TablaNet, an online musical collaboration system by Mihir Sarkar, may soon become a rave for percussionists across the globe
Nineteen years ago, Mihir Sarkar had organised a concert in India. He had come all the way from France, and brought with him smoke machines, black lights, strobes and scanners. Most Indians had not been exposed to this equipment at that time.
“I was born in Paris but my ancestral roots are in India. I used to go back to India (Pondicherry) annually. I learnt the flute, tabla, then Western music,” muses Sarkar, who also studied engineering.
During his 1992 visit, he managed to make friends with many Indian musicians. And when he returned to France, his band was eager to pursue the new collaboration. “We even included another friend (a guitarist living in the US) in the process. We exchanged multitrack audio cassettes (like many famous bands are said to have done), conversed over the telephone, sent letters and parcels back and forth. But our subsequent interactions were not satisfictory,” he recalls.
A few years later, still eager, with brand new e-mail accounts, Sarkar tried using the internet to exchange MIDI files. “Digital audio streaming was still out of our reach then…, and our enthusiasm faded out,” he rues.
Sarkar, however, had not forgotten the issue. When he came to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab, he “decided to take up the challenge and find a novel solution to solve this problem”. This he finally did with TablaNet — a computer system that enables real-time online musical collaboration between two tabla players from different parts of the world.
Sarkar wrote software that recognises drum strokes at one end, sends symbols representing the recognised stroke and its timing over the network, and predicts and synthesises the next stroke based on previous events at the other end. He used C-Sound — a computer programming language for dealing with sound. The C-based audio DSL was originally written at MIT by Barry Vercoe, Sarkar’s research guide.
The algorithms — the main part of the research undertaken in this project — rely on machine-listening and machine-learning models, which, in turn, are based upon digital signal processing, pattern classification, and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques.
Since the advent of the internet, notes Sarkar, musicians have been looking for a solution for online musical collaboration. “Thanks to the internet, musicians located in different countries can now aspire to play with each other almost as if they were in the same room. However, the time delays due to the inherent latency in computer networks — up to several hundreds of milliseconds over long distances — are unsuitable for musical applications,” says Sarkar.
Meanwhile, he admits there have been several commercial endeavors including from the defunct Rocket Network (1998) to Ninjam (2005), Audio Fabric (2007), and Lightspeed Audio Labs (2007).
Other musical collaboration sites with a social networking twist include indabamusic (2007) for non real-time collaboration, and eJamming (2007) for real-time performance (with documented lag). Jamglue (2007) and splice (2007) are two other websites where one can upload music and allow others to remix it. There has also been similar research at other universities.
“Although the systems described here propose attractive tools to foster online musical interactions and community building, they fall short of enabling worldwide collaboration in real-time involving all kinds of non-mainstream and non-Western music,” believes Sarkar.
“With a system such as TablaNet, we can imagine it would be possible for an instructor living in a city to teach music to children in villages who may not have regular access to a teacher otherwise,” notes Sarkar.
He also points out that the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) seems like an ideal platform to implement and distribute the TablaNet system since the built-in wireless mesh network capability can enable children to play music with each other at a distance through an ad-hoc network as well as through the internet.
Apart from distance education, preliminary testing also shows that the TablaNet system is suitable for distributed online “jamming”, especially in the context of musical call-and-response interactions, which are very well established in Indian music, and therefore carry relevance in entertainment (two amateur musicians wanting to “jam” together from their respective homes, or a live network music performance between musicians over long distances). Collaborations never heard before are thereby made possible, notes Sarkar.
“This is still at a research stage. We continue to invite Indian musicians from the Boston area. But the interesting part is that the results are satisfying,” concludes Sarkar who, incidentally, also heads the MIT Media Lab’s ‘India Inititiatives’ which aims to foster collaborations between the Media Lab and Indian organisations.
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