Reid Oda will present his research seminar/general exam on Monday May 6 at 10AM in Room 402. The members of his committee are: Rebecca Fiebrink (advisor), Adam Finkelstein, and Tom Funkhouser. Everyone is invited to attend his talk and those faculty wishing to remain for the oral exam following are welcome to do so. His abstract and reading list follow below. --------------------------- ABSTRACT: The Internet allows musicians and other artists to collaborate remotely with one another. However, network latency presents a fundamental challenge for remote collaborators who need to coordinate and respond to each other's performance in real time. Latencies of more than 55 ms round-trip make it difficult for performers to synchronize with one another. Each performer slows down to keep in time with the other, causing the performance to fall apart. Researchers have optimized client software in order to reduce latency as far as possible, but the leading cause of the latency, the architecture of the Internet, is beyond the control of the user. Recently a system was developed to recognize patterns in the music being played, and to synthesize those same classes of patterns on the far end of the connection. This allows musicians to "play" in synchrony, but because of the pattern-level granularity of the synthesis algorithm, the receiver will not hear actual notes being played by the sender. I present a system which attempts note-level prediction. The system predicts percussion hits before they have occurred, so that information about the predicted drum hit can be sent over a network, and the sound can be synthesized at a receiver's location at approximately the same moment the hit occurs locally. The system uses a high-speed camera to track a percussion mallet. It uses regression and pattern matching to predict the note, timing and velocity of the percussion hit. In order to synchronize music events in real-time, it uses a modified version of Marzullo's clock synchronization algorithm. I show that it is possible to predict a percussion note within the bounds of perceptual synchrony, 30-40 ms before the event occurs. A 40 ms lead time means that two artists in Boston and New York city could potentially play together with perfect synchrony. TEXT: E. R. Miranda and M. M. Wanderley, New Digital Musical Instruments. A-R Editions, Inc., 2006. (Chapter 3) J. P. Caceres, “Synchronization Of Rhythmic Performance With Delay,” 2013. (Chapters 6 & 7) A. Greenbaum and T. P. Chartier, Numerical Methods. Princeton University Press, 2012. S. Dahl, “Striking movements: A survey of motion analysis of percussionists,” Acoust. Sci. & Tech., vol. 32, no. 5, pp. 168–173, 2011. J. P. Caceres and C. Chafe, “JackTrip: Under the hood of an engine for network audio,” Journal of New Music Research, vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 183–187, 2010. P. Oliveros, S. Weaver, M. Dresser, J. Pitcher, J. Braasch, and C. Chafe, “Telematic music: six perspectives,” Leonardo Music Journal, vol. 19, no. 1, pp. 95–96, 2009. (Chapter 3) M. Sarkar, “Tablanet: a real-time online musical collaboration system for indian percussion,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2007. J. P. Lewis, “Fast template matching,” vol. 95, no. 120123, pp. 15–19, 1995. M. V. Mathews, “The radio baton and conductor program, or: Pitch, the most important and least expressive part of music,” Computer Music Journal, pp. 37–46, 1991. K. Marzullo and S. Owicki, “Maintaining the time in a distributed system,” pp. 295–305, 1983. V. Cerf and R. Kahn, “A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication,” Communications, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 22, no. 5, pp. 637–648, 1974.