Internet Music: Dream or (virtual) Reality?

The recent explosive growth of the Internet and the fact that personal computers with multimedia capabilities are now a commonplace have raised the interest in distributed multimedia systems. Among all multimedia applications, the ones that relate to interactive music are the ones which present the tightest timing constraints. Traditional operating systems and networking infrastructure do not provide enough support for the quality of service these applications require. This paper describes a number of problems concerning distributed musical applications on the Internet and discusses possible solutions for each of them. We, then, consider a variety of situations in which Internet Music systems could be used and suggest that the Internet is a viable environment for musical activities even when using existing technologies. 1 Introduction In 1995, our research group at the University of Illinois developed Vosaic, an extension to the Mosaic Web Browser that is capable of streaming compress..