The COVID-19 pandemic has made it difficult to engage in face-to-face musical activities, especially lessons. However, upon looking into it, I’ve found that various online initiatives have started emerging in the music world as well. I’d like to explore two of them.
1. Online lessons via video call
I have mainly been taking lessons by sharing mixdown files from my DAW with my advisor via cloud storage, receiving feedback, and making revisions accordingly. I chose this method because I thought it would allow him to listen carefully and provide detailed feedback on the issues.
At times, I have also used Skype, where he plays the piano live to explain the meaning of the comments. However, due to audio dropouts and latency issues, I often have to infer the intended feedback to some extent.
So, in search of better audio quality, I explored several options and found that Discord, a freeware for instant messaging, video calls, voice calls, and VoIP, seemed quite promising. I decided to give it a try.
This platform allows for audio quality adjustments, and after testing it, I realized that it significantly resolved many of the issues present in Skype. While it’s not quite the same as in-person lessons, it allows for subtle nuances to be conveyed more effectively. As a result, we decided to continue lessons using this method for the time being.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 the lesson is one-way, like listening to the teacher's piano performance as I do, then Discord is more than sufficient. However, when it comes to playing an ensemble together, "latency" becomes a major obstacle. In other words, the delay in network communication—the time between sending a data request and actually receiving the data—becomes a bottleneck. If the delay is too large, a real-time session simply isn't feasible.
But when I looked into it, I found that YAMAHA had proposed a system called "SyncRoom" that can solve this problem. It is a P2P (direct connection and communication method 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 without delay. Since we are only exchanging audio at the moment, if you want to watch each other, you can use Zoom or something like that. However, since there is a delay, I think it will 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.