Through the anecdotes and experiences of musician Mike Rocha, pianist and coder Dan Tepfer, investor Mike McGinley, and Stanford professor Chris Chafe, we delve into the impact and development of music collaboration technology during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our guests give us valuable insight into the pandemic’s lasting impact on the music industry.
Through the anecdotes and experiences of musician Mike Rocha, pianist and coder Dan Tepfer, investor Mike McGinley, and Stanford professor Chris Chafe, we delve into the impact and development of music collaboration technology during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our guests give us valuable insight into the pandemic’s lasting impact on the music industry.
Welcome to the Drop the MIC podcast where we'll dive into conversations with some of the music industry's most established professionals. Like all of our episodes, what you will hear today has been created and curated by Stanford students who are breaking their way into the music scene. I'm Jay LeBouef and I lead Stanford University's music industry initiatives. Whether you're aspiring to launch your career in the music industry are already a music industry pro, or just curious to learn more. We've got you covered.
D'Andre Jorge:To start off this episode, we talked to the following student musicians.
Aditya Gupta:I'm a Aditya, I'm a music producer.
Jack Riley:My name is Jack Riley. I'm a producer right now.
Easha Nandyala:Hi, my name is Easha. I'm a 20 year old singer song writer.
Anthony Arya:I'm Anthony Arya I am a singer guitarist and songwriter.
Leah Waites:My artist's name is Gloom bug and I am Leah Waites.
D'Andre Jorge:While talking to them, they told us about their work...
Anthony Arya:I've been writing songs for the last, three or four years. In 2018, I was on NBC's the Voice.
Jack Riley:I'm producing a lot of hip hop for people.
Aditya Gupta:I tend to experiment with more sample-based and old school stuff.
Easha Nandyala:In January, I released my first EP that I wrote recorded and performed like fully in my bedroom because of the quarantine.
D'Andre Jorge:Some of the positive impacts the COVID-19 pandemic has had on their art...
Leah Waites:COVID really kind of forced me to explore art in ways that I hadn't before. I had so much time alone with myself that I realized how interested I was in music.
Jack Riley:I love kind of being able to take a step back from everything else be with my own thoughts and think about,"What do I want to make? Why is this important to me?" without the chatter of what's going on around me.
Easha Nandyala:I just recorded three other songs and put that on Spotify. I did it in the style of a passion project, which I feel like I haven't done in a while since I was really young and just starting. None of it would have happened without quarantine because mentally I was just in a totally different place.
D'Andre Jorge:and what new things they started doing as a result of the pandemic.
Anthony Arya:I wanted to, and sort of out of necessity, had to start doing a lot of live stream. I had done plenty of Facebook lives before and Instagram lives.
Easha Nandyala:I had been very consistently posting on Tik Tok. I posted this on my Tik Tok, it blew up to like, I would say like 300,000 views I posted on Instagram reels and that got like 4 million views, and my streams just skyrocketed.
Aditya Gupta:I started, using Discord because of the pandemic. I found a few different servers. Some had, you know, it's up to, a hundred, 200 people, some had like 20-30, and just get to know those people. And a lot of them were willing to just hop in voice chats. Had some people who worked in drill, some people were lo-fi, some people were EDM, et cetera.
Leah Waites:I release like a song in April I was like, this is super fun. And like, a lot of my friends listened to the song and they were like,"Oh cool." And it's like, there's no really like, downside to it.
D'Andre Jorge:They also agreed on the benefits of showcasing their work on social media...
Easha Nandyala:I think the thing with Tik Tok and Instagram is that when you have other people kind of paying attention and putting in their input, you get a lot of insight on how other people see the music.
Anthony Arya:In the live stream world, there's people tuning in from all over the world, which is, which is awesome. And there's people from Ireland, India, um, Australia. It's actually a lot more personal, I think, because one, the sound is lot better, so people could hear what I was saying in between songs and really paying attention.
Easha Nandyala:There is something really special about interacting, like answering questions and getting to know people that you never would have known ever.
Anthony Arya:For me as a song writer telling stories about my music and talking to people has been a nice way to connect, during the pandemic
D'Andre Jorge:and even told us about some of the equipment they use.
Anthony Arya:The pandemic music scene at first, it was just like, getting a bunch of equipment
Leah Waites:The first that's really important is like the technology.
Easha Nandyala:I was like, okay, I'm just gonna do a song, like write it, record it in like my Logic Pro
Anthony Arya:I started working with OBS, and getting my mixer set up and you know, just kind of working out the kinks, which took a lot of testing.
Leah Waites:Since I got an iPhone for the first time and was able to access Garage Band and realize all the crazy, AI instruments and some stuff and stuff that lets you do so much, even if you don't necessarily have certain musical knowledge. It was just easy to create songs. Like I could make a whole song in like a couple hours because it's like, I can just do the little notes and then do the little recording and then boom, you have a song.
Jack Riley:You really don't need anything. You need a mic in audio interface and a laptop. You're good to go. And part of that is like a little scary, then it's like, Oh, it's up to me." Like, we're like all on this playing field together
Leah Waites:There is so much that you can do with just a simple pair of Apple earbuds. Even if I can't get into a studio, it's really nice to be able to like, hear my own voice recorded on, equipment that makes it sound more professional and stuff that I had never experienced before. The equipment is super helpful, in a lot of ways, but it's not necessary.
D'Andre Jorge:Finally, they explained how they've been collaborating during the pandemic...
Jack Riley:what we lose from not being able to be in like a session with someone live in a studio, it's kind of replaced with a back and forth of like, they send me a version, I send them a version everything's written out, and it becomes super, super organized.
Aditya Gupta:Music production is actually very well-designed in that. you don't necessarily need to be in the same room as someone to work with them, or even to share ideas or your opinions about different projects. Sending back and forth audio files like,"Hey, I changed this. Now I put a filter over this section," or, you know,"I added a drum fill here. Do you like it?" Right. and it's always been like that. And then, you know, it's very easy to get big feedback that way
Anthony Arya:I record with, my producer and we sort of build up the albums that I've put out, uh, just me and him playing all the instruments. So my band doesn't come in with me to record.
Easha Nandyala:Co-writing has been all zoom. I did remote production with my producer. So like I would record vocals and instrumentation on here or we'd FaceTime and go through most of it.
D'Andre Jorge:and gave us their predictions on the state of music post COVID 19.
Leah Waites:I think that there's like a part of playing with people in a physical space together that can never really be recovered in virtual programming.
Easha Nandyala:I prefer live performances with an audience just because you feel the energy and there's also this sense of time and place.
Anthony Arya:Now we're in a place where we can do outdoor music and I am doing a lot of shows, and some with my band.
Aditya Gupta:It's probably going to change the way in which we actually end up working for some people, even after most people are vaccinated.
D'Andre Jorge:Welcome to the Stanford University Drop the MIC podcast. We're your hosts, D'Andre Jorge,
Shreya Ravi:and Shreya Ravi,
D'Andre Jorge:and as just revealed by the previous compilation you just heard, we will be exploring how music technology is being used to collaborate and adapt to the changes caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the course of the next 50 minutes or so, you will hear from professional musician Mike Rocha, Stanford university professor Chris Chafe, seasoned technology investor Michael McGinley, and, finally, jazz pianist and coder Dan Tepfer. That being said, please sit back and enjoy. To begin, we spoke with Mike Rocha: a Los Angeles-based music artist who's made music for numerous movies and worked with artists such as Chance the Rapper.
Mike Rocha:My career is centered around live and recording as an artist, primarily a trumpet player. I've done some producing in the past and I've done a handful of teaching over the years, both in masterclass settings and at colleges.
D'Andre Jorge:After introducing himself, we asked Mike how music technology has impacted his career both before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, in addition to the changes he's noticed with said technology.
Mike Rocha:Yeah, a couple of things have happened. One is that, you have the ability to record with such a small amount of equipment, which is a really nice feature If you have a computer, you essentially, you have a digital audio workstation, you have a device that can power your microphone, and you're good to go. You're able to do live and production right there, like you're done. You don't need tens of thousands of dollars worth of gear to get rolling anymore. It used to be that you had to get Pro Tools, which required a subscription, which required a really, quite a sizeable investment to get their outport gear. And it's not that user-friendly, you know, I don't use Pro Tools. I don't necessitate something that intense for what I do at home. More and more people are moving to Logic overall. I'd say another thing in regard to that, that really changed my job is the folks that you work with. That changed heavily very quickly, you know, before it was like, you're, you're really only seeing a lot of mostly trusted, and reputable people. And now it's like, anybody can make music very easily and quickly, like with the advent of like Ableton and Logic comes on your computer. And now some guy in an apartment is working with people in Belize or something. And, it's the global advent of the internet, the computer programs coming together and just human ingenuity and a willingness to explore. And you can come up so much faster now. It's, changed the ability for that music to get out there. You know, before it would be much more localized. You know, the internet has changed a ton of that and our social fabric, as we know it has changed intensely because of the internet. So again, trickling down into music. It's an ever evolving field and it's only speeding up. You know, technology is only making things go quicker and I feel like session musicians as a whole there's less and less because the work is going away more and more as people get more and more capable in the computer, you know. Why do I need a live drummer? Obviously if you hire somebody who's been playing drums for 35 years, they might have better ideas about drumming than you do, but some people are just cheap or you can't afford it. It's expensive. Studio musicians are expensive and that's just the reality of it. You're paying for all those years of experience.
D'Andre Jorge:Moving forward, we asked Rocha to explain how the pandemic has impacted his recording practices and what struggles musicians are facing at this time.
Mike Rocha:Until more recently, home recording was part of my life and I had built a studio at home, but, the primary, means of conveyance for me was in person. So yeah, that all came to a screeching halt, once the first lockdown happened and then all of a sudden, all live gigs were canceled, and we're not going into the studio anymore. I've been in the studio two times for live recordings since the first lockdown. It is happening in very small reserved instances, but by and large it's, stopped. Immediately things shifted to home recording, but keep in mind that production largely also halted for major studios, both in the filming capacity and creation, you know, writers, aren't getting together in rooms and, it's just become very difficult for production in general. So music is going to feel that in a trickle-down sense, because music generally gets added on to film, towards the end of the process. So, um we ended up feeling it, you know, no matter what in a big way as everyone kind of feels it. But, I've done a couple movies, from home currently and, uh, it's okay. I feel fine recording at home. You know, I've done a lot of it. Every musician is going through something different right now, in regards to what we're experiencing and having things taken away from you, the ability to like, do what you've been doing. And so, some people are remaining more positive than others. You know, some people are really feeling the effects and, uh, it's different for everyone.
D'Andre Jorge:Continuing on, we then asked Rocha about the impact COVID-19 has had on studio work and what the current state of the music industry looks like.
Mike Rocha:As far as studio work, I think that there is a lot of damage being done right now, to be honest. I think it's really pushed the gas pedal down towards the, uh, the shrinking, just speeding it up You know, we, contractors and musicians, were doing a lot of fighting and advocating for bringing work back to LA and gaining ground. You know, we were really doing a lot, like I did a, um, I've done a lot of work for HBO. Like I did that show Euphoria. They wanted to, they wanted to push you forward to get to Nashville, you know? And so in LA we agreed to do, uh, the first season, uh, non-union. And it's been working, you know, we've been able to really showcase the expertise of the studio musician and how much that truly does matter. You know, you do, if you want to outsource an orchestra and you can take it to a foreign country, you know, that's where the musicians will work for very little but the reality is that the finished product is, uh, it's a pale comparison to what you're going to get in LA of having not only the caliber of musician, but also the caliber of the studio engineer, the equipment, the microphones, the rooms, the post-production engineers, you know, everything. So, like I said, we were having good success, really good success at moving work that had left LA and bringing it back. So we were, we were gaining, we were gaining we're gaining and now it's like, dude, you know, it's, it's, it's uh, it's bad. I mean, I don't know. I honestly don't know anybody who's like working even in a similar-ish capacity. It's quiet. It's quiet. And to go from where it was to this, it's eyeopening, you know, and again, me being a realist, like I like to read the writing on the wall, or at least what I think is the writing on the wall. And it's like, wow. I went from working constantly to, I'm not doing hardly anything in music. You know, hardly anything that's scary. And, and then I look up to the people that are 25, 30 years older than me, that are really on top of the pile, as far as the career musicians and they're not working, it's like, man, if they're not working, who's working? I think that music itself will always be alive and well, it's just evolving. Studio recording, I think, is It's maybe going to be more of like a blip in history, where it was once this really great art form that people gave themselves to, and these musicians are incredible. You know, they are unbelievable. The, the levels that they've achieved in sight reading and flexibility. My God, like it's really a masterful thing. It's sad to see it go this way, because people will become that anymore. The whole thing about like pushing yourself in that direction. Like me, I'm intentionally classical trained and I'm intensely jazz trained, and then everything that experience brings in, too. That's going to just like, I don't know, where's it going to go? Like, if there's no demand for it. Right? You think that even with the ability to record at home, everybody has the equipment and the software and the, this and the, that. And it's like, where are the calls? You know, I'm not getting hit up to do hardly anything. Nothing to pay my bills, you know, not enough money to even get that far.
D'Andre Jorge:Finally we asked Rosha about the return of live music, post COVID-19 and his thoughts on the lasting impact of the pandemic.
Mike Rocha:I think live music will, will resurface stronger, than studio recording will, just simply because people want to play. There's that, that visceral connection that you get, you know, when you're out there and you're putting yourself out there in the moment and giving a live performance and getting energy back from your audience. I think that's, that's just something that will never, ever go away, no matter what. People do it for free, you know. They'll just have a day job and play for fun, you know, and that's their thing. And, studio recordings, like all I did was music, you know, I didn't have something to fall back on or, have a backbone of income, you know, where it was, I'm recording and I'm performing. That's all I was doing. So it's just, it's a different approach for someone like me. And, I do think live is going to come back. It's already back look at Texas, you know, like they, they're doing comedy clubs. They're back, you know, it's all kinds of stuff is already, uh, going, uh, at the willingness of, of getting COVID. They're getting sick. They're just getting out there. I guess they just don't, uh, I don't know, they I ain't scared of anything, but a live music has always persevered. I really do associate like with being a realist and[the] music industry was already hurting. It's been hurting for a lot of years since well, before, even the 1980s, uh, it's been shrinking, uh, on a whole. In LA there's this thing called the Nifty One-Fifty. The Nifty One-Fifty are the 150 people that are basically the chosen ones that get to do the majority of the studio work. 150 people that really handle all that. And I know that, of course it's not the entire, the entirety of the people involved. Like a lot of stuff gets outsourced. So, you know, if you're in the San Francisco symphony, you're going to see a lot of work for video games. London Philharmonic does almost primarily all the Disney stuff. Um, you know, work is moving around the world now at this point. Uh, and so that's been going on before the pandemic. But, uh, I, I think that, um, COVID is going to have, um, a lasting effect. I think that the effects of the pandemic are going to last in music, as long as people can remember the pandemic. Like until you can truly forget about it, like it doesn't occur to you anymore. I'm going to call a 90 person orchestra session. Right. And it doesn't cross your mind that,"how am I going to get 90 people at Fox Studios with, and I need to have everyone 12 feet apart or whatever," you know. It's like, until you can get over that mental reaction, then I think there's, there's going to be an effect and what, what we're going to experience and what we already are experiencing is less people getting hired, because you need to get this space between everybody and with brass players, and wind instrumentalists in general, it's 12 feet. It's not six feet, it's 12. So to have a trumpet section, you're talking about 48 feet just between them. That's a big deal studios generally, aren't that huge, and the big ones have been going under because the necessity for large recording stages has been shrinking for again, decades. So, that's part of my unpopular opinion is that I think that it's not gonna come raging back and you know, like,"Oh, you know, once we're out of this, there's going to be a ton of production." And I'm not saying that that is a possible, and it can't happen. It could happen.
D'Andre Jorge:We now transition to a short interview with Michael McGinley, a technology investor who used to travel with some of the biggest musical acts such as Michael Jackson. Now an advisor for the streaming service Napster. We asked McGinley for his thoughts on technology and the impact it's had on music.
Mike McGinley:Good question. I spent most of my career live. Okay. And the best sounding music recorded is when you have real musicians playing. That natural feel that you're capturing in the studio. You can't get that off a computer having said that. Can you grade something with Garage Band in your home for kids that want to get started? Cause yeah, back when I was on the road, it cost$2 million to record a record. Big barrier. Okay. The fact that you can communicate and record remotely or with connect with friends, that's a big deal, because it enables you to do a lot more things that you normally couldn't do, or that would be expensive to do. I mean, right now with COVID, you couldn't be going to school without all the technology. 10 years ago, I'm not sure the internet would have been robust enough and everybody's home to do Zoom calls all day. Probably not. So I think all that's good. A lot of, lot of music is a collaboration with multiple people. So I think that's a big deal. I don't know if it's going to make music better. The fact that they're working more together might make it better, to have an opportunity to work more together. I'm not trying to be anti-technology. The technology has definitely made it easier to record and be creative. I just, I don't think the music is better with more technology.
Shreya Ravi:Next we spoke with Stanford university professor Chris Chafe, who has been developing JackTrip, a tool to allow musicians to collaborate remotely. We spoke to him about JackTrip and how he got started in music technology.
Chris Chafe:so JackTrip is a multi machine Internet audio transport system. So you can have JackTrip audio flowing between many machines with many channels at very little latency. Background personal side of things is family environment that led me into the world of music and science at a really young age. I think it was just, there in the air with my parents both musicians, both science teachers. And, I guess, the rest is pretty predictable. The result was, early love of the world of the music that I was playing, but also I think sound in general, and so I'm really lucky. I found a career, which combines my passions. Beautifully supported at an early age by teachers who let me range far and wide. At the same time with fantastic mentors on the engineering and science side- I think back to the fifth, sixth grade for that. You have people in your life that just shaped things, right? And because of their generosity, boom, that continued right up through college and then into graduate school, having had fantastic opportunities and mentors digital computing came along just at the point where I was probably really receptive to this you know. And, got fascinated by computer programming and, the fact that I could tie computer programming into experimenting with sound was also kinda early on a unique thing. And I came to Stanford to work with, kind of like, the first-generation folks that were experimenting, you know. Digital computers that could do that kind of stuff- that was really rare. The other part of this luck is people who have the same passion and being able to be around them and have a culture evolve, right. And that happened at Stanford, too. So I waltzed into a scene and that is the same scene today. At the computer music center, we have over 350 participants and they're all great people bringing all this individuality and, you know, diverse approach So we have a kind of scene that's more fun every day. Here we are in the pandemic. We're often, separate little satellite computer music centers. I'm in my home and we're very connected. One of the ways we're connected is, fortuitously, that home networking got to this level where we can support digital audio flowing from home to other home with enough reliability that it actually works really well. But, you know, a half dozen years ago when I moved into the place I'm in now, I couldn't do it. I could not have a flow of uncompressed audio to Stanford and back without a whole lot of hiccups in it. It sounded horrible. Along comes lockdown in March. Try it again. I'm getting six channels perfectly. Such a wonderful moment, you know, because I'm not alone. There's just a really new kind of medium there, you know. Eventually we would have discovered it, but we were brought into this we were led into this by necessity. Probably why we're having this interview today, because it's been going really well.
Shreya Ravi:Along with Chafe, we also talked to Dan Tepfer, a pianist, composer, and coder who has been utilizing JackTrip during the pandemic.
Dan Tepfer:My name is Dan and I'm a pianist, composer, and coder. I always had these, two interests. These two worlds, kind of, surrounding me from a very young age- the world of science and the world of art. I gravitated towards jazz very naturally at an early age. I loved improvisation, just always really spoke to me in the sense of having agency and being able to just be yourself in music in the moment. That always felt amazing to me. But at the same time, I also got really passionate about physics. And so for my undergrad, I actually studied astrophysics, uh, and still, did a lot of music on the side. I was constantly playing gigs. And then, for my masters, I went to the new England conservatory and did a masters in jazz piano performance. I'd been coding, just for fun all through my teens, but I just kind of put it aside in my twenties, focused like a hundred percent on just being a jazz musician And, for kind of random reasons like needing to practice a certain musical exercise, I started coding again and started integrating programming into my musical practice. I started working with the Yamaha Disklavier which is this fully acoustic piano that that can act as a player piano you can send it commands and it will play. I've written these algorithms that improvise with me in real time and also generate a visual representation of the music as it's being created. That's been really exciting for me. So, that brings us to like right before the pandemic, and, I just totally by chance, because a friend of mine asked me if it might be possible to play real-time music between Hawaii and New York, I discovered Jack trip. I didn't know anything about realtime music making over the internet before the pandemic and just immediately dove deeply into it and haven't looked back. I've been doing a ton of it through the entire pandemic. And also I think I'm one of the only people doing this, but I've been doing regular ticketed live streams where I actually sell tickets to these live. duo concerts, throughout the pandemic with, uh, you know, really great artists like Christian McBride, Cécile McLorin Salvant, Fred Hersch, um, Melissa Aldana, um, et cetera. And that's been hugely important to me through the pandemic.
Shreya Ravi:To get some more insight on using JackTrip. We asked both Chafe and Tepfer about their experiences with the app and how latency impacts the process.
Chris Chafe:When it's up and running and you connect with somebody else and you can kind of get a sense of the way audio should be then it's, pretty rewarding. I got to say, you know, there's a lot of those kind of stunned moments where, you know, you, you were so used to. Communicating over a distance with a not so good audio sound and that once you get a good audio sound, it's a contrast, right? The next stage is like you start playing with somebody and for so many of us that haven't been able to play with somebody for nine months now, that's a huge, huge, moment. It's really fun to be there when it happens.
Dan Tepfer:And so then the other thing, the other big development has been my use of JackTrip, which also, I didn't know anything about before the pandemic and, as a jazz improviser, The ability to play to really be improvising with another musician to be in that conversation is just like almost essential to my wellbeing, I would say. It was about six weeks into the pandemic that I did JackTrip for the first time with my friend Jorge Roeder, who's a phenomenal jazz bassist. And we were like almost crying when it first happened because we hadn't played with another human than in six weeks. And that's a really long time for us. Like we're doing this on a daily basis. If you were used to being hugged by somebody you love every day and it just disappeared for six weeks When you finally got that hug back you'd be like"Oh thank God!", you know? I put a lot of work into getting JackTrip working in a very powerful way where you literally feel like you can make very intricately rhythmic music with another person, as long as they're relatively nearby. And so through the pandemic, I've been able to have these meaningful musical exchanges with great musicians and, um, That's been amazing. In terms of creative process at a kind of a meta level, I would say it's not very different in the sense that at the end of the day, I've worked very hard my whole life to, to be a competent jazz musician. And what that means is, I care about. Playing together in rhythm, making good melodies, improvising harmonic pathways together. So all of these things remain front and center the like essential values of music that I care about and ultimately what I'm doing is using JackTrip as a way to still be able to deal with music in this serious way that I've come to value so much. So in other words, the creative process remains the same, but I have noticed some important differences. For example, in order to get the latency, so low that we're really able to play. For example, with like Christian McBride, you know, we were playing. Like Donna Lee about that fast or actually even faster. So, something that fast, I mean, your latency has to be extremely low. Just as a comparison, it takes sound one millisecond to travel one foot in air, approximately. So in other words, if you have 20 millisecond latency, that's like playing with someone who's 20 feet away from you and 20 feet away from you makes it pretty tough to play those kinds of rhythms. Like you're going to feel that latency. So, what we are actually hearing in our headphones when we're doing these, these duos, in many cases is pretty choppy. It's got noise in it. Because, you know, we're pretty experienced musicians, we can kind of hear through that. So, so a lot of the time we're listening through a lot of noise, and what that means is it really has an effect on the music. What it means is that you have to play with great clarity. For example, I've done three two-piano concerts and two-piano improvisation is a particularly challenging thing because you're constantly kind of stepping on each other's toes. You're playing the same instrument. It sounds the same. You're in the same range, unless you're very careful to avoid each other's range. So it's tough and you have to be listening really closely. And when you play in a concert type situation, you can tend to like step on each other's toes quite a bit. And what I've found is doing it with JackTrip, because of the limitations of what you're hearing, you just naturally play very purposeful, very clear. You simplify, you put less density into your harmonic textures, and ultimately those are good things. Those are things that lead towards a more communicative and, I would say, more powerful music. So that's been a really interesting side effect of, of using JackTrip.
Chris Chafe:The more traditional uses of, of this is really replacing people's need to be in the same room playing music together. So, typically that's a distance that, for classical or jazz or folk, it's kind of like within 600 miles or a thousand kilometers. So, up and down California, it kind of works. There's a lot of music that's less latency sensitive. I mean, it's music that you really want to hear really, really well what the other folks are doing, but maybe you don't care about playing kind of in the groove and a fast tempo. Once you relax that latency constraint, then you can start to stretch, right? So there's a lot of music being played, very long haul between continents. I find that to be like almost a frontier, because you're connecting with people you've never actually been physically with- might be new acquaintances entirely musically speaking- and you start making music. And this goes back way pre COVID because this really was where Jack trip got its inception for these more, distant types of concerts and jams. To play with somebody that you've never met who's on another continent, way different time zone. You start making the music together and you discover that you're really on a wavelength together. You get into that kind of frontier. You make music that you haven't experienced before and you make wonderful connections with other musicians that way. And it's musical connection.
Shreya Ravi:We also asked Tepfer about some of the work he's done during the pandemic.
Dan Tepfer:One of the things I've done during the pandemic is, I've been doing a lot of duets right. And even trios with other people. But some of these people are too far away. For example, uh, I have a good friend who is a brilliant singer in Melbourne Australia and, you know, that's massive latency. There's no way that even with Jack chip, you're going to be able to really play in rhythm together. Right. And so I was thinking about what can we do together? That's not going to be just like, The stupid thing where like I keep playing the chords of a song and she sings over them and I'm hearing her like two seconds later, you know, what can I do that is more meaningful and embraces the, the latency that's there. I came up with this idea that I made a webpage with a piano on it, and she can just click a note on the, on this piano. And that note will start trembling on my piano here. So the note will start trembling and, and then if she presses another note, that note will also start trembling so I'm enabling my duet partner to control my piano here through a webpage. she can lay down some notes that play and, and these are like, they're not rhythmic, right? It's just like kind of a bed of sound, a pad. And so then the game is, it's an improvisation game. She'll start singing, she'll improvise with it. She'll make up a melody, a, you know, makeup ideas. Um, and then she can push a button that just says transform. And it will move these notes in a certain way. And so she doesn't have control over that. It's just transform. And then it's like this kind of profound and, um, hearing game where the, the notes of change. How do you adapt to that? And how do you direct your improvisation? So what it is is it's an evolving set of constraints and that's what we like as improvisers. You have to have somebody to push against you. You have to have something to bounce off of. So that's not only does it make sense in the new context, but maybe it also connects to what you were doing before. So this is a really fun game that involves, you know, algorithms and coding, and also responds to the need for something that doesn't require low latency. There's something else that I did during the pandemic that, uh, I would not have done otherwise. And that, that I thought was pretty cool. Uh, there's a presenter in Japan, um, who invited me to do a live stream of natural machines to his Japanese audience and in Japan, in his region of Japan, in Kyushu, the COVID numbers are low enough that they have public performances. Um, people wear masks, but they're all doing live performances in a room. Um, and, and so not only did he want to do a live stream of natural machines, but he asked, is there any way that we could have a Disklavier there that would play what you're playing so that we'd be hearing acoustic sound. So we got in touch with Yamaha, Japan, and it turns out that it was possible to bring a Disklavier concert piano to the venue that they did it in a, in a science museum actually. In the atrium of the science museum. So it was possible to bring this piano. And then, the question was, can I make this happen? And I, um, I actually ended up writing it all in JavaScript. Uh, I made it basically, all they need to do is open a webpage on their end, which is actually being hosted on my computer here as, as acting as a server. And that web page connects to their local MIDI device, which in this case is the Disklavier piano. And then every time I play something here, not only when I play something, but when the computer plays something, that's being sent to Japan, and also I had to build a buffering system because with that kind of distance, you get very different lag times in data transmission. So that gets sent to this other piano and it gets buffered and then they can adjust the latency there so that it matches the stream, the visuals of the live stream that I'm doing, which I was doing just through it, through a YouTube unlisted stream. And it actually worked really, really well. So, so basically the audience was treated to a live stream where I am performing live. And all the sound is coming in real time, uh, from an acoustic piano. Basically, it's like, I'm playing the piano over there. I was really excited that we pulled it off.
Shreya Ravi:Capping off the conversation, we asked Chafe about the future of JackTrip and its development.
Chris Chafe:I think the more practical, immediate things that we're doing today that I think will endure have to do with, probably not replacing the fact that it's really enjoyable to play music together physically and be in the same space, but some of the preparation that goes into that is sometimes a little cumbersome. In a group that might be made of different sections, you know, like a large orchestra or big band there's always time spent like working on subsections of the ensemble. It's kind of a hassle to form those sectional rehearsals. This is like a really, really obvious benefit to be able to like, prepare the rhythm section before the main rehearsal where everybody, drives to the hall. And even with a coach and maybe the coach is on the other side of the country. That's going to be doable because we're already doing it now. The more far-fetched stuff though is, you start to kind of take some of what we're talking about and put it into a more kind of XR environment where, you're inhabiting a space with other folks. There's a sense of presence that you want to build. That's, you know, gonna have a lot of components. One of them is audio. you know, first of all, make a kind of, audio experience with some veracity so that it really feels like a space an illusionary space that has walls and angles other inhabitants. The next thing is kind of from the artistic point of view, what's the synthetic version that isn't really reproducing reality, but create something very new that we haven't experienced before. That takes us all the way into computer music or computer art. There's always been kind of like this benchmark of like, we're going to reproduce reality. you know, there's been research trying to create a really good synthesis of the violin and get the rich sound make it, just be perfect. And, that's a benchmark. That's one aspect of computer music and acoustics. The other side is, well, we know something about that, but you know, now that it's in this form of a model, we can manipulate that model and we can create things that are never before heard. And also might be very tantalizing, might be very musical give new sonic possibilities to the artists. I see that in the XR world happening, I mean, it already is. One thing that I've been putting out there is when we do JackTrip sessions with the music department we actually have servers running that take the place of rooms. I mean, that's their function. And so from my house, I connect to a room that's actually just a computer server and there's other people connecting in and we hear each other. And to some extent, we try to get a little bit of a room, feel like a acoustic with some reverb and spatialization, but what about taking that a whole other level, right? You know, what about a room that's full of alien harps? Strings that are excited by wind blowing through. Wouldn't you like to be in a room for like that and play your instrument for a little while? I mean, just to find out. You know.
Shreya Ravi:As COVID-19 has ushered in a world of limited physical interaction, live musicians who rely on collaboration have faced a unique challenge in continuing to create. Innovative music technologies like JackTrip pave the way for new forms of remote music collaboration that have connected musicians during the pandemic. In an increasingly digital atmosphere, they allow us to reimagine how music can be performed and experienced. We want to give a huge thanks to Chris Chafe, Mike Rocha, Michael McGinley, and Dan Tepfer, for providing their thoughts, opinions, and experiences for this episode. If you would like to hear some of Tepfer's music, be sure to check out his YouTube channel or website at dantepfer.com. Likewise, you can find some of Rocha's work on his own website at mikerochamusic.com. If you'd like to try JackTrip out for yourself, check out the JackTrip Foundation at jacktrip.org. D'Andre and I co-produced this podcast along with Ryan Wixen and Nathan Sariowan. Ryan and Nathan also produced the music. Thanks for listening!