TimeWarp Technologies is a music software company that develops interactive software for performing musicians, music educators, students, and music hobbyists.
During this pandemic, many music teachers and coaches, accompanists, performers, and students have found Internet MIDI to be an especially useful tool for transmitting musical keyboard performances from one location to another in real time with low latency. Thus, a singer can be in one location and the accompanist in another.
When the pianist plays a digital or acoustic piano with MIDI capability, Internet MIDI transmits the performance as musical instructions that are reproduced on the remote piano—a digital piano or a virtual piano that runs on your computer. This enables the pianist to play on 2 pianos simultaneously: the local keyboard and the remote instrument.
Unlike a musical performance that is transmitted as degraded audio through a video conferencing system, a musical performance transmitted by Internet MIDI has no loss of audio quality because the sound of the performance is created on the local digital or virtual piano.
At either end of the connection, Internet MIDI can also be used to record and save the keyboard performance as a MIDI file, enabling playback at any time and at any tempo.
Internet MIDI is not a solution for all situations. There is latency with any data transmitted over the Internet. The amount of latency is determined by the quality of the Internet connection and the geographical proximity of the two locations. Nonetheless, it is possible to provide the singer with perceptual synchronicity and a high quality experience in many situations.
