Distributed musical performances

Abstract

An increasing number of novel applications produce a rich set of different data types that need to be managed efficiently and coherently. In this article we present our experience with designing and implementing a data management infrastructure for a distributed immersive performance (DIP) application. The DIP project investigates a versatile framework for the capture, recording, and replay of video, audio, and MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) streams in an interactive environment for collaborative music performance. We are focusing on two classes of data streams that are generated within this environment. The first category consists of high-resolution isochronous media streams, namely audio and video. The second class comprises MIDI data produced by electronic instruments. MIDI event sequences are alphanumeric in nature and fall into the category of the data streams that have been of interest to data management researchers in recent years. We present our data management architecture, which provides a repository for all DIP data. Streams of both categories need to be acquired, transmitted, stored, and replayed in real time. Data items are correlated across different streams with temporal indices. The audio and video streams are managed in our own High-performance Data Recording Architecture (HYDRA), which integrates multistream recording and retrieval in a consistent manner. This paper reports on the practical issues and challenges that we encountered during the design, implementation and experimental phases of our prototype. We also present some analysis results and discuss future extensions for the architecture.