Quality of Musicians’ Experience in Network Music Performance: A Subjective Evaluation

In Network Music Performance (NMP), audio quality and audio delay are considered to be the most critical variables affecting the Quality of Musicians’ Experience (QoME). In order to quantify the extent to which these parameters affect QoME, we executed 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. We present the design and execution of this experiment and discuss its results and their implications for the tolerance of musicians to increased delay and degraded audio quality.