I agree with others, latency will always be an issue over a distance.
Thought Leadership ... ha ha ... I'm impressed by their leadership, I didn't expect latency and timing matters in Music. Yet, I'm also a novice and ignorant :)
The real problem here is latency, and I'm good friends with the folks who are working the hardest on that issue for real musicians wanting to collaborate with each other in real time. The most important work is being done with SoundJack.
https://www.ianhowellcountertenor.com/soundjack-comprehensiv...
> In practice, musicians ignore sound and watch a conductor when separated by such distances [of 100 feet].
It had never occurred to me that a conductor was a kind of clock at an approximately uniform distance from the performers.
If you are 100 meters away, you have delay of about a third of a second if you use sound, but for light it will be a fraction of a millisecond.
Doesn't matter for the performers, but it matters for the conductor.
10ms only gets light 2/3rds of the straight line distance between LA and NY. After you start accounting latency in infrastructure components, round trips, and the fact that cables aren't laid in straight lines between two users, the idea of live musical collaboration over even short distances starts to seem implausible.
10ms is what I was always told was the generally accepted threshold after which a musician start to experience increased difficulty as a result of the latency. Which largely aligns with my own experience with audio latency. From there the difficulty just keeps increasing, and the performance quality keeps degrading until at some point the musicians and the audience gives up.
I honestly just don't think you are truly appreciating that light is almost a million times faster than sound.
And that’s just for an idealized communication network. A real world use case would have a lot more latency introduced by routing/switching, and all of the typical quality issues you’d expect from ISPs. I used to live within line of sight of the data centre that hosted an online video game that I played, and the lower bound of my ping was about 15ms, it was usually in the 20s. Those factors are why something like this is unlikely to ever provide a high quality experience over even relatively short distances. I’ve just always found it interesting how quickly you start to run into issues with the speed of light when you’re trying to optimize for network latency.
(And no: you are wrong about round trip. If you care about round trip time then 3ms of round trip by sound is so close that the violin player is going to be elbowing the singer. Sound is fundamentally slow, and you need to just accept that.)
Also, the reason you'd care about round trip time, is if you needed mixing or processing to be done to musician foldback (I never mentioned 3ms being an issue btw). The mixing and processing of sound is prior to being sent to foldback monitors is a completely standard process in just about all live and studio sound engineering. Latency is a very important consideration for sound engineers, and it's why in situations like stadium performances, the only sounds that matters to a musician on stage, is the sound coming out of the foldback monitors directly in front of them. I'm getting a rather strong impression that you don't know much about what actually goes into sound engineering.
FWIW, when I asked my professional musician ex about all of this (which was before I read this comment of yours here) she also mentioned monitors, but it was because she claimed a core consideration for her with respect to distance in a performance was volume of her instrument drowning out her playing companions (and when I pushed into that she said if the acoustics were bad enough they would use monitors). She also told me that people she knew were already using software to play with each other over the Internet. If nothing else, I feel like "proof by counter example" should win here vs. your statement that this is just somehow impossible? As others have pointed out in this thread, the SoundJack people exist and claim to do this (whether or not you believe they have users: my ex apparently knows of users, though I don't know if they are using the same software).
https://www.ianhowellcountertenor.com/soundjack-comprehensiv...
Signals are fast, electrons are slow - on the order of a quarter of a millimeter per second.
> the drift speed through a copper wire of cross-sectional area 3.00 x 10-6 m^2, with a current of 10 A will be approximately 2.5 x 10-4 m/s
As I've said elsewhere in the thread zoom is the wrong tree to bark up since these tools exist.
What applications would you recommend? Can it also do video, if not each link in the chain, at least one camera for the conductor (the node providing the metronome audio)? I realize the conductor would hear nobody at all, until playing back a recording from the end of the chain. Playback of said recording could begin after the song, or one measure into the song if there are no tempo/time changes (NINJAM style).
I will try to search around and get you some more examples. I can't remember off the top of my head what else worked that way.
Another technique is to mix all musicians on a server and send the mix back to all of them. Everyone hears the exact same signal, so in theory people could play perfectly in sync, but in practice hearing yourself delayed is very awkward and needs lots of training. We tried it but gave up quickly.
While this approach certainly works from a technical perspective, but I don't see many musical styles where this would yield a satisfying musical result. However, it might work for pieces which are specifically written for this constellation.
Do all of this, and you can collaborate really well with people in the same geographic area as you. Of course you can't get around the speed of light, but you can do a lot better than the default setup or Zoom will give you.
For instance, 22.5ms latency has been achieved at a distance of 900 miles (between the middle of Kentucky and Boston) with SoundJack and this setup:
Both port-forwarded, both using Fast Music Boxes, both on fiber internet connections. First user had an MXL770 XLR mic and an Audient EVO4 interface. Second user also had an XLR mic and an audio interface.
San Francisco is 7 miles wide.
Performers need to learn to ignore the rest and play their instrument while looking at the conductor.