News

Evaluating the Quality of Experience in Network Music Performance

MMLab member Konstantinos Tsioutas (Ph.D. Candidate) will present his work on Quality of Experience (QoE) evaluation for Network Music Performance (NMP) at the 148th Audio Engineering Society Conference.

In NMP, audio quality and audio delay are considered to be the most critical variables affecting the QoE. Although past work in the field has evaluated the effects of delay on remote musician synchronization, it has assumed high speed network connectivity and sophisticated equipment available only to research labs. The work of Konstantinos Tsioutas not only focuses on the equipment and speeds available to home users via high speed residential network connections but, more importantly, it uses user-centric QoE evaluation tools and methodologies to assess various parameters of the musicians' experience in NMP sessions. The paper to be presented at the AES Conference reports on a pilot study where eight musicians performed music in pairs in a controlled NMP setting and were asked to evaluate eight variables related to perception, while the end-to-end delay and the quality of the exchanged audio were varied.