Experimenting With Adaptive Metronomes in Networked Music Performances

The increasing attention toward interactions at a distance and the improvement of digital communications networks have steadily increased the interest toward Networked Music Performance both regarding entertainment and education. Unfortunately the unavoidable network latency remains one of the main issues that prevents a satisfiable remote performance. In this work we propose three different techniques that try to contrast this issue by relying on adaptive metronomes, i.e., metronomes that are able to track the tempo of the musicians through a beat tracking technique. We present a series of preliminary experiments with both professional and amateur musicians that demonstrate that these techniques could be a promising approach as an additional tool for contrasting the impact of latency.