
Connecting disconnected musicians
Music making is a social activity. We form creative connections – and ultimately communities and friendships – when we make music together. We ask: how can we make meaningful musical connections when performers are in fact in different locations?

Equipment and cost
In order to achieve an immersive experience online, sound and video quality are important. But the higher quality that is required, the more expensive the equipment needed, and that equipment might be out of the price range of amateur musicians. We ask: what is the minimum set up required to achieve a meaningful musical experience?

Equipment and complexity
The more equipment used, the more specialist skill that is needed to operate that equipment. We ask: how can we make our technical set up as simple – and as invisible – as possible, in order to allow focus on the music making?

Echo and feedback
When multiple locations each have active microphones and speakers, echo and feedback can form: the sound of me coming out of the speakers in your computer is picked up by the microphone in your computer and sent back to me. How can that echo, and the potential for feedback, be suppressed in order to make music online? And how can this be achieved in a way that does not degrade the quality of the audio signal, and that allows multiple locations to make sound at the same time?

Latency
Whenever a signal has to travel over a network there is a short delay before it arrives – the signal latency. When performing music – which often requires musicians to make sounds at the same time – that latency disrupts the possibility of playing together. What techniques can we use to limit latency? And how might we compose music that seeks to embrace latency as part of its content, rather than seek to avoid it?

Bandwidth
Audio and video signals can use large amounts of bandwidth. Compression of these digital data streams – using encoding and decoding – can reduce the amount of bandwidth required but typically at the cost of increased latency. What is an acceptable trade-off between quality audio/video streams and latency in networked music collaborations? And how can that quality be maintained when communities are many miles from the high-speed Internet connections that other locations now enjoy?