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THE LAST PAGE Musicians Without Borders A singer turned entrepreneur moves to Kansas City to launch her e-jamming service. By Synthia Payne / CYBERJAMMER as told to Broadband Communities G oogle Fiber is what brought me to Kansas City. I'm a vocalist and play synthesizer as well as percussion instruments such as hand drums and shekeres. I use electronic sounds and trigger synthesizer sounds with my voice. Te collaborative, improvisational aspects of music making really appeal to me. Back in 2000, I worked with video game programmers who developed massively multiplayer online role-playing games – games that thousands of people play together – and I asked them to write me a program that would let me do something like this with music. Tey were busy with other projects, but I found some McGill University professors who were developing software for the University of Southern California and McGill orchestras to play together over Internet2. I went to the concert they played, and it was amazing. I was hooked! I wrote to McGill and said I wanted to study what they were doing. Fast forward to 2005, when I was in graduate school at the University of California, Santa Cruz and a friend told me about a music collaboration program called NINJAM. Te frst time I tried it, I was online for fve hours! But it isn't exactly real time – a delay is added to line up the streams – and there's still no video. An adviser suggested I contact Chris Chafe at Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. Chris's SoundWIRE group creates applications optimized for gigabit networks – still only audio, but high-quality, uncompressed audio over IP. Since 2005, I've been using SoundWIRE's music collaboration application over Internet2, as well as NINJAM – which has a very open, friendly community – over the public Internet. I'm able to play with people I've never met before. I've grown as an artist by dispensing with the social expectations of being a musician – having to look and act in a certain way – and can focus on the art itself and do things musically that I might not do when people are in the room watching me. Some of the work from the SoundWIRE group is under the hood of my e-jamming website, CYBERJAMMER. CYBERJAMMER will give people access to an enhanced version of the application along with social networking tools 92 and ways to mix audio streams. My business targets everyday people in their homes who are getting gigabit fber or decent Internet speeds. Te scaled model for my business includes private instruction, technical services, and consultancy to academic institutions, live concerts and event production companies. Te real-time aspect is what's going to make a diference. I've done quite a few tests, and there are a lot of problems that can come between a user and a real-time experience. But if the distance between locations is limited and everyone has plenty of bandwidth, those problems are minimized. Tat was my reason for coming to Kansas City. Google is building its gigabit network here and ofering it to people in their homes. I had to be here. Te support for startups in Kansas City is really strong. Startups that optimize gigabit fber are really hot here – people are hungry for these applications. As in other metropolitan areas in the United States, there's a digital divide here in Kansas City, and that's another attraction for me. I see this technology as a tool for communicating across digital, racial and cultural divides. In a subtle but signifcant way, it could help to heal them. I hope to bring that here. I was able to come here in December 2012 as part of a recruitment program called Homes for Hackers. I applied, and the founder called me the next day, so I went and lived in a hacker home from December through February. Ten a friend from Santa Cruz introduced me to his mother, who invited me to stay in her house. Last month I set up a booth at the Google Fiber Space for the Kansas City Startup Crawl and at Union Station for the Maker Faire. I was more focused on doing outreach and education at the booths than looking for investors, but people could listen to live jams through some headphones, and I had a keyboard if they wanted to try it out. I found that people were too distracted to really focus on participating. Soon I will have a studio where people can come and learn more about the practice of jamming online and spend some time playing. Tis project kind of picked me. I can't think about anything else. v | BROADBAND COMMUNITIES | www.broadbandcommunities.com | July 2013