GÉANT and LOLA - enabling real-time musical collaboration

The Challenge

Driven by a pressing demand from musicians and performers, the LOw LAtency (LOLA) project was developed by the Conservatorio di Musica Giuseppe Tartini, Trieste, and the Italian research and education network GARR.  The challenge was to enable musicians separated by vast distances to perform together in perfect harmony, opening projects up to wider collaboration and reducing the need for travel.

The Solution

To meet LOLA’s needs GARR and GÉANT worked closely together, providing consultancy and support to help deliver the project’s vision. Following network tests, a dedicated 1 Gbps set of links was planned across GÉANT to provide the guaranteed bandwidth between GARR and test sites in Europe. Bringing latency down to less than 60 milliseconds fools the ear into believing that all the musicians are in the same room. Achieving this level of performance requires high speed, reliable and stable networks providing guaranteed bandwidth of up to 500 Mbps.

Key Benefits

A dramatic reduction in jitter enables real-time musical collaboration on even the most complex scores. Musicians perhaps unable to travel can rehearse and perform seamlessly together across vast distances, without the audio or video delays experienced over the public Internet. Advanced software and high speed research networks combine to let musicians in multiple locations perform together in perfect harmony.

​“As musicians we want to collaborate with our colleagues wherever they are located and were frustrated that the Internet couldn’t provide the level of performance we needed. The LOLA project is very exciting as it combines specially optimised software with high-speed, robust, end-to-end networks to enable us to work together in real-time and feels like everyone is in the same studio for both musicians and the audience. Working with GARR and GÉANT has been vital in achieving our vision now and moving forward.” Massimo Parovel, Director, Conservatorio di Musica Giuseppe, Tartini, Trieste

 

​Partners in the project:
​Conservatorio di musica Giuseppe Tartini GARR, the Italian NREN