organ in a very large church.) This JamKazam service is free but there doesn’t seem to have been much investment or marketing from them since 2015. We’d have to try it out.
Using JamKazam, small groups of 4-5 would be OK with up to a few hundred $$ of investment by each person for equipment, assuming they had none already. A studio recital event at which individuals sang separately would be easy and almost free using Zoom. (Someone would have to pony up for a business account to host a large number of guests for more than 40 minutes–but such an account doesn’t cost much.) Conceivably, with the purchase of equipment per above (and see below for detail), a conferencing service like Zoom could be made serviceable. The “codecs” that Zoom and Skype use to process digital signals are designed to isolate speech, not music, so they chop out high and low ranges and do other un-musical things. The processing time required to run these codecs might also increase latency, which is the big obstacle to simultaneous singing, as explained below.
I also observed when Bach Cantata Choir tried it that singers get shy and stop singing. And I have read elsewhere that the same happens to singers who show up for recording sessions and get isolated in their little booths. This could make remote rehearsal a GOOD training experience for a choir.
One advantage of JamKazam (and Zoom) is that anything can be recorded and published or posted later, or even streamed live. It is also relatively easy to generate recordings in which some parts are left out or minimized, a la CyberBass.
My conclusion is the IF a small choral group could make JamKazam work, it might even be better than a live rehearsal for some purposes; BUT that online remote rehearsal is unlikely to work for a LARGE choir or section, for both financial and technical reasons. SUBGROUPS from a section could make it work if they had the equipment or were willing to buy it.
MORE DETAIL / TECHNICAL BARRIERS AND SOLUTIONS:
There seem to be four problems that must be solved to make a real sectional or choir-wide rehearsal or live performance work, with each singer isolated at home:
1) Feedback
2) Home Processing Latency
3) Distance Latency
4) Home Internet Bandwidth
1) Feedback is when what I hear locally feeds back into my microphone and gets re-transmitted back to where it came from. Very ugly interference. The solution is for each person to have a set of headphones or earbuds and to get audio only through those devices, which makes it inaudible to the person’s microphone. If headphones are used, they would have to be closed, not open-backed. Headphones would probably be better than earbuds because they would be louder and provide higher fidelity. It is easy for one’s own voice to drown out the audio from the rest of the group when they are not singing beside you.
(There is another kind of disruptive interference that can happen if people in the same room are using two smartphones simultaneously. That’s easy to solve, just turn one off.)
2) Processing Latency is harder to fix. Processing latency is the time it takes your computer to digitize an analog audio signal (one’s voice or analog instrument), plus the time one’s WIFI router takes to process and send that signal to the internet; PLUS the time that each recipient’s WIFI plus the computer take to send and de-digitize your sound into their analog ears. Latency creates two problems a) not being able to stay in rhythm by listening and b) having variable latencies across singers so that even if we were correctly following a conductor rather than our ears, the various voices would still not end up in sync. (I also found that it is very difficult to follow a conductor in a little window in a screen and also read music.)
There are solutions, which are to connect computers directly by wire (ethernet cable) to our routers ($10 for 100 feet of cable), and to buy an interface device that can digitize audio much more quickly than the average computer or smartphone ($50-$100 or more), plus a microphone to plug into said device ($100 on up). Smartphone video is digitized to start with, so no delay there, but video must be input into the interface device from a separate smartphone or, conceivably, and using an expensive digital camera for those who have one. In addition, listening to some NPR announcers talking from home this morning, the average room at home is not great for audio production, either–one guy was crouched under his dining table, which was hung with curtains and blankets, to eliminate unwanted reverb and reduce noises from outside.
3) Distance Latency is the time it takes to move signals from person to person across the internet. For a local group this is a non-problem because internet signals more at near the speed of light. But for people 1000 miles away or more, delay becomes significant.
4) Local internet bandwidth. The speed of one’s connection determines how many singers can be on a session simultaneously without things slowing down and falling apart. Satellite, low-end DSL/phoneline, wireless, and cellphone connections are not going to cut it. Has to be cable or fiber-optic, apparently. Most residential cable or fiber connections will suffice for a quartet or sextet. (Need 2.5 MBpS to run a JamKazam session with 4 musicians in sync, using both video and audio.) A person’s internet service is not easily changed, and larger bandwidth costs more monthly. Possibly, by eliminating video signals, an audio-only group could be larger. That would require testing.
Jonathan B. Brown
Portland OR USA
David Avshalomov says
Jonathan, wonderful analysis .Several other threads have surfaced the same obstacles and challenges. My question is, has anyone actually *tried JamKazam in real world conditions? I emailed them (several ways) and have heard nothing. Didn’t download it . . .
fiddlercrab says
I will try KamKazam out and report back. Some of us are thinking of trying it for small studio recitals in which the vocal coach or a hired accompanist would play in sync with each “distanced” singer.
By the way, are you the David Avsholomov I admired so much growing up in Portland in the 1960s-70s, or his son, or grandson? A peak experience of my childhood was singing madrigals with members of your family in the house above Washington Park….
melindb says
I’ve been looking into JamKazam since they can play live and record. Most are instruments but sometimes the band all sings too. I just checked their website and they have marked some areas that due to the recent demand they are upgrading some of their systems. Eric on Youtube has mentioned that all of their people were not working due to the stay at home orders. Maybe if they knew so many people were interested, they’d find a way!
jimaudley says
Thanks for initiating this challenge Mr Avshalomov. The members of our 35 member chorus sorely miss making music together. There must be thousands of choruses and choirs like ours who are looking for a way to continue to “sing together -remotely”. I really appreciate your perspective that this app would enable people to continue to practice while in forced isolation. It does not need to be perfect, just good enough until we reconvene.
If it’s possible, there is one additional criteria I would like you to consider for the design:
– Provide the ability for singers to hear their own sections more distinctly than the rest of the chorus.
Most of us non-soloists rely on listening to voices within our individual sections to learn our parts and to blend our voices. We typically listen to the entire chorus in the background, interacting with others sections as a section.
I imagine we can use a more simplified remote singing app to practice sectionals, but to understand the music we really need all sections singing together.
What an uplifting thing it would be for us to be able to keep singing together, to look forward to our reunion, to be ready to celebrate with a community concert!
David Avshalomov says
I like that additional criterion. Unfortunately, the solution does not seem to exist as a widely-available app or service; we have anecdotal reports of one-off jury-rigged elaborate local setups.
vaporker says
Hi, Mr Avshalomov. I found your post while searching on google for the very same solution you proposed. I’ve found a couple so far, but the fact that they have not been updated in years seems worrying. I’ll leave their names, maybe you could get some useful info. The first is JamKazam which has a software that connects all participants. They also sell hardware that is destined to minimize lag. Another one that is just software is Jamulus. Another with hardware is Jam Link. However, as mentioned, the fact that all are very old and none are updated makes it seem like a bad investment. Hope to find a quick solution for this problem. We are 50+ group of musicians in 6 different projects that quickly need to find a way to play. All the best!
David Avshalomov says
We are all crossing our fingers (after washing our hands) . . .