Matthew Teeter

Information & Computer Science Daniel Lindsey Information & Computer Science

Matthew Teeter was looking for research topics that combined computers and music when he discovered Professor Dobrian’s similar interests. He promptly started working on this project, which he says has helped him refine his interests and discover a topic about which he is deeply passionate. One of the highlights of Matthew’s research experience has been the relationship he has developed with Professor Dobrian throughout the project. Matthew hopes to work in the music software industry, creating software that promotes musical education and music in general. His advice to potential researchers is, “By all means, go for it!”





Daniel Lindsey credits his undergraduate research experience with developing his communications skills and work ethic, skills he will use throughout his future years in the workplace. For his project, working alongside his peer, Matthew Teeter, Daniel designed new experiments aimed toward discovering knowledge, rather than following established techniques. He enjoyed working with MaxMSP to create the software they used in their studies, and found the weekly meetings with his fellow researcher and their mentor to be consistently valuable. Daniel’s advice to new researchers is to make sure to find a project you really enjoy, something that will be “more of a hobby and less of a chore.”

With the increasing prevalence of broadband Internet connections, people are exploring new applications that rely upon a low-latency communication medium. One such application is networked musical performances, in which physically-separated performers simultaneously play instruments that are connected via the Internet. In this study, we combined empirical data about latency (delays) inherent in the transmission of information via the Internet with psychoacoustic information about the ability of players to synchronize their playing and discern independent musical events. We used this information to decide how feasible it would be to conduct networked musical performances over local-area networks (LANs), wireless local-area networks (WLANs), and even wide-area networks (WANs). The latency data we collected implies that successful networked performances can occur if the network latency is less than the time needed to perceive musical events as simultaneous, and less than the ability of the players to synchronize. These stipulations are usually met with performances between two locations that are less than 400 miles apart (where network latency is below 20 ms). By conducting our tests on commonly-available hardware and software, we have shown that networked performances are accessible to household users and university performers alike.

John Christopher Dobrian Claire Trevor School of the Arts

Increasingly musicians are interested in the potential applications of transmitting musical information wirelessly from one computer instrument to another in real time. The main problem is the delay introduced during transmission, which might cause noticeable timing problems between performers, especially when sending data over the Internet. We researched and tested two related questions: 1) How much timing discrepancy is deemed acceptable by musicians in a normal musical performance situation? 2) Would the timing discrepancies introduced due to wireless data transmission be acceptable to musicians in a real-time networked performance? I&CS students Matthew Teeter and Daniel Lindsey worked with me to review relevant research, design and implement controlled yet realistic experiments to test the questions, and summarize the results.