Fundamentals and Principles of Musical Telepresence

The idea of playing livemusic with someone abroad represents a major challenge for musicians and sound engineers likewise. Cognitive, technical and purely musical aspects make high demands on a network music performance that should fulfill conditions of a realistic rehearsing scenarios in the same room. In turn the idea of a network music performance has generally been considered as an impracticable application. However, a precise and comprehensive analysis has so far not been published, which equally covers technical, cognitive aspects and their interdependencies equally. In order to give a final and valid statement about the feasibility of distributed real time music we take any of such relevant aspect into consideration and explain it accordingly to the reader. Finally we conclude that in recent wide area networks remote music sessions are possible assuming an awareness of latency conditions and appropriate interaction categories.