Towards a telematic visual-conducting system

Recent advances in networking technology (higher bit rates and lower transmission latencies) enable new applications where musicians can play together remotely, over the Internet. This application requires an audio coder providing sufficient compression to avoid overloading a connection and delay jitter, and also having a very low encoding/decoding delay. Often it is also desirable to have a visual connection, particularly for a conductor of an orchestra. But a parallel video connection often overloads a low delay connection, and usually also leads to more jitter and delay in the audio connection. Hence our approach is to design a special conductor transmission scheme, using a standard computer mouse, for this purpose. We found that the data from this transmission scheme can easily be integrated in the audio data stream without affecting jitter and delay. Experiments showed that, depending on the tempo of the music, the conductor and the orchestra could tolerate round t rip times of about 75 to 150 ms. Copyright© (2011) by the Audio Engineering Society.