Losing that long distance feeling

by Debra Hornsby

“Good audio,” says Theresa Leonard “is all about capturing emotion.” Leonard, director of the Centre’s audio programs, is talking about ANET (Audio over NETworks) research at The Banff Centre.

This June, as part of this research initiative, members of the St. Lawrence String Quartet performed in Banff with Barry Shiffman, the Centre’s director of music programs (and a former quartet member) joining them live from Stanford, California.

“Our goal is to discover what perceptual qualities are most important for artists performing over distance networks,” says Leonard. “In order to enable live long-distance collaboration like this, we need to be able to capture every subtlety of these creative conversations.”

Chris Chafe, director of Stanford University’s Center for Computer research in Music and Acoustics, also took part in the June test. He says that even with today’s high capacity networks, long distance musical collaboration poses challenges. “What we found was that Barry and the quartet could perceive a micro delay – the equivalent to Barry sitting about 25 feet away from the rest of the quartet. For most of us, that delay would be imperceptible, but to them it made a difference.” This is exactly the sort of information researchers need to improve long distance audio experiences.