Piano Master Classes via the Internet

This paper describes the long-distance reproduction of professional-level piano performance by transmission of redundant indexed UDP packets containing MIDI data over the Internet. Our project was developed with the express intent of enabling remote instruction of piano Master Classes where highly accurate and subtle musical gestures must be reproduced. With MIDI grand pianos on both ends of a network connection, the sound quality of our system exceeds other means of performance reproduction. Regardless of the fidelity of live audio streaming, no arrangement of microphones and speakers can reproduce the acoustics of a grand piano as accurately as hammers striking the strings of a real, physical instrument.