I have several sessions every week, mostly jazz jam session and also some 101 sessions, all on JackTrip. Over about two years I have been able to grow a community of 2-3 dozens of active members. Those who join by their own initiative are the exception. The majority had to be persuaded to give it a try and then made comfortable one by one. The predominant view is still that playing together in real-time is impossible and not even worth trying.
This is a big awareness issue that word of mouth alone is unlikely to fix anytime soon. Perhaps a massive participation of JackTrip users in the International Jazz Day 2027 by UNESCO could change this. Perhaps JackTrip could be associated with this event on a more institutional/organizational level.
For myself I certainly will have one or more public live streaming sessions under the umbrella of International Jazz Day 2027.
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I’m excited about your public live streaming sessions for International Jazz Day on April 30th next year! Please keep us posted on any preparations leading up to it.
What do you think about bringing local people together in person to learn how to set up and operate a JackTrip studio? Could be at a community center or church or cheap rental space. Do you think that would increase abilities and participation?
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I think I have exhausted local possibilities. They are happy to do their thing. Unless they have a compelling reason, they do not care. My place is too small anyway but I could think of cities with town twinning. There are sporadic in-person visits and some people might be interested in more advanced and continuous collaboration using JackTrip.
Anything grass-roots alone is, in my opinion, not enough. In terms of visibility the UNESCO event might reach a broader audience.
@synthia, assuming showing a local audience what you can do with JackTrip was something to do, how would one go about it? I cannot give everybody headphones and have them play or sing. The key is that everybody by now knows ZOOM and the like and everybody has seen the asynchronous recordings in tiled videos during the pandemic. JackTrip looks much the same but is fundamentally different. Unless one can demonstrate the real-time musical interaction the whole thing is pointless.
Any thoughts about that?
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this response might be a bit off-topic because it is not specific to International Jazz Day.
I am a big fan of hybrid studios that combine onsite and online players in the same jam. The onsite players are in the room together like normal - they see and hear each other in loudspeakers, and then they see the online players onscreen and hear them mixed into the loudspeakers. The onsite players do not need headphones. This experience could encourage the onsite players to learn how to set up and play from home, and the online players might drop in if/when they are near to the onsite location.
To clarify: For those onsite wanting to learn onsite how to setup and play at home: the players would need headphones, and it would be a controlled classroom type experience playing onsite with each other, and using the local network only. Then when everyone is comfortable with the setup and operation onsite, shift to the WAN and arrange for a single player to connect with the onsite players with specific instructions for interacting with each one, i.e. listening for latency, fidelity, etc.
Anyway, that’s the vision I received for CYBERJAMMER that first came to me as a grad student in 2005 and has stayed with me all these years.
p.s. no audience per se
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Interesting suggestion. You seem to assume there are people who want to learn how they can use JackTrip. Finding these is actually the most difficult part, as even those for whom it would likely be beneficial are convinced they do not need it and it doesn’t work. Once someone is really interested the tech issues are a piece of cake if they have optical fiber. For me the singly most important issue is awareness.
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Agreed awareness is critical, also I think relevance because if learning JackTrip brings people something they want they will do it. For this group I am working with now, one of the leaders is keen to learn and facilitate the others who maybe are not as engaged, but really want to play online with the group that is together in person. They are currently very unhappily using Zoom (no surprise) so there is an urgency to find a solution. I think that identifying individuals who can learn and then lead the others is helping to enable adoption. Hang in there Thomas!
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This is exactly what I am doing. We have reached the point where sessions can run without me. Others learn how to host sessions and take paid JackTrip plans. But this is a very slow grass-roots process. There seems to be a growing interest in practice partnerships where two musicians meet online as practice buddies.
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