Virtual Choir

This project concerns the use of electronic communication links for choral singing with participation by singers or groups of singers who are geographically remote from each other. They may be in concert halls, schools, churches or even at home, and they may be in the same city, the same country or in different countries. The intended application is amateur or semi-professional singing involving individuals or choral societies in towns and cities throughout Europe. The first technical parameter to be considered and the most important, is latency, i.e. delay. If an electronic link introduces too much delay, the interactive experience of singing in a choir will not be achieved. An important part of this work will be to investigate how much delay is acceptable. We need to consider how a conductor can control and rehearse a choir when the individual singers are remotely situated. Also, the required characteristics or 'quality of service' parameters of the electronic links must be determined and the acoustic properties of the electronic signals will need to be processed to allow the remote voices to be merged as though they were in one concert hall. Once the required quality of service, including latency, has been established, the means of delivering it must be considered. Very high speed network links are required, with new high speed routing protocols, delivering very high quality sound and reasonable video with acceptable end-to-end delay. Compared with the 300 ms that is considered acceptable for high quality telephone speech and video-conference links, it is already clear that the interactive music-making will make new demands on the latency of networks. The project will require an interest in choral singing and expertise in networks and digital signal processing.