1. Overview

The MCT4022 was our first physical course since we attended the MCT. The aim of this course is to learn to operate and maintain the Portal, the audio-visual communication platform connecting the two campuses in Trondheim and Oslo. Meanwhile, the preparation of a telematic concert between UiO and NTNU is one of the important outcomes of this course.

In this semester, we followed Guy and Eigil, learned about the operation and the set up of the hardware devices in Portal, also the low-latency communication tools such as LOLA, TICO, Zoom between Oslo and Trondheim campuses. In this blog post, we will summarise and reflect on our portal experiences and our telematic concert.

2. Experience and Troubleshooting

Experience

Although we knew about the MIDAS M32 mixer and all its specifications and routing charts, we actually found it complex to operate it. With help from Eigil and Guy, practicing on the mixer on different scenarios by setting up various microphones and instruments helped us learn faster.

Few routines which made the mixer setup much simpler and easier for us are:

Try to work in groups of 3 or more people.
Always communicate and be loud about the tweaks you are making, so that others can guide you, if something goes wrong.
Do not be afraid to try out new parameters and settings. More technical steps can be found here

The primary learnings, playing music and communicating with each other in the team are:

Everyone is always concerned about how their instrument sounds on either end. So, we had to make sure, the gain stage and mixes on both ends are perfectly done, giving us one master control of how much is sent over to the other end.
Being ‘Patient’ while one end is trying to solve issues.
Complain unfailingly (always give feedback), to get the best results on your side.
Take breaks to ensure having the day without headaches.

Troubleshooting

The experience in Portal was a bit of a mixed bag. During Team C rehearsals, we encountered a variety of software and hardware problems pretty much continuously from the beginning of the course right to the end of the concert. Here we will discuss three LOLA related problems that we encountered during the semester.

The first seems to be a common one - if LOLA is connected for a longer period of time (usually more than two hours), the audio receive will suddenly disconnect at one end, while the other side remains completely normal. This happened to us pretty much every rehearsal we had, and it always happened on the Oslo side. We found that after restarting the whole computer and reconnecting LOLA, communication was restored and everything worked normally again.

The second problem occurred during a rehearsal in the middle of the semester when we couldn’t send the audio signal to Trondheim but we could hear from the other side. After asking for help from Stefano, we learned that in the audio input offset option in the LOLA Setup, we should select the same number as the sound card channel setting, which is usually 6 on the Oslo end. We are not sure whether this had reset itself automatically or whether it had been changed by someone, but this became something we would check at the beginning of each session.

Our third problem happened on one of our last rehearsals, where no matter what we tried, we couldn’t hear anything from Trondheim. Despite both the computer and LOLA showing that the signal was being received, the mixer remained silent and we heard nothing. We spent 3 hours trying to fix it before giving up and trying to make do using Zoom (not a good idea!). This problem seemed to magically fix itself after a few days. After consulting with Stefano, we suspect it was caused by a master clock conflict between audio devices. It turned out that the master clock can be set on both the computer running LOLA, as well as the hardware audio interface - we needed to ensure that only one of those devises was set as the master clock.

3a. Wenbo’s Reflection

In summary, it was really a blessing to be able to participate in a physical class and meet people face-to-face during the pandemic. For preparation of the concert, we encountered many problems but we also learnt so much through solving them. It was a valuable experience for me.

From a musical perspective, as a traditional classical music soloist, I am not sure about the concept of telematic performance at the beginning. But rehearsing with Team C did make me feel the joy of playing in an ensemble, and made me realise that it is POSSIBLE to play music successfully together even if we are 500 kilometers away. Besides that, I played jazz music for the first time. The jazz rhythm was really hard to feel at the beginning, but with the help of Stephen and Lindsay, also the lead from Guy in the concert, I think I comprehended some tips on how to “swing” with the Jazz.

During the concert, although the digital piano was being constantly compressed for unknown reasons, and re-listening to the Youtube stream was a completely different experience from the live one. But I guess that’s probably one of the charms of being involved in telematic performance, you can never predict what strange problems you’ll have next time!

The MCT4022 was a good exploration of telematic performance and low-latency transmission techniques, and I hope to further refine my understanding of Portal technology in the next semester!

3b. Stephen’s Reflection

I was very happy to finally be on campus for the portal course this semester. The portal is an exciting place with so much to learn about - pretty much everything in that room was new to me. A myriad of strange black boxes connected to other equally strange boxes via a million leads. It could also be frustrating as there was so much that could wrong, so many points of failure just in that one room, and thats before you take into account the second portal in Trondheim that we were connecting to.

I really enjoyed the rehearsals. It was an amazing experience to play with Lindsay, Joni and Wenbo - musicians infinitely more talented than myself, and at the same time relaxed and easy to play with. Being hundreds of kilometers apart meant that the latency could be an issue at times (I suspect Lindsay would have struggled with this the most, being on his own up in Trondheim), but I felt it was just about manageable for the most part. Playing the concert was fun, especially getting to play Autumn Leaves with Guy on saxophone. Things sounded fine as we played in the room, but as Wenbo noted above, the streamed sound wasn’t brilliant. Maybe monitoring through headphones while playing would have helped us pick up on this sooner.

3c. Lindsay’s Reflection

In our second semester, we were excited and looking forward to finally meet our classmates and to work in the core feature of the program, the high-tech MCT Portal.
Starting to understand the technologies and getting a hands-on experience on what we learned theoretically in the first semester and getting around with using the mixer, LOLA and TICO setup was fairly challenging at first. Speaking on behalf of all MCT students, the one main thing we all were experts on, was using ZOOM.

The course had much to offer, in terms of utilizing the time and technologies at our disposable. Even though we were only 3 in Trondheim, I could reach a good amount of skill using the Midas M32, be quick to grasp ques from sound feedback while able to sort out the equalizing and spend some quality human time in these COVID times.

The practice and the rehearsals for the concert went quite well. I liked playing the drums for the jazz piece as the whole team enjoyed the song. The things we may want to improve for the concert would be to do a full stream sound check, because we could not hear the bass as well as the saxophone.

Reflecting on the concert, it was fun and engaging to play spontaneously with Guy on saxophone, who we never practiced with.

4. Our Concert!

Come and hear our concert, and huge thanks to Guy and his magnificent saxophone skills!