Physical model synthesis with application to Internet acoustics

Distributed physical models of musical instruments have been used to acoustically “ping” Internet connections between two network hosts. Sound waves propagated through Internet acoustics behave just as in air, water or along a stretched string. In this case, a musical synthesis technique creates waves on the Internet path between two hosts. When waves recirculate between two endpoints, a musical tone is created if the round trip travel time lies within the range of our pitch sense (roughly 250µs to 50ms). The resulting tones provide a quick and intuitive evaluation of quality of service (QoS), displaying its significant aspects including latency, jitter and packet loss. Stable, clear tones with high pitch indicate good end-to-end capabilities that a path must support for immersive, real-time applications. A “network harp” recently demonstrated 320 synthesized strings oscillating across the Western half of the Internet2 Abilene Network.