Speaker
Description
The Europasinfonie project will stage the world’s first real-time pan-European distributed orchestra concert on 18 June 2027 in Dresden. In this performance, 62 string musicians of Dresdner Sinfoniker will perform live on stage, while wind, brass, percussion and choir musicians from 11 additional European cities – Athens, Birmingham, Brussels, Brno, Tallinn, Salzburg, Belgrade, Milan, Madrid, Pécs and Warsaw – participate simultaneously from remote locations. These musicians will appear life-size on LED panels integrated into the Dresden stage, creating the experience of a single unified orchestra performing across approximately 2,500 km of fibre network infrastructure.
What will the TNC audience take away from your talk?
The TNC audience will gain a concrete understanding of how Europe’s research and education network infrastructure can enable real-time human collaboration at continental scale, far beyond traditional data transfer or video streaming use cases.
First, the talk will demonstrate the practical latency limits of pan-European research networks in a real-world scenario. By presenting results from the 2026 test programme, the audience will see how a strict ≤25 ms one-way latency budget can be achieved simultaneously across eleven NREN paths via the GÉANT backbone. This provides valuable insight into the operational performance of European research networking under conditions where even small delays become immediately audible.
Second, attendees will learn about the technical architecture required for distributed real-time performance. The presentation explains how the SoundJack system, a Frankfurt-based hub topology, synchronized audio/video packet transport, and uniform remote-site hardware design enable frame-accurate synchronization between musicians separated by thousands of kilometres. These architectural principles are transferable to other latency-critical applications in research, education, and media collaboration.
Third, the talk highlights a new application domain for research networks: distributed cultural production. Europasinfonie shows how high-performance research infrastructure can support artistic collaboration across Europe, creating a model for permanent low-latency connections between music academies, conservatories, and performance venues. This expands the perceived societal value of research networking beyond science and engineering.
Finally, the audience will see how network characteristics themselves can become part of creative practice. Rather than treating latency as a purely technical constraint, the project integrates it into the compositional concept, turning geographical distance and propagation delay into audible musical structure.
In short, participants will leave with three key insights:
1. What is technically possible today on GÉANT at continental scale.
2. How to architect ultra-low-latency distributed systems for real-time collaboration.
3. How research networking infrastructure can enable entirely new cultural and societal use cases.
If feasible, a live bilateral audio demonstration between Helsinki and Dresden will provide a direct experiential moment for the audience, allowing them to hear, in real time, the network performance that makes the Europasinfonie possible.
| Are you a first time speaker at TNC? | Yes |
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