IEEE Spectrum July, 2007 - 43

RESOURCES
music players across some 2600 km, performing in real time in Russia, Ukraine,
and the United Kingdom.
Right now, Musigy just comes in
an invitation-only beta version. Vonog
says that the commercial version will
probably offer a two-tier pricing structure. "Basic functionality like jamming
or recording will be free," he says. "But
if you want to upload all your rehearsals or hold live concerts, there will be a
premium charge."
Another tack, implemented by a company called eJamming (http://ejamming.
com), is to cut lag by compressing data.
That way, instead of swapping megabytesize sound files, you could use mere kilobytes to describe when and what kind of
notes each instrument plays. "The analogy is a player piano with the small holes
in the piano roll, which trigger the player
piano to make sound," says eJamming
founder Alan Jay Glueckman. His compression standard is the familiar MIDI
(Musical Instrument Digital Interface).
The company, based in Valley Village,
Calif., and Orlando, Fla., now offers eJamming on a monthly subscription basis.
Subscribers can sign on to the eJamming
Web site and play with any other member
who is connected. Glueckman cautions,
however, that lag times begin to become
noticeable at distances between about
320 km and 800 km.
"Some people feel it, some people
don't," he says. "Some people will never
be able to do more than 15 or 20 [ms]."
In March, eJamming announced its
new AUDiiO package, which opens eJamming sessions up to as many as 16 lowbandwidth MIDI tracks and eight regular (high-bandwidth) audio tracks, such
as guitar or vocals. Glueckman has also
expressed interest in bringing eJamming
AUDiiO to Second Life, the massive multiplayer environment where people meet
via gamelike avatars.
Another approach to lag is to embrace
it. Ninjam, a free, open-source program,
does so by intentionally lagging each participant exactly one bar, much as choirs
do when they sing rounds of "Row, Row,
Row Your Boat."
Ninjam (http://ninjam.com) was conceived in large part by Justin Frankel, one
of the creators of the peer-to-peer filesharing program Gnutella and the audio
player Winamp. "Sometimes when you're
playing in person, you don't always pay
really close attention to what other people

are doing," he says. "So how would you
know if you're playing with their current
measure or their previous measure?"
The Ninjam session leader programs
in the number of beats-per-minute and
beats-per-measure in advance, the way
you might plug a starting balance into a
new Quicken account. Each participant
then hears a metronome-click track to
ensure everyone's on beat and an audio
stream that Ninjam says will sound different to every user.
"This is obviously more suited to freeform experimentation than to rehearsing
songs, because when you actually have
changes it's very difficult to synchronize," says Frankel.
Ninjam is already available on Second
Life. In October, the London vocalist and
keyboardist Leo Wolff, aka Slim Girl
Fat, hosted "Metajam" by using Ninjam
to allow eight performers from Japan,
the United States, and the UK to play
together on a virtual stage before an
audience of 100 avatars, logged in from
around the world.
"The crowd stood mostly stock still
as Ricardo Sprocket, Komuso Tokugawa,
and others played a medley of folk-slashindie rock tunes that were easily as good
as anything I've heard in New York clubs,"
wrote The New York Times' Matt Gross.
Wolff plans to hold a second Metajam
later this year, after she completes her
next album.
Da n Su l l iva n (avata r na me, Jazz
Glineux) holds Ninjam sessions in Second
Life at his private performance space
and recognizes the earmarks of a classic
rivalry between Ninjam and eJamming
users. "Ninjam users tend to be skeptical about eJamming," Sullivan says. "It's
a bit of the Microsoft pay model versus
the free Linux thing."
He says that just 10 ms of lag time is
enough to notice and even trip over. He
therefore remains skeptical about using
Musigy, eJamming, and eJamming AUDiiO
beyond a limited geographical range.
"Ten milliseconds," he said, "is about
900 miles, assuming an ideal point-topoint optical link between two players,
from what I figure. And the Internet ain't
no perfect connection."
n

ABouT ThE AuThor
MArk ANdErSoN is an author and freelance writer based in Northampton, Mass.
his work has appeared in Wired, Harper's,
Discover, and Rolling Stone.
www.spectrum.ieee.org

http://ejamming http://www.ninjam.com http://www.spectrum.ieee.org

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum July, 2007