An idea of MattisManzel’s. Some excerpts copied (and reorderd) from Ting 49:
“24/7 absolutely, the global-jam-session should as well be 24/7, kuban percussionists wihth chinese guitar-player. hehe. …. I dream about music, made the world-jam-wiki. It’s similar in a way to collaboratively painting, playing music, writing. There are different technical issues, but getting people move to do things together is in a way similar. …. We tried on skype, good musicians, rightaway reacting on the limitations that grow out of the latency. There is also “ninjam”, a program that extends the latency to exactly one beat - you play a beat in front of what you hear, strange in the beginning, but possible to get used to. There are solutions. I admit music is (maybe apart from dance and theater) the one those that are most diffcult to get online.”
It would be interesting to combine this with OverHear. Picture this: there is a global jam, but you can’t hear all of it. You can only hear the other musicians who you currently “subscribe” to. Example: Musicians A,B,C,D,E,F are currently jamming. You subscribe to A,C,D, so you can hear what they are playing. A subscribes to C and D and you, C subscribes to A and you and F (but not D!), and D subscribes to A and B. F subscribes to C and E.
So perhaps there would be a kind of six-degrees-of-separation thing with respect to harmony and rhythm. In the above example, perhaps A and C and D would sound good together, even though C and D don’t subscribe to each other, because both are subscribed to A, and A is subscribed to both of them, and C is subscribed to you, who hears all three. How far would this go? C and F are mutually subscribed, so maybe they’d sound good together, even though C is also trying to match up with A and you. Would F sound good with you? Would F sound good with D? Would the musicians be able to handle this at all, or would it turn out to be impossible to jam with someone who is also hearing a third party that you can’t hear?
A weird idea. Playing music is a communiction situation like talking about something. It would be the same like saying you can hear what A and B say to the the issue you talk about, but you can’t hear what C says. Under such circumstances it’s rather unlikely for a group of people to make sense. Maybe though music is a bit different still, Maybe on a very large scale it would be “a little less impossible”, as having first agreed on metrics, speed and harmonics it could probably work and a six-degrees-of-separation like phenomena migth get wisible. Local music styles are different, ideas on harmonic progression, melodics, metrics. There are big differences in musicians from different cultures. But they would still be able to somehow communicate. Whereas if they spoke only their three different mothertongues they hardly wouldn’t be able to commuicate verbally at all. But such won’t be worth thinking about any further before there will not be many, many permanent jam-sessions and a big sprirt for exerimentation.
Another thing might be the mix of such a permanent global cacophonic one big-soup-jam. Selecet tracks from all music beeing played at a time, mix them and stream it. But that’s also pretty far from what is technically possible now. If someone answers in text of spoken language a second earlier or later doesn’t make much of a difference. If a snaredrum beat is 0.1 s earlier or later makes a hell of a difference.
See also AudioWiki.