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 To recreate the experience of
performing together live when artists and
audiences are apart, a collective effort has
been under way to reduce the lag between a sound
being produced and being heard, known as
latency.
In rehearsals for Rossini's Barber of Seville,
the San Francisco Opera has used a test version
of a device called Aloha, developed by
Stockholm-based Elk O.S., in partnership with
Ericsson, Vodafone and Verizon.
The pocket-sized device cuts the lag from around
600 milliseconds, which would make two
performers sound out of sync, to roughly 20
milliseconds, which is no greater than if the
performers were in the same room.
"That was shocking to me that technology has
advanced that far," said soprano Anne-Marie
MacIntosh, who is performing in the production
scheduled to open to socially-distanced,
drive-in audiences on Friday. Terrified of
throat infections, singers tend to be
germaphobic at the best of times, which makes
digital technology like the Aloha attractive
with or without a pandemic. "You can be in a
separate space and still have a rehearsal and
still do it safely and not worry about
potentially getting someone else sick," said
MacIntosh.
While innovations such as the Aloha can work
with the existing internet infrastructure, the
rollout of 5G, which promises speeds 10 to 20
times faster than 4G wireless networks, could
spur even more dramatic advances.
'SCRATCHING THE SURFACE'
The likes of Verizon and Ericsson intend to take
advantage of 5G to overcome latency issues for a
wide range of industries. Digital surgery,
self-driving cars, gaming and virtual reality
are some of the areas likely to benefit.
"We are just scratching the surface of how
transformative this technology is going to be,"
said Nikki Palmer, chief product development
officer at Verizon.
Matthew Shilvock, general director of the San
Francisco Opera, said technology had enabled the
upcoming Rossini production to be more
experimental and transform the backstage
environment into part of the set.
As singers no longer need to be on stage to sing
together and audiences can be anywhere, there is
also the potential for spectators, however
remote, to be involved in the live moment that
makes performances exciting.
"I think there's a new hunger, there's a new
curiosity that has developed around digital
content," Shilvock said. Elk was founded by
Michele Benincaso, a violin-maker who trained at
a specialist school in Cremona, Italy. He began
working in his Stockholm basement around six
years ago with the dream of making musicians as
digitally connected as other professionals.
"What the pandemic has told us and is still
telling us, it's time for music and musicians to
move into the digital world," he said. "The
final goal is engaging the fan base in a
completely new way."
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 REMOTE SURGERY
While many musicians are eager to return to
performances in packed concert halls, Benincaso
said that the benefits of reducing latency to
levels seen when performers are in the same room
would be felt long after the end of COVID-19
lockdowns.
For example, it can cut carbon emissions as well
as budgets by eliminating journeys, reduce the
need for drummers to lug unwieldy kit to
recording sessions, and allow audiences to play
with professional musicians in innovative ways.
Benincaso said he was also working with major
bands from outside the field of classical music,
but could not name them because of
confidentiality agreements.
He said the San Francisco Opera experiments had
put Aloha on track for a commercial release in
October.
Beyond music, an early 5G-driven change is
likely to be in the sphere of leisure and
entertainment, as amusement parks and shopping
malls could use low-latency networks to provide
an augmented reality experience for visitors.
Further into the future, developers are aiming
to reach a sufficiently minute and stable
latency to enable a surgeon to perform an
operation at great distance from a patient,
using robotic arms. In that scenario, even the
briefest spike into a higher latency, or greater
lag, could be a matter of life and death. "There
cannot be a sudden change when you are doing a
critical manoeuvre," said Jan Söderström, head
of Technology Office Silicon Valley at Ericsson.
There is also the question of how to make all
this pay, which probably means slicing up the
network, so that the surgeons or musicians for
whom timing is of the essence, might pay more
for a guarantee of stable low latency. "That's
not current but that's the course, the model
that we foresee," Söderström said.
(Reporting by Supantha Mukherjee in Stockholm,
Barbara Lewis in London and Nathan Frandino in
San Francisco, editing by Estelle Shirbon)
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