Piano and Vocal Seminar - Remote Collaboration (OLP_20200829)

My classes as an official music student at HHSOM started last week and I finally think I might be able to shift gears and start organizing my notes instead of just simply trying to stay afloat.  Yesterday Kathleen Kelly was the guest speaker during the SoM common hour.  She is a pianist and a vocal coach with experience with several well known opera companies.  With the entire vocal and piano studios attending - some 80-100 students plus many faculty attended the virtual seminar - she discussed many methods and techniques for doing online collaboration and her recent experiences with media streaming for vocal coaching.  She has written an article called How do I work this? in which she discusses how to go about creating the best virtual environment for online musical collaboration because she sees that for the short term there is no really safe way to perform or coach music in person, particularly in large groups, in the way we have been accustomed to doing throughout the history of collaborative music making.  She references an article by Ian Howell called Best Practices for High Quality, Technology-Enabled, Applied Music Teaching that details the technological enhancements that will improve the lag times and can be summarized as 1) use wired connections (headphones and IP devices to routers) and 2) separate computers for separate programs.  She also describes using a program like Soundjack for the audio segment of the feed....    Initially, as I was writing this comment I became very excited because there were some hints about using a  soundjack based audio switcher with windows that looked as if they would resolve some sound routing issues I have had with my X32 and windows, pointing to a program called jack (jack2) by jackaudio but it appears the development team is in a state of limbo.  There is a somewhat useful JACKROUTER setup guide for windows 10 64bit video but jackaudio.org has been making changes to their website and they have only posted the linux binaries although they claim updated macOS and Windows binaries are coming soon.  Hopefully, this will be resolved or I'll be able to find a workaround sometime before I feel a compelling need to do any serious live audio collaboration over the internet.  One other thing that Kelly addressed was using Cleanfeed as a browser based multitrack, multiparty live audio and recording host for use over internet connections.  As getting this to work today or even in the next couple of weeks is not a priority and I have just spent at least three hours trying to understand how I might be able to implement some of this I am going to set it aside for a while and come back to when low latency online collaboration becomes a greater priority.