Oslo - Rearrange in the membrane

“Spaghetti Junction” - aka the portal before

Final week before christmas. After months of experimentation with microphones, lectures with TICO, workshops with Zoom, jams with LOLA and routing on the Midas mixer - the portal is in disarray.

The main aim in Oslo was to move the LOLA and TICO set up to the other end of the room, so that all connections were more conveniently in the same place. The second task was to change the routing so that all connections, both inputs and outputs passed through the Midas mixer. This was the way it is set up in Trondheim - and makes a lot of sense. Then using the mixer we can group each connection, use effects and adjust levels all in the same place. One control to rule them all!

Monday we got together, with many of the MCT team, and moved the whole setup. I present to you the new, improved portal room….

Oslo's new portal room

And then came Thursday…

With TICO-problems in Trondheim and a guest-lecturer in Oslo, in need to be heard at both campuses and also sharing screen with playback audio, things got complicated; the “ant-hill” allegory is again useful, but this time with all the ants (the entire class) pulling in different directions. People started to disconnect, reconnect, trying new connections… then disconnect and reconnect… pulling everything apart and then starting from the top… or from the bottom. And suddenly nobody knew what’s connected to what - and we’re sort of back to the start. New day, new set-up tomorrow :)

So, to get things to work on Friday, it was back to basic… Zoom with sound directly through the loudspeakers.

Trondheim

The portal was just recently moved to our new location; one floor down, a floor we share together with doctors’ offices, a music school, an instrument maker and music studios. We are hidden behind thick white walls, and doors with locks, keeping our experiments to ourselves and not letting sound out or in. This may sound a bit creepy, but really, it is such a great improvement compared to our previous location. Our new portal room is open and bright, ready for being attacked with our exploration of setups with placements of tables, microphones, projectors, tv’s and other technology.

Our new portal setup

After a week with Øyvind Brandtsegg, exploring Digital Signal Processing (DSP), our portal was set up to work as a performance environment between Trondheim and Oslo. We were using LOLA for transmitting the sound of our instruments and Zoom for speech communication. Cables were going all over the place, and TICO was not yet connected in our new portal space.

On monday we rearranged the tables and placed two condenser microphones in front of the tables, as you can see in the picture below. This is how Oslo sees Trondheim, being captured by a Huddlecam PTZ camera over TICO. Yes, we connected TICO, and it looks really good!

Trondheim looking good! (The HUGE cable in front of the camera was removed)

Connecting TICO could not be done before sorting out the mess of cables going all over the place, and removing unused equipment standing in the way. After cleanup, we connected TICO and it was looking great!

Then thursday came and TICO was dropping out like crazy on the Trondheim side during machine learning class, both audio and video. It was left in a mess. Friday, After some hours of connecting stuff and adjusting some settings on the TICO hardware, it was up and running without any dropouts. The improvement felt a bit random, as if it fixed itself, so we decided to leave it on over the weekend to see if it kept being stable.

Sunday the 25. November, Sepehr, Jørgen and Eigil came to the portal to prepare for a WoNoMute talk that was going to be held the day after. TICO had been up and running all weekend and…now it was back to dropouts. The dropouts were present every 10 seconds, and we figured that TICO could not be trusted to be used for the WoNoMute talk. We chose to disconnect it and leave it for now.

Since the problems with TICO are mainly present in Trondheim and not in Oslo, we think the issue is with the network traffic, or with the device itself. Maybe somewhere on the line there is a network hiccup, making the connection go out of sync, resulting in the dropouts in audio and video. I know it has been recorded latency on the line earlier when running the diagnostic tool Traceroute to the IP of the TICO in Oslo. This needs to be investigated further together with Robin and the IT department. That is of course an issue to be fixed.

Till next time, Team A