Alfred Crown & Michele Benincaso - 5G Remote Jamming
At MTF Stockholm in September 2018, BBC tech reporter, musician and MTF regular LJ Rich were joined on stage by Ericsson 5G radio engineer Alfred Crown (pictured above) and Mind Music Labs CEO Michele Benincaso to discuss their 5G innovation project that allows musicians to jam, collaborate and record live remotely over long distances.
Mind Music Labs’ ELK Music Operating System and the Ericsson 5G MusiConnect project provided visitors of MTF Stockholm the ability able to experience the benefits of incredible low-latency when playing/singing together at a distance.
AI Transcription
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
music, build, musicians, musical instrument, low latency, latency, studied, mtf, audio, stockholm, stage, analogue, keyboard, network, guitar, tech fest, michela, bit, labs, maker
SPEAKERS
Michele Benincaso, LJ Rich, Andrew Dubber, Alfred Crown
Andrew Dubber
Hi, I’m Dubber. I’m the director of Music Tech Fest, and this is the MTF podcast, is something we haven’t done for a bit. Let’s go back to MTF Stockholm in September last year, right near the showcase stage, we had what we call the MTF playground. It was a place where you could hang out, try some cool music gear, from the latest Roland synths to a fully working vintage analogue recording studio featuring Ennio Morricone’s his own mixing desk from the RCA studios in Rome, where you could try your hand at a mix using multitrack tape and valve compressors and so on and compare the results with digital emulators, which was kind of fun. There were also new accessible musical instruments in there, some VR music experiences to play with for massive visualisation table. And we also had some deeply experimental tech in there including an in house 5g innovation project from Ericsson, in partnership with mind music labs. We grabbed the brains behind this project Ericsson radio engineer Alfred Crown and MIND Music Labs CEO Michele Benincaso and set them down on the Showcase stage with BBC click technology reporter musician and MTF regular LJ Rich.
LJ Rich
Alright, so hello. Hi, I’m obviously joined on stage by a human being. Please tell us your name and what you do.
Alfred Crown
My name is Alfred Sam… Alfred Crown, (oh good). It’s been recently changed. So not for any weird reasons just, yeah, marriage. So. So anyways, I work as a radio engineer at Ericsson. And then we also have this little innovation project, which me and a few colleagues started up a few musicians who came together and thought about what can we do when it comes to products and services for musicians? What would we want? And could we make it
LJ Rich
brilliant? And let’s have a quick show of hands. How many people here play an instrument or sing? Yeah, pretty much everybody? Well, I guess. No, no, I’m not interested in how many people play? Well, I guess it’s how many people enjoy it. And this is a really rare audience. Because a lot of the time when we talk about music technology on stage, it’s through an audience of people who aren’t actually either familiar with it or, or interested. So this is a real opportunity to talk to other musicians. So you sing, right?
Alfred Crown
Yeah. I mean, I say I enjoy singing. Sometimes, I guess I get lucky and do it fairly well. But yeah, um, that’s, that’s sort of my musical background. And then, you know, it’s always been, you know, every now and then you need if you start a band, it turns out, okay, we don’t have a guitarist, okay, I’ll try to play that for a while. But you more usually is maybe the bass player. So then you’re a bass player for a while. So kind of like that. And then also, I studied music production, before I studied electrical engineering, which is sort of what led me into the electrical engineering studies. So, you know, turn this knob in the studio, I hear how it sounds, but what does it do? So that was the way
LJ Rich
so you started off as a musician, then you studied electrical engineering? And then just explain to us how you got to where you are now from that, because it seems to me that mixing music and tech in a professional context is going to have its own challenges.
Alfred Crown
Yeah, for sure. I mean, it’s, but I think I think they go very much hand in hand. And for me, you know, when I was studying, I was always very, you know, I had this, I was very firmly convinced that I was going to work with developing audio technology. And and I did do some some summer job at teenage engineering, which the here in Stockholm, and that was really great. And then and then I figured for my thesis, because, you know, when you study stuff, you realise that new things are exciting. So So I got, I thought this FPGA design was was a lot of fun. And also thought like, okay, radio, that’s pretty cool. It’s something you can see or feel or hear, but somehow it works. So I thought that was pretty cool. So I figured there was a good thesis that Ericsson and in FPGA design, and I figured I would try that out. And I did and it was fun. And then also got some got in touch with our internal innovation incubator, and started talking about these ideas I had for music and, and got really good support to to drive that. So. So then I ended up taking a position as a radio engineer, so developing chips for for radio, and then keep on driving these, this innovation project together with my colleague, Christopher. So we sort of came together in the innovation incubator. He’s an old guitarist. So we we really, really got along and started thinking about what we could do. So that was a lot of fun. And I think for me, I mean, also the sort of the experience of recording and music has been really great to my electrical engineering studies. Because of A lot of times, there’s been so many lectures where it’s like, okay, you have a course in like signal processing. And then you know, it kind of falling asleep a bit. And they’re like, wait a minute, that’s, that’s that knob that I was wondering about this very function, you know, controls this. So that’s been that’s been very helpful for me to motivate my, my studies to have that context.
LJ Rich
Cool. So how many of us found out about latency when we try to sing along with somebody through the internet and things like that? Yeah, latency is I can see the engineers over there is our latency is a massive pain. And I think that’s one of the reasons you’re up on this stage today. And while you’ve got a demonstration, just behind this wall, is a kind of way to sort of almost solve latency over network. So when I heard about this, I was like, really, because there’s nothing worse than you’re trying to sort of get a groove and it’s not quite right, and you’ve got this lag. And if you want to simulate lag, go try this demonstration. Oh, it’s very weird and disorienting, which I think is a massive bit of fun that MTF is quite famous for weird stuff. So tell us, what’s the problem that you’re trying to solve?
Alfred Crown
So yeah, basically, we’re trying to kill latency. I mean, I think that’s a pretty good, good description of it. So I mean, we one thing with the 5g, which is upcoming, which we are working on in parallel, I think Ericsson in general is working harder on 5g than this particular project. But one major thing with 5g is not just more data, it’s also lower latency in the networks, lower delay. And, and means I mean, Christopher and a few other colleagues, we started thinking about, then well, what could we do if we can develop a low latency audio solution? What kind of things could we do? So So for example, if I’m in Stockholm, maybe you’re in London, and we want to either maybe we had a band before, and we want to keep practising or want to do some sort of collaboration, right music. For us to be able to play together in real time, we need a very low latency. So that’s one thing you can do if you have a low latency audio connection. And you can also, for example, for recording, it’s very useful in a lot of different applications. So we started working on, you know, can we can we bring bring forth a prototype. And there’s really, I guess, a, there’s two parts of the problem. So it’s, first of all in the interface. So if you start with thinking with analogue audio, because what we wanted to do was to really, we didn’t want to create a separate echo system. Since we’ve come from musical background and sort of know the workflows, we wanted to build something that could easily be inserted into your current workflow. So to integrate easily, and I mean, the most straightforward way is just to have an analogue audio plug to plug into, because then you can route anything with your normal setup. So that’s where we started. And so then you have the problem of the interface between analogue audio and the network. So basically, taking from analogue audio, and creating network packets in the most low latency fashion. And then the other part of the problem is the network itself. And so we started looking at the interface and started developing this application. And then we also got in touch with with mine music, who have developed a really, really useful platform for for I think Michela will talk a lot more about that. But what we found useful, useful, it’s a really good platform for low latency audio handling on embedded devices. And for us, it’s really, it was when we heard about it, and we got explained more about it, we found out it was a very useful thing for us to speed up the development and also this fact that it seems to integrate very well into the existing workflow, which is something we also wanted. So we built the prototype on that platform. And so we now we have the showing here today, we have the a low latency interface, which you can use to to plug into a network. And we’ve also actually plugged that into a 5g testbed in our labs in Kista. So we have late earlier this spring in me and my colleague, Christopher had the first jam. As far as we know, it was the first jam ever, ever over 5g. That was a lot of fun,
LJ Rich
definitely a good claim to fame. Completely. Coincidentally, I visited the research labs, and they’ve got all kinds of things that deal with low latency issues. Like if you need to drive a bulldozer remotely, so you’re wearing VR, but if if you’ve got that latency, and you try and stop the thing, and it’s quite heavy, then it’s, it’s going to sort of smash into stuff. So there are lots of different applications. The main issue, though, is I think audio is, sadly it doesn’t seem to have the same glamour as remote controlling diggers through VR. And I know one of the reasons that you’re here is to get people to fill in a survey that could hopefully get more people at Ericsson to invest in this audio latency project. Yeah, I
Alfred Crown
think I think the thing is that it’s always a we we really appreciate that when we come to contexts like this or when we speak musicians in general, the problem and this, you know, the needs is very clear. And, you know, there are a lot of musicians at Ericsson as well, and, and we can, we can sort of explain it fairly well, to the ones that don’t play music either. But would make things a lot easier for us if we have the answers from a survey where people, people like you who might want to use this could say, Okay, this is something that would be really valuable. Because then it’s, it’s, it’s, it makes it a lot easier for us to, to take this forward, we’ve had really good support, and it’s something I really appreciate. We have this internal innovation structure where I can put part time to my work on this project, when I would really like to take it to the next step and make it even more of a reality. And so that would be really helpful. If you guys could fill out that survey, just like five questions takes two minutes. So they’re really, really great.
LJ Rich
And we’ve got one last question for you 5g. When, when? When can we have it?
Alfred Crown
Well, we have it in our labs right now. But the the phones are like the US as we call them user equipment. They’re like this big. So So I mean, this big off the ground. Yeah, exactly. So because this is like a whole rack of stuff. But going
LJ Rich
back to the 1980s, isn’t it? Yeah,
Alfred Crown
it was a bit nostalgic, even though I wasn’t live them. But anyway. So no, but the first releases will the first networks will start rolling out probably during the next year, and then more in the 2020. So it’ll be a gradual thing, of course. But I mean, now we’re seeing a lot of the first first network integration. So it’s, it’s coming. And and I mean, hopefully, by the time it becomes readily available, we could have this, this product that we’re working on, available so that people would be able to jam remotely to collaborate remotely recorded motion, and so on. And that’s something that we think would be very good both as I mean, from a from an engineer point of view, but as as musicians, we’d really like to use it.
LJ Rich
Currently I send mp3 is over. And then someone sends something back. And then it does just feels so much like it’s getting in the way of the creative process. And to an extent any music device is a barrier between what’s in here and what goes in here. So there’s so many compromises, but it’s lovely to know that we’ve got somebody on the inside. So ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much. We ready for our next of two guests. And then at two o’clock, there is a concert performance in the reactor Hall. So you’ve got that to look forward to. Alright, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome our next guest, Michele Benincaso. How you doing? Here’s the microphone, sit yourself down.
Michele Benincaso
Hi, everybody. Hey.
LJ Rich
Thanks very much for being here. Thank you. Is this your first Music Tech Fest? Yes. Oh, what do you think so far?
Michele Benincaso
so far? I think it’s great. I mean, I was expecting something big, but it’s actually bigger than what, what was expecting.
LJ Rich
It’s really interesting, because everybody in the audience could probably be sat in the seat, which I think makes for slightly more amusing situation as an interviewer because I’m aware that there might be questions that I’m missing. So please feel free. If you have questions to just stick your hand up. It’s a really informal environment, so we may as well make use of it. So tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do.
Michele Benincaso
So I’m Michele Benincaso, the founder of MIND music labs. And what we design is a musical operating system. It’s an operating system designed for building musical instruments. And the story, I mean, I started as a luthier, I studied violin making in Cremona at the Stradivari school. So there’s my dream was to build musical instrument. Then I moved to guitars. And when I moved to Stockholm, I am Italian. So I moved to Stockholm 10 years ago, and the dream was to bring the guitar to the future. We started to put together the team and we work it on that GitHub project, which will get done some very good feedback. But then we realised that to build the guitar of the future, we needed to build an operating system capable to give all the the the experience that we wanted to give to the users. And that means, you know, if we look the technology today, you need something that you can upgrade, you can connect to other device, and you can share what you do easily. And that’s exactly what is not music today. Because technology wise, we have a lot of new stuff, but we are still stuck like 20 years ago or something. I mean, we’re still around MIDI, which is great. But it’s you know, it has been some time.
LJ Rich
So MIDI is sort of missing out. I can say I’m going to ask the question that probably everybody might want to ask or it just makes it doesn’t matter. But what’s the difference between miking up a guitar? More making some software that allows what what are you adding
Michele Benincaso
to so basically we are building just I will give you an analogy. I mean, think about the mobile industry before the Android era. Every company was building their own operating system writing code on that specific DSP. And it was a very big chain of for the production, and was basically impossible to run software from other devices, only to move software between devices. But then Android came to the word, you start coding, like you’re coding on a computer. And in very short, you get the community just bring in what you have on the computer, on your mobile phone, and you get this great connectivity and so on. When it comes to the musical instrument work. If we go a little bit in tech, I mean, what elk is, it’s a Linux dual cannon system, where we get a Now we go back to after the talk, I mean, we can run the system below, like 03 milliseconds round trip latency, and we can speed the CPI up to 97%. So we really can make, we can give to the user the super Pro Audio performance. But at the same time, we would, we can make the musical instrument we can upgrade when you sound we can read the BST. So you can basically get whatever you have on your computer, or running in your keyboard. And also, it’s very easy to connect and sharing. I mean, think about if you want to share music today, you play a few chords on a keyboard, I mean, your experience is very painful. Because you need to plug your keyboard in a sound card which goes in a computer and then open up your GarageBand or whatever. And then finally share it. If you don’t on your keyboard, your keyboard connects, and you just play it, press a button share it that’s make much faster everything.
LJ Rich
So was this all born out of frustration. And it sounds to me there is a point where you’ve stopped just being an instrument maker, and you’ve augmented yourself in a way. So what was the point at which you thought hang on a minute, I want to be the the person that changes this.
Michele Benincaso
I mean, as I said everything started around the guitar because I was a musician and guitar maker for many years. And then together, of course, the team was increasing. And then we realised that the system that we were developing for the guitar, we said, Oh, wait a second. I mean, with this system, we can build anything. I mean, we can build them keyboard, drum machine, studio mixer, anything and and that will make so much easier for developers to run the software that they already write for computer. I mean, there’s tonnes of VST on a computer. But if you want to bring it on stage on your keyboard, that’s basically not possible. So that’s so the choice just came, it was some kind of a natural transformation, instead of building the guitar, let’s focus on building a platform where everybody can build whatever they want. So elk,
LJ Rich
yeah, how does it work?
Michele Benincaso
Okay, it’s I mean, it’s a product designed for industrial. I mean, it’s over the system that we are licencing to a big company building a musical instrument. And the idea is just, I mean, you don’t see it, but there is what you can get this what the musician are missing. So it’s like you don’t see Android on your phone or us on your iPhone. But what you see it’s a device where you can download data, process data, send out data in real time and be connected with everyone, wherever you want. So that’s what you get if you get the musical instrument Power BI.
LJ Rich
And where do you see it going? Then in a few years time, do you think you’ll start creating an open source project as well? I
Michele Benincaso
mean, there is, of course there is. Since we’re all a musician, and all makers, sunken omegas in the team, there is a desire to build something for the community, which we’re working on. But we don’t have exactly the perfect schedule yet. When, but I mean, that’s definitely something that
LJ Rich
will happen. And what’s the thing that most surprised you about building software when you’ve been building hardware all the time?
Michele Benincaso
I mean, first of all, I have been amazing how code can be. So there is creativity also in there because I as an instrument maker. And also with you know, I studied to build violin like 400 years ago. So it was a really practical and physical work. But then when you see actually a full OS building from scratch, and I mean there is craftsmanship also in there. And but that’s thanks to the guys in our team.
LJ Rich
It’s a crazy amount of work to build a whole OS. thing,
Michele Benincaso
what why it’s Linux based system, but if we do our kernel architecture, but I mean, it has been a lot of work. Yeah, definitely.
LJ Rich
And what’s next for you? What would you like to do next? Obviously, you’re gonna continue to work on So
Michele Benincaso
yeah, I mean, together with alikat, we are not working only on the operating system, we are creating the whole ecosystem, we are releasing a marketplace for VST maker selling their VST on our platform. And together with our zone, we are working on this long distance jam session, which is what musicians have been waiting, I guess since the beginning of internet. Yes, I’m definitely one of those. And and that’s actually happening because we have a prototype running, you know, the test with Ericcson is with our development board. And that’s something that will happen.
LJ Rich
Brilliant. And it’s not often that you get the chance to be in front of a music tech audience. So is there if there was anything that you really wanted to communicate? Or anything that I’ve forgotten to ask you think I wish I’d said that now is your chance to speak to these amazingly brain to people, then I would be something not technical and not related to Okay, I guess it’s more like, we just keep making music and have fun with it because the word really needed. Yeah, that’s true. It’s a lovely place to end actually. So thank you very much Michele Benincaso. Did I get it right? Yes. Excellent. Grazie mille, round of applause. Thank you.
Andrew Dubber
That’s Alfred Crown from Ericsson and Michele Benincaso from MIND music labs on the Showcase stage with a wonderful LJ Rich at MTF Stockholm last year, and that’s the MTF podcast. If that was enjoyable of interest or useful. Please do subscribe, share, like rate review or tell someone you like would really appreciate it. Have a great week and we’ll talk very soon. Cheers.
