Musicians all over the world who are looking for others to jam with are starting to look online.
Enter LiveJam, a new service launched last week by Ruksun Software Technologies that lets those with musical inclinations and some technologically capable instruments play together in real time, no matter how distant the players are from each other.
"With the creation of LiveJam, we hope to do away totally with any sort of cultural or geographic barriers, and make 'music for all' a reality," says company spokesman Anmol Chawla.
Headquartered in Pune, India, and doing business across the Internet, the company certainly knows about technology's ability to break through barriers.
While there are other Internet options for musical play over the Internet, most notably the San Francisco-based Res Rocket, Ruksun hopes that an emphasis on real-time composition will set its product apart. LiveJam works by streaming musical information among the players, which lets several musicians jam simultaneously, as opposed to the more compositional approach taken by Res Rocket. Both companies rely on the music industry standard MIDI format to encode sound files.
In order to achieve Internet streaming and minimize lag time, LiveJam uses Ruksun's proprietary software, called Olympus, as its backend.
Olympus is a generic platform for Internet-based multi-user applications. The company forsees using the program to create multi-player interactive games, multi-user forums for applications such as auctioning, as well as interactive classrooms.
Ruksun used a modified version of Olympus to create the game Scrawl for the Microsoft Network. The game uses the features that Olympus provides "in order to share data across the Internet in as close to real time as intelligently possible," says Chawla. Res Rocket encourages players who wish to work together in real time to use short loops, riffs that can be played against the main beat or melody that others have created. Though perhaps a little restrictive, this method assures that a strict beat will be kept, regardless of any Net lag.
For the time being, Chawla says that LiveJam and Res Rocket are "complementary" to each other. "As far as we know, they allow musicians the platform to create individual tracks for others to build on them and then record the result. We, on the other hand, provide for real-time jamming. For musicians, the ideal scenario would be to have both features present in one product."
Of course it's not a great leap to forsee both products soon delivering both features, which seems to be where LiveJam is headed.
"LiveJam, in its present form, is in alpha," says Chawla. He adds that the company is in the process of adding the features of recording and saving, aiming to integrate those features in a few days. The company hopes to create virtual studios for musicians, and give them the option of cutting CDs of their recordings.
Res Rocket producers had no comment on LiveJam or on their own plans to integrate live play into their site.
Chawla also believes that his company's location is a great strength. "The Internet has been a great leveler in the mosaic of global commerce, and the world has become a global village in more ways than one," he says. "The ball is positioned for software vendors in Third World countries like us to take advantage of this leveler and place ourselves equitably in the global scenario." The lower wages in the region are also a boon, he noted.
Despite the global ambitions, some local musicians also seem anxious to join the jam. Lucky Ali, a singer and star of Hindi musical films, was the first professional musician to experiment with LiveJam, and was very impressed.
"Going by the trends in other industries, the Internet is all set to be the next medium for creating, composing, and recording music. LiveJam actually gets online musicians together on one platform, allowing them to do just that."
