Feature-Based Analysis of the Effects of Packet Delay on Networked Musical Interactions

Networked Music Performance (NMP) is a mediated interactional modality with a tremendous potential impact on professional and amateur musicians, as it enables real-time interaction from remote locations. One of the known limiting factors of distributed networked performances is the impact of the unavoidable packet delay and jitter introduced by IP networks, which make it difficult to keep a stable tempo during the performance. This paper investigates the tolerance of remotely interacting musicians towards adverse network conditions. We do so for various musical instruments and music genres as a function of rhythmic complexity and tempo. In order to conduct this analysis we implemented a testbed for psychoacoustic analysis emulating the behavior of a real IP network in terms of variable transmission delay and jitter, and we quantitatively evaluated the impact of such parameters on the trend of the tempo maintained during the performance and on the perceptual quality of the musical interaction.