ABSTRACT
Nowadays, widely used videoconferencing software has been diffused even further by the social distancing measures adopted during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. However, none of the Web-based solutions currently available support high-fidelity stereo audio streaming, which is a fundamental prerequisite for networked music applications. This is mainly because of the fact that the WebRTC RTCPeerConnection standard or Web-based audio streaming do not handle uncompressed audio formats. To overcome that limitation, an implementation of 16-bit pulse code modulation (PCM) stereo audio transmission on top of the WebRTC RTCDataChannel, leveraging Web Audio and AudioWorklets, is discussed. Results obtained with multiple configurations, browsers, and operating systems show that the proposed approach outperforms the WebRTC RTCPeerConnection standard in terms of audio quality and latency, which in the authors' best case to date has been reduced to only 40 ms between two MacBooks on a local area network. © 2022 Audio Engineering Society. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
The recent lockdown restrictions imposed by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 pandemic have heightened the need for new forms of remote collaboration for music schools, conservatories, musician ensembles, and artists, each of which would benefit from being provided with adequate tools to make high-quality, live collaborative music in a distributed fashion. This paper demonstrates the usage of the Networked Music Performance software JackTrip to support a distributed classical concert involving singers and musicians from four different locations in two continents, using readily available hardware/software solutions and internet connections while guaranteeing high-fidelity audio quality. This paper provides a description of the technical setup with a numerical analysis of the achieved mouth-to-ear latency and assessment of the music-making experience as perceived by the performers.