Currently, conducting in-person rehearsals is difficult (especially for wind musicians and vocalists). However, conducting these rehearsals over Zoom is also not possible simply due to latency: the time difference between sending and receiving audio is too great in a program like Zoom for rehearsals to be possible without significant delays and a lack of rhythmic unity. A latency of more than 150 ms is noticeable in speech, but playing music has a much lower threshold: any higher than about 25 ms makes playing rhythms accurately and together nearly impossible.
Jack and JackTrip are two audio routing programs that work together to send audio more directly between computers, no matter the physical distance between them. However, online guides recommend the following:
- An ethernet cable
- This isn't about upload/download speed so much as constant, uninterrupted connection. Even the fastest wireless internet sends and receives data in packets, while ethernet maintains a constant connection. I haven't been using an ethernet cable and I haven't had issues (yet), but if you have one available to you, use it.
- Internet speeds of at least 5 Mbps upload/download
- JackTrip is best run on a university's internet connection, but with home internet connections improving, running this software at home should also (hopefully!) work.
Check out the following links for more info:
- Michael Dessen is a pioneer in composing and playing telematic music, in which performers appear together virtually and are often hundreds of miles apart. He has a great guide on how he makes this work.
- John Williamson and Sam Leak put together a (two-hour) Zoom tutorial that basically goes over the same things as this repository will.
To get started, navigate to the "Install Jack qjackctl" page above, or click here.