REDWOOD CITY — As most people were cocooning in their homes last winter to avoid the COVID-19 surge, the Ragazzi Boys Chorus was holding a live holiday concert.
But the choir wasn’t breaking any health guidelines. Instead, the boys were singing separately from their homes, delivering their music remotely.
The concert played out in perfect harmony, without any disruptive audio lags, just like a live ensemble. For Mike Dickey, who pulled off the rare technological feat, it was a sight — and more importantly, a sound — to behold.
Months earlier, Dickey had set out to find a way for his son to continue singing with his Ragazzi classmates even though they were forbidden from being in the same room.
Dickey, a Palo Alto-based entrepreneur, searched the internet and eventually stumbled onto JackTrip technology, which enables musicians to produce music together over common Internet connections. JackTrip was created by Chris Chafe, the director of Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics.
As Dickey begin tinkering with JackTrip, he became personally invested in the technology as a consumer product. Together with Chafe, he founded JackTrip Labs, a business that connects musicians in virtual online studios.
In an interview, Dickey, who is also the company’s CEO, expanded on his quest to preserve the magic of music in an increasingly remote world.
Q: Can you tell me more about the Ragazzi concert last winter? What was the process behind arranging a fully remote, high-quality musical ensemble?
A: It was gradual, starting small, with just the young men’s ensemble choral group at Ragazzi. We sent out a survey to the families asking what kind of internet connection they had, and we thought, “Let’s go for the few people with the best possible connections and start from there.”
We had a call to get started, and it worked great — well, there were quite a few hurdles at first, and it was very experimental, but by the end of the call they were singing together and recording some of the first songs. Then we just started gradually adding in other groups from Ragazzi as we went, rolling it out to all the younger groups.
By the end of the year, we had a holiday concert — all of Ragazzi, and they were performing live, each boy singing from their homes; it was just amazing, we were broadcasting it online. That was really the culmination for me of a lot of different things. In the spring of last year, we had another concert with everybody singing together; it was really pushing the upper bounds of anything we’d ever seen before.
Q: How soon after discovering JackTrip’s technology did you realize this was something you could be part of as a full-time job, and what is your role as CEO of JackTrip Labs?
A: I met with Chris (Chafe) and got to know him and others at the JackTrip project at Stanford. The idea came up of, how do we help more people know about this and use it? That’s when the idea came to create the JackTrip Foundation.
We started that, and we had a wholly owned subsidiary LLC for a while that was building all the devices and operating the (virtual studio) service. Early this year, we realized that we just couldn’t keep up with all the demand that was out there, because it was just myself and others as full-time volunteers sending out thousands of devices per month. So we made the decision to spin out the subsidiary as JackTrip Labs, which is a public-benefit corporation of which the foundation is a shareholder.
Q: How are you getting the technology onto people’s devices?
A: We had a device that we built from a Raspberry Pi micro-computer. It’s that plus a sound device with a case and various cables — we just packaged it up together along with the software that runs on the device. It has JackTrip and a bunch of other software that makes (the device) easy to just plug in and use. We sell that online.
We also have a web-application service that people can log into and create these studio rooms that allow them to get together. The service has been free to date, it’s been in a beta period, and then on Jan. 1 we’re planning to start charging a fee for a subscription plan.
Q: Could you describe how JackTrip works in simple terms, namely how it achieves audio communication without the loss or lag that’s made audio conferencing during the pandemic a nightmare?
A: What it essentially does is digitize audio, and then it sends that digital signal over the internet. And because the internet moves data a lot faster than sound can move through air, we’re able to get that sound from one end to another end very efficiently.
Q: Why haven’t other tech products that involve audio communication, like FaceTime or Zoom, already solved this problem?
A: I think the need is extremely strong for musicians. When you’re having a conversation over the phone, you have a very high level of latency, but we could never sing a song together and stay in tune.
So it’s a use case that just hasn’t yet been properly addressed by the industry, because they’ve been focused mainly on voice communications. And even then it has largely been around making (audio-conferencing) work — it hasn’t really been focused on the quality of the sound or how realistic the sound is.
And really, one of the realizations that came out of the pandemic is how important audio quality is, because we’ve all been forced to, rather than sit in a room together, communicate and speak together over the internet. It’s made us realize how lacking it is compared to in-person communication. I think there’s a growing recognition, even for conference calls where people talk to one another, of how different that experience is when you’re talking with a technology that’s designed for it.
Q: How does your interest in audio manifest personally? Were you always into high-tech sound devices, like headphones?
A: Yes, I’m a music lover and have been a part-time musician. I used to play marching band in high school. I had a long period of time when I started working where I barely picked up an instrument, but I’d still listen to music all the time during the day. Everybody knew me when I was working in an office as the person with the crazy headphones who had them on all the time at my computer.
Q: Do you see the technology being widely used even after the pandemic is effectively over and in-person large groups are once again a safe reality?
A: I definitely think it’s a new era. The pandemic has sparked innovations to unlock things that weren’t possible before. There’s a convenience that comes from being able to do something over the internet and not have to drive your car or travel somewhere and lug all your instruments with you. Being able to click a button and be with everybody you want to perform with provides a new convenience that didn’t exist before.We don’t think that’s going to lead to people purely making music online. But we think that it will hopefully lead to more people making music more frequently, because the bar is lowered. It’s easier to jump online and play with people for an hour versus having to set aside a huge portion of your schedule for it.
MIKE DICKEY’S PROFILE
Organization: JackTrip Labs, Inc.
Position: Co-Founder, CEO
Age: 43
Birthplace: Lancaster, Pennsylvania
Residence: Palo Alto
Education: Carnegie Mellon, dropout
FIVE THINGS ABOUT MIKE DICKEY
- Spent much of his youth keying printed code from “Rainbow” magazines into his dad’s Color Computer, so he could play video games on it. Helped run Bulletin Board Systems and ANSI art groups in the 90’s.
- Co-founded and sold three enterprise software companies. The first of those he started a few days after his 18th birthday.
- Played saxophone and bass guitar in high school (marching, concert, jazz) band. Took a hiatus for a few decades, and recently started to re-learn and kindle his love for music.
- Started working on JackTrip to help his son sing with Ragazzi Boys Chorus during the pandemic.
- Enjoys biking, hiking and most outdoor sports. Discovered sailing a few years ago and frequently races sailboats on San Francisco Bay.
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