The Corona disaster has made it difficult to do face-to-face musical activities, especially lessons. However, after doing some research, I found that various attempts are being made to utilize the Internet in this world. I would like to mention two of them.
1. online lessons via video call
In my case, I mainly shared my DAW mixdown files with my teacher on cloud storage and repeatedly made corrections while receiving comments. I thought it would be a good way for him to listen to me carefully and point out issues. At times, I have asked the teacher to explain the meaning of the comments while actually playing the piano via Skype. However, I had to make some guesses about the contents of the comments due to out-of-tune chords on the piano, cover-ups caused by delays, and so on.
So we decided to get a little better sound quality... and after some consideration."Discord"Instant message, video call, voice call, and VoIP freeware" looked pretty good, so I actually tried it. This method allows you to adjust the sound quality. When I tried it, I found that it cleared up a lot of Skype's problems. It is not as good as a face-to-face lesson, but I was able to convey subtle nuances, and we decided to use this method for a while....
2. online session
If you are a one-way learner like me, listening to the teacher play the piano, a lesson on "Discord" is sufficient. However, when it comes to ensembles, "latency" becomes an issue. In other words, the latency that occurs between the time a data transfer request is submitted and the time the data is actually sent becomes a bottleneck. This is so big that it doesn't make a session.
But I looked into it, and to my surprise, YAMAHA can solve this problem."SyncRoomWe proposed a system called "P2P. It is a P2P (direct connection and communication between devices on a network) system that uses an audio interface, and if an optical fiber line is used, it seems to be possible to communicate with little delay. Since we are only exchanging audio at the moment, if you want to watch each other, you can use Zoom or something similar separately. However, since there is a delay, it may not work well if you try to synchronize while looking at the screen. Now, YAMAHA clearly states that this service is targeted at domestic users, but it seems that sessions with overseas users are also starting to appear. In fact, this could be the real future of online lessons.