[federico3]

I always wondered why there aren't synchronous "audio conferencing" tools to allow play music and even improvise over the Internet.

Of course they would have to introduce a fixed delay of a phrase (or multiple) and people would have to play accordingly.

[th0ma5]

You can totally feel any delay above 5-10ms so that rules out quite a lot of things. I hear people still do it in some fashion.

[grawprog]

I have trouble getting local latency below that at times with recording and live playback. Trying to sync together multiple people and keeping it below that is still a bit a ways off most current networks.

[DaniFong]

It takes about 134 ms for a signal moving at the speed of light to go around the Earth. You can do no better if you have to cross such distances (unless you want to bore through the earth somehow).

So making it possible for people to jam together across such distances is an interesting challenge indeed. Such a delay makes a naive approach incredibly awkward! Good musicians can get around it with practice and using drones, for example.

However, if you're synced to a shared reference /background track, you could play in time to that. The problem is that you can't hear any of the contributions of the other players while you're playing -- the signal is too far away.

But you could imagine sort of controlling an AI mimic which would stand in for you in the ears of the other players, and your contribution would be patched in to the final mix. As a minimal step you could just represent your playing with a couple of loops (A and B pieces) and your improvisations can get auditioned and patched in for later contributions later on in the song.

Some things to think about. It's easier to imagine doing it all in the same area! And you can do in in real space, so that's a plus :D

[n3k5]

This has existed (at scale, not just experimental prototypes) for over 10 years. I can't recommend anything in particular as I don't use it myself, but the very first search term I tried ("online jamming") turned up some useful leads. Direct integration with DAWs seems quite easy to set up nowadays.