Performance to Fuse Art and Technology

Attendees to the 2007 Advanced Technology Summit Awards program, Tuesday, May 1 in Columbus, Ohio, will experience firsthand the capabilities of Ohio Supercomputer Center’s OSCnet via the evening’s entertainment: a live, bi-location performance by members of the Cleveland Institute of Music. The event, with two brass musicians at the Blackwell in Columbus and three in Cleveland, is the first of its kind in Ohio.

While the audience enters a dimension of sight and sound that would have been unimaginable a decade ago, OSCnet engineers and researchers will be working with an impressive array of emerging network technologies to ensure the audio and video components of the concert go beyond what has been previously accomplished. The performance will create the illusion that all the musicians are playing in the same room.

This event presents several challenging propositions for the artists and the Ohio Supercomputer Center. First, the performance must be video-streamed in high definition between Cleveland and Columbus at 10 to 30 megabits per second through the OSCnet fiber optic network. Further, the network design for the event makes 50 megabits per second end-to-end bandwidth available exclusively for the performance between the Cleveland Institute of Music and the Columbus venue. OSCnet, a dedicated network for Ohio research and K-20 education, has the capacity to support 75 of these performances simultaneously.

Supporting these large amounts of video streams for an hour performance isn’t the entire challenge, though. Because the musicians will hear and see each other via the video, the network must provide continuous, crystal-clear reception. Audio drop-outs, echoes and split- second delays could interrupt the flow of the music and alter the quality of the entertainment.

In lay terms, the technology requires the video and audio to stream across the broadband as smoothly as the evening news appears on a high-definition television broadcast. It’s the difference between watching a show in HDTV and a YouTube video, with its jumpy starts and stops.

The integration of music with technology showcases how the technology can serve the needs of performing arts. It also presents a tangible way for attendees at the Summit Awards event to appreciate the networking capabilities available through OSCnet.