Thursday, August 16, 2001

High-Speed Networks Let a Music Professor in New York Teach a Student in Oklahoma By FLORENCE OLSEN Erin Dunn rests her cello after playing a saraband from a Bach suite. Her teacher for the day, listening and watching from hundreds of miles away, praises her: "Beautiful, Erin. Really beautiful." He is David Geber, chairman of the string department and a member of the cello and chamber-music faculty at the Manhattan School of Music in New York. He has heard Ms. Dunn play before in similar circumstances. "You know, each time I hear you play," he says, "your bow arm gets more powerful." Ms. Dunn's life-size image is projected on a wall in a crowded room where Mr. Geber sits with his cello, surrounded by network and audio technicians. "Now try something, Erin," he says, "which is not dividing up that dotted eighth and sixteenth." Ms. Dunn, whose principal teacher is in Oklahoma, is studying for a master's in music at the University of Oklahoma. She plays the passage again, and Mr. Geber responds, "Good!" The Manhattan School of Music and the University of Oklahoma are among a select few institutions that are having experimental musical exchanges over high-speed Internet2 networks. Internet2 is a consortium that includes more than 180 universities interested in establishing high-speed networks, and in creating research and education applications for those networks to run. Occasionally, it hosts musical exchanges that could become commonplace on the public Internet in the next three to five years -- by then, the commercial Internet is expected to be as fast as today's Internet2 networks, which are used only for research and education. Using videoconferencing technology for musical exchanges has been a way of life at the Manhattan School since 1996, when the idea was conceived by Marta Istomin, the president, and Pinchas Zukerman, the internationally renowned violist and violinist who teaches at the school. Videoconferencing is "as if your television set is talking back to you," explains Christianne Orto, director of recording and videoconferencing at the Manhattan School. In 1996, videoconferencing was done over digital phone lines, using a standard called H.320. Since then, the Manhattan School has continued to use pre-Internet2 technology to conduct scores of videoconferences. The widespread use of H.320 videoconferencing makes it handy not only for teaching students while Mr. Zukerman is concertizing around the world but also for chamber coaching, composer colloquiums, master classes, and special programs that build music awareness for students in the New York public schools. The audio engineers at Manhattan School have devised a variety of successful workarounds for dealing with many of the limitations of what they call "the narrowband world" of relatively slow digital networks, which at best offer limited audio quality. The difference in audio quality between narrowband videoconferencing and using an Internet2-grade network, which is "broadband" technology, is night and day, Ms. Orto says. The Internet2 technology supports 16-bit CD-quality audio standards. The Internet2 video standard is MPEG-2, the same standard used in high-definition television. "It's excellent, and we're hoping it can get even better," says Ms. Orto. Admittedly, she will not be satisfied until the audio quality of the new medium is equal to that of 24-bit digital-audio recordings with surround sound. For now, Ms. Orto says, the Internet2 consortium's research and education networks are a pretty good teaching medium, even if they are not yet a good performance medium. Enough nuance and tone quality come through over high-speed networks that a professor can hear and correct a student's music-making. But there are limitations, she says, to how music can be taught using high-speed videoconferencing. Professors who use the new medium for teaching simply learn to work around its limitations, Ms. Orto says. They work with the students on hand positioning, fingering, and expressing musical styles in their playing. Instructing students in subtle gradations of dynamic levels, such as piano, forte, mezzo forte, and so forth, is more problematic over Internet2 networks, she says, and is generally avoided. Today's Internet2 networks, she adds, capture between 80 and 85 percent of the dynamics of a live performance. Ensemble playing, in real time, by student and teacher or by performers separated by distance is still out of the question, though "we're getting closer and closer," says Ms. Orto. Some recent "multisite" Internet2 performances have conjured an illusion that the performers, separated by distance, are playing in sync. The illusion is created by having one group of performers play, then transmitting that sound to the second group of performers, who play off the sound when it arrives. What the audience hears is all in sync. Ms. Orto says improvements in Internet2 technology have brought the synchronization delay down to 3 milliseconds, compared with 500-millisecond delays common to narrowband videoconferencing. "I don't think it's a pipe dream," she adds. "Our hope is that even more [Internet2] research will be done to get the best-quality sound so we can transfer a lot of beautiful music across the Internet and Internet2." Meanwhile, the occasional music lesson over one of the consortium's high-speed networks still requires a good bit of planning and troubleshooting. "To do these things right, we need about three weeks of rehearsals with a new [Internet2] partner," says Alan Crosswell, director of academic network and computing systems at Columbia University, which lends its Internet2 network facilities to the Manhattan School for such occasions. The Manhattan School has applied for affiliate membership in Internet2, with Columbia as its sponsoring institution. Troubleshooting, Mr. Crosswell says, usually turns up myriad problems -- dirty fiber-optic connectors that need cleaning, malfunctioning software in one or more of the routers on the network between the partner universities, and congested links. Sometimes a router needs a replacement part. "It's a bleeding-edge network, so we run up against problems," he says. For the music lesson, technicians use a $2,800 digital video camera -- basically consumer equipment, as Mr. Crosswell puts it. The audio quality is what counts most to everyone involved in the lesson. As the lesson proceeds, Mr. Geber asks Ms. Dunn to focus her attention again on her bow speed. "Every now and again on the A string -- and it could be the audio that I'm hearing," he tells her, "but every now and then on the A string I hear a little bit of pinch." Mr. Geber reminds her that she can eliminate that sound by increasing her bow speed. "Now add to that one more thing," he says. "I can't see it, but I can hear it -- and that is you're catching the wood of the stick on the string. Keep your bow a little more flat as you go across to the A string." He listens, again. "That's the way." When the lesson is over, Mr. Geber gives a thumbs up to Ms. Orto for the Internet2 technology that made it possible, and for the special attentiveness that he says it elicits from the student and teacher. "The idea of there being a physical distance," he remarks, "in a funny way, draws people closer together." Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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