Results of the Fast-Music Project—Five Contributions to the Domain of Distributed Music

Due to the conventional “best-effort” approach that had no guarantee of packet delivery, the Internet was not initially developed for the purpose of sending real-time traffic. However, within the last 20 years and as part of the evolving trend of globalization along with distributed work processes, IP-based telecommunication has become a widely accepted and commonly used service. In that context a number of researchers have been investigating how far distributed communication on the Internet can be applied in terms of artistic music performances. Such a scenario exhibits signal delay boundaries tenfold less than the common video conferencing thresholds of 250 ms or more. Several successful results and actual implementations exist. However, apart from minor details, all of them share the same or at least similar approaches. In that context we established the fast-music research project in order to identify and develop novel approaches within this domain. In this paper we will present the final results of this project, which took place from 2016 to 2019. The target of fast-music was divided into five main goals: With respect to audio, we aimed for the development of a versatile streaming solution, the creation of a synchronizable standalone hardware and the installation of a server-based streaming solution. In terms of video, a latency-optimized capture/display component and an alternative IR-tracking based technology with 3D support was developed.