#37 The Gig Room: Real-Time Online Musical Collaboration with Terry Lowry

Terry Lowry is a prolific composer, conductor, Steinway artist, and host of the podcast Tone Poem. With over 200 compositions to his name, he has performed across North America and Europe and leads several ensembles, including the Carroll Symphony Orchestra. He co-founded Musical Overture, an online music platform, and is deeply involved in music therapy and education programs in his community. Learn more about Terry’s work at musicaloverture.com.

In this episode, Seth, Allyson, and Terry discuss:

• The analogy between conducting and teaching, focusing on how both roles involve knowing the material, empowering others, and facilitating a conducive environment for learning or performance.
• Terry’s journey into music and conducting, starting with his childhood experiences performing with his father and leading an instrumental ensemble at a young age.
• The creation and impact of Musical Overture, a platform connecting musicians worldwide, and the development of Gig Room, a revolutionary tool for real-time online music collaboration.
• The groundbreaking e-concerts hosted using Gig Room, including performances with musicians from different continents and the story of a Syrian refugee who transformed her life through music.
• The future of music education and performance with projects like the Stars Align initiative, aiming to connect people globally through live virtual music experiences.

Key takeaways:

• Conducting and teaching share similarities in preparation, communication, and fostering a collaborative environment.
• Musical Overture and Gig Room bridge geographical gaps, enabling musicians to collaborate and perform together in real time.
• Technology like Gig Room can enhance music education by providing opportunities for virtual rehearsals and performances, leading to greater confidence and preparedness among musicians.
• Innovative projects like Stars Align demonstrate the potential of virtual platforms to create large-scale, impactful musical events that unite people worldwide.

Learn more:

• Visit Musical Overture to explore the platform and Gig Room.
• Watch the documentary “Hear Us” on Apple TV and Amazon Prime to learn about the world’s first e-concert and its impact.
• Subscribe to the podcast to hear more inspiring stories from educators and industry professionals leveraging technology in virtual learning.

About the hosts:

Seth Fleischauer is dedicated to exploring the intersection of education and technology through insightful conversations with experts and practitioners in the field of live virtual learning.

Allyson Mitchell is an enthusiastic co-host who brings energy and curiosity to discussions, highlighting the transformative power of innovative educational tools and methods.
Tami Moehring is a seasoned educator and podcast host who excels in creating an inviting atmosphere for guests. Her warm introductions and keen interest in educational innovation make her a valued voice in discussions about the future of education.


Host Links:
1. Browse amazing virtual learning opportunities at Tami Moehring and Allyson Mitchell's CILC.org

2. Seth Fleischauer's  Banyan Global Learning helps schools leverage technology for teacher and student wellness including AI literacy PD for teachers and, for students, live virtual learning experiences in Character Education: banyangloballearning.com

Subscribe to Why Distance Learning for more engaging interviews and insights into the evolving landscape of virtual education. Available on all major podcast platforms. Visit Be Podcast Network to learn more about the network and discover other educational podcasts.

Creators & Guests

Host

Allyson Mitchell

SF

Host

Seth Fleischauer

TM

Host

Tami Moehring

What is Why Distance Learning??

The Why Distance Learning? podcast is for educators who are engaged with live virtual learning experiences, whether they be content providers who produce and facilitate or educators who want to complement their curriculum and learn more about the medium. We interview content providers, industry professionals, field experts and educators who love and use live virtual learning.

Dive deep with Seth, Allyson, and Tami into the rapidly growing world of synchronous virtual and online education. Through in-depth interviews, explore how educators are leveraging videoconferencing, interactive virtual learning, and other education technologies like virtual field trips to revolutionize remote and distance learning. Discover the benefits and challenges of teaching at a distance. Learn how virtual engagement can enhance traditional instruction. Hear from distance learning experts using the latest EdTech tools to create unique remote learning opportunities for students and teachers alike. From content providers to administrators to EdTech entrepreneurs, this podcast reveals the human stories and innovative technologies shaping the future of virtual and online education. For anyone interested in transforming classrooms and learning through remote digital platforms, Why Distance Learning? charts a path forward.

Hosted by Seth Fleischauer of Banyan Global Learning and Allyson Mitchell and Tami Moehring of the Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration.

Seth Fleischauer (00:00.701)
Hello everyone and welcome to Why Distance Learning, the podcast for educators who are engaged with live virtual learning experiences, whether they be content providers who produce and facilitate or educators who want to complement their curriculum and learn more about the medium. We interview content providers, industry professionals, field experts, and educators who love and use live virtual learning. And this week, our guest is Terry Lowry. Terry, welcome to the podcast.

Terry Lowry (00:25.262)
Thank you, Seth. Thank you.

Allyson (00:26.516)
Yay. Hello, I'm good. How are you?

Seth Fleischauer (00:27.293)
Allison, hello, how are you?

I'm good on a scale of zero to excited. How excited are you right now?

Allyson (00:35.06)
I'm the most excited, very excited, so excited.

Seth Fleischauer (00:40.189)
Love it. Tammy is not here with us today. Can you, Allison, please introduce Terry?

Allyson (00:46.996)
I can. So Terry has done so many amazing things. We're just going to name a couple of them since we'll jump into the wonderful career and work that he does. But Terry is a prolific composer with over 200 works, host of a popular podcast called Tone Poem with listeners in over 100 countries. Make sure to check the notes in the show notes today so you can grab that link.

As a Steinway artist and conductor, he has performed across North America and Europe and leads several ensembles, including the Carroll Symphony Orchestra. He co -founded the online music platform, Musical Overture, and serves as its CEO. Additionally, he is an active volunteer in music therapy and education programs in his community. Thanks so much for being here, Terry.

Terry Lowry (01:40.334)
Thank you, Allison.

Seth Fleischauer (01:41.981)
Terry, I have a question off the bat about being a conductor. It is a metaphor, I think, or maybe an analogy that is often used for teaching that we are at the front of the class and kind of conducting the controlled chaos of the classroom. Do you see that as an apt comparison or is it completely different? Are we way off?

Terry Lowry (02:01.428)
absolutely. That's absolutely a wonderful comparison. Two big reasons that come to mind immediately. One, we have to know the material, right? And because they'll see right through us if we don't. The students see right through us, the musicians see right through us. We have to know what it is we expect them to be able to do. And our primary...

task is to empower those in front of us to learn, perform, whatever we're trying to do. We are there to empower, whether that means making sure everyone has the right materials or all the music is on the stands, making sure that the classroom is conducive for learning, that there are no distractions, that the lights are on, that the, you know, everything, you know.

everything from the logistics and the simple things like does everyone have the proper materials all the way up to the details of how it's supposed to be done and modeling what it is we're trying to teach. I think it's a great analogy.

Seth Fleischauer (02:59.261)
How often do you model for your musicians? Do you like, you're like, hold on, give me that clarinet, let me do it.

Terry Lowry (03:07.15)
Well, it's funny, when you're working with a group, we kind of start out in what I kind of think of as a teaching mode where my gestures and my body, my face are really kind of trying to convey as much information as possible.

because it's more efficient to do it while they're playing than for me to stop and go off on some tangent and talk for four minutes about why this particular measure should be played this way because it was written in 1830 in Vienna as opposed to what you might have thought from 1740 in Paris or something crazy like that. So if I can convey it on the fly while we're doing it.

through my conducting, then it's much more efficient. Now, as the players and I come to a shared interpretation of the music, I can get away from the teaching part of it or become more of that, almost like a mirror so that when they will look at me for...

that little bit of confidence. They know what to do. We've rehearsed it. They look at me as if to say, I'm right, aren't I? I look at them and go, yes, you're right. The way that I approach the group evolves as we learn the piece of music.

Allyson (04:18.804)
Yeah.

Terry Lowry (04:31.502)
But at the beginning, it's a very detailed, I think of it more as teaching than conducting. And then by the end, it's more of a shared dance, I suppose.

Seth Fleischauer (04:43.421)
Yeah. Yeah, and I love that terminology that you used, arriving at a shared interpretation. Because I think that teachers have an idea of what the standards are, what the assignment is, what we're trying to get our students to accomplish. Even if it's super open -ended, there's some sort of framework to interpret their production. And the students must have that same path, right? They have a path from the opposite angle, but it has to arrive in the same place.

which is that shared interpretation. I really appreciate that.

Terry Lowry (05:16.334)
I think one of the things about that is that we have an idea as the teacher or the conductor, we have a way of thinking about it that is both that we can articulate, but also that we have internalized. And maybe I haven't talked about how to play a passage a certain way because I've just done it for so long. And maybe I've always done it and I never really had to tell anyone else how to do it.

Allyson (05:42.388)
Hmm.

Terry Lowry (05:43.662)
learning how to articulate something, the student may or the musician may come back with a different articulation, a different way of saying it or talking about it that I might like better than what I would say. And so when I say a shared interpretation, I'm learning from them. I'm learning both.

Okay, did I convey what I was trying to convey? Was it effective? Do I need to alter the way I say it? Do I need to change what I'm doing? Because I'm not getting the results I wanted. Or did they show me something new that I had not explored yet? And perhaps if I frame my musical language in a different way, I can achieve the new goal. And so, sure, I'm probably providing a little more information, but I'm definitely receiving it from them too. And so, it's...

Allyson (06:31.252)
A true educator.

Seth Fleischauer (06:31.773)
Yeah.

Terry Lowry (06:33.072)
kind of evolving kind of thing. So I really do feel like it at the end. After all, they're the ones playing the music. I never forget that. I'll walk out on stage and I'm thinking, I'm not going to play a single note tonight. These are the...

Allyson (06:39.892)
Yeah.

Seth Fleischauer (06:41.149)
Hehehehehe

Allyson (06:45.524)
Yeah, it's interesting to hear this because I think of two different things that came to my mind. One was this painting in the Romantic period by Delacroix of a very famous violinist. And this individual was painted a number of times. But the way that...

his depiction was, was really the movement, the feeling. And none was better or worse. It's just that idea of the collective understanding of the movements coming together. And then it also made me think a lot about connecting teaching as well as being conductor. One quote that I read once was, conductors have the courage to turn their back to the audience.

And when you said that idea of that you're really there, you're mirroring or you're acting, you're helping your artists be confident, your musicians be confident in the skill you already know they have. I think sometimes as teachers, you have to hold that role and you have to be brave and kind of turn your back on what might be what everybody is expecting and just hone in on what you know your collective group.

Seth Fleischauer (07:30.781)
Hehehe.

Allyson (07:57.652)
that are all individuals and bring something beautiful together. So I just think that that's a, you know, it's a powerful role you hold and it's exciting to see how it comes to, comes together. And I wonder, how did you get to become a conductor? Like, how did you get to, what started you on your musical track?

Terry Lowry (08:16.302)
My father was a concert pianist and I always jokingly said that had he been a baseball player, I would have been a baseball player. That I wanted to do what dad did. So by the time I was playing, I was performing with him on two pianos when I was seven. And so we would travel around and play recitals. That was just part of my childhood. And at a...

Allyson (08:21.908)
Hahaha

Terry Lowry (08:40.974)
He was also a church musician, which was interesting because he had a choir and there were other people in the church that played other instruments. And when I was probably 11 or 12, he put me in charge of what he called the instrumental ensemble, which was kind of a small little band of wind players, maybe a dozen players. And some of them were students like me. Some of them were adults that still played or wanted to start playing again. And so I kind of had my own little group to conduct and play with and write music for. And that just kind of grew.

throughout college and graduate school being a composer you want people to play your music you've got to be the one to start it and so I would put players together and conduct them with my own music and and eventually it led toward to founding my first orchestra which was called the Edouard chamber Orchestra I was in a tiny little town

Allyson (09:18.676)
Hehehe

Terry Lowry (09:34.19)
Okay, so post grad school, it's time for me to head out on the road and start my concert career. So I was living in this tiny little town that was about half an hour from the big airport in Atlanta. This is a wonderful location, perfect for what I wanted to do. But my in this little town population of about 200 people, one little blinking red stoplight in the middle of town, one church where I worked on Sundays, I would direct the choir of this church.

One day this man in my church told me that he had a birthday coming up and it happened to be January 27th. And I said, well, you've got a famous birthday. And he said, well, whose birthday is it? January 27th. And I said, well, that's Mozart's birthday. And he said, who's Mozart? I think he was kidding, but I didn't know. Just to make sure.

Allyson (10:17.492)
Mwah!

Seth Fleischauer (10:18.045)
Meh.

Allyson (10:21.076)
Yeah.

Terry Lowry (10:24.814)
We reserved one evening for a night of Mozart and I started calling in favors from players whom I had accompanied. They owed me one, so I said, hey, we're gonna do this, we're gonna play this piece of music, this. And I ended up with about 40 of my friends coming in to play. We had a full orchestra.

And we did this program of Mozart in this tiny little town. 300 people came to that concert. They were sitting in the aisles. They were sitting on the steps leading up to the stage. The church rebuilt the stage of the sanctuary to accommodate the orchestra, standing ovation after every movement. It was the most magical night you can imagine.

I was maybe 24, 25 years old. And from that point, I was hooked. I went out and got local businesses to sponsor the orchestra. We started playing three times a year. I moved from that orchestra to the orchestra where I am now, the Carroll Symphony. 600 concerts later, here we are.

Allyson (11:17.076)
600, wow, so great.

Terry Lowry (11:20.014)
Yeah, so it's just been, there's music I want to play and if I can play it by myself on the piano I do, but if I need my friends to play then that's what we do. That's kind of how we think of the orchestra.

Seth Fleischauer (11:27.293)
Mm -hmm.

dozen or so friends to put the sound together, here we go. So, you know, this is the Wide Distance Learning podcast. I'm wondering where does musical overture in the gig room, where does that fit in to all this, to this story?

Terry Lowry (11:33.07)
Yeah.

Allyson (11:33.908)
You

Terry Lowry (11:46.414)
Sure, so when I was a child, I grew up in a small town in South Georgia, all these small town stories, maybe 8 ,000 people, and I was the only kid I knew that played the piano for 6 hours a day. Now, as I grew up, I realized that there were other kids like me scattered all over the world, but we had no way in the 80s of meeting each other.

Fast forward to the age of the internet and suddenly it's possible so back around 2011 2012 a friend of mine and I decided to start an online platform for musicians So the social media had started but it wasn't what it is today. It hadn't gone mobile and If you remember social media before it was mobile it was a thing but it wasn't the thing and it later became it was also before cell phone carrier started offering unlimited

So YouTube was not something that you carried around on your mobile phone.

Because it was so expensive to get to on a mobile platform So at that time we decided to create musical overture, which was sort of like LinkedIn plus YouTube put together with the idea being that and whereas with YouTube you'll often upload your favorite Billy Joel video or your favorite Taylor Swift video or something The idea of musical overture is you just upload your own videos. It's you these are for musicians, right? So you you had your own We gave you a little web page

We had messaging between members. We had a really cool search early kind of AI kind of thing. We were able to identify which musicians we thought might like to meet each other and create a...

Terry Lowry (13:26.51)
people you may like kind of feed for them. But you can upload as many videos as you wanted. The upload speeds were much faster than YouTube at the time. So it just kinda, it kinda took off and it was always free. No ads, no commercials, just straight up musicians, many musicians.

and the day that we launched it Steinway helped us launch it and the day that we launched it from Atlanta there was a violinist in St. Petersburg Russia who uploaded a video and so just went around the world on day one.

And so we just kind of watched that and from our members we started receiving requests around 2015 for a way to be able to play music when you're not together. So the flow is this you created your presence on Musical Overture uploaded some videos and then you found other people that you liked they watched your videos then you send a message back and forth and you're talking.

And the idea is that eventually you may want to meet up and play together. Maybe we're going to play in a coffee shop or meet at a school or somewhere and make music. So you never would have met each other otherwise, which is what I needed when I was a little kid growing up in a small town. So you've got musicians that live three or four hours apart. Now they're finally getting to meet each other. But there was a step in between that we really needed, and that was to be able to play together online.

Allyson (14:47.092)
Mm -hmm.

Terry Lowry (14:47.758)
So you watch each other's videos, you make, you send messages, you play together online, and then you decide if you want to make music together in the real world. That was kind of the flow. So back then, everything was Skype. Skype was the word that we used for what we're doing today. Whether you use Skype or not, we're gonna... That's why the engine was on December, the engine, all of a sudden it was Zoom and Skype was no longer the thing, it just kind of...

Allyson (15:04.116)
Yes, never be Skype in this situation.

Seth Fleischauer (15:04.637)
Hehehehehe

Terry Lowry (15:13.518)
But at the time Skype was the thing. And our members were letting us know that Skype is too slow. There's this huge lag. I would play and then they would play, but they were playing two, three seconds behind me. So what do we do?

Seth Fleischauer (15:24.093)
Yeah.

Terry Lowry (15:25.198)
And no matter what the platform, no matter who it was, there was always this built in, it seemed to be intentional latency. So we started kind of diving in to say, well, what's causing the latency and is there a way around it? Or is it just, is it part of the physical world? Is there, what can we do about it? And we started experimenting. Well, what is the latency in the real world? What would it be like if you were here in my studio? What would the latency be between us? If you were X number of feet apart or with my orchestra?

What is the latency between the players on the front row and the percussionist in the back? What is the limits? What can we actually do? Let's not be theoretical here and let's not ask Google what the limits are. Let's actually find out. Let's measure these limits. How far apart can I put musicians and still be able to make music in real time? And can we that using technology? So we started working on it at the end of 2015.

By the end of 2016, early 2017, we had a prototype of an application that we called Gig Room. And we were able to achieve at that point sub 150 millisecond round trip times. So if I played, then within 75 milliseconds, you could hear me and you would respond. And within 75 more milliseconds, I could hear you. And so.

Allyson (16:34.292)
amazing.

Seth Fleischauer (16:43.805)
And that's equivalent to what distance between people.

Terry Lowry (16:45.678)
That's been 75 feet apart. So sound travels at one foot per millisecond. And you have to account for round trip. So you've got to multiply it times two. And then there's the reaction time, right? So I can have the technology working great, but because I'm four feet from my microphone, I'm adding four milliseconds. Four feet from my speaker, so I'm adding another four milliseconds. So all of these things factor into it. The real breakthrough, well, we were able to achieve this and we put on the world's first that we know of.

world's first ever e -concert in 2017. We had two musicians in Germany. We had a brilliant

Seth Fleischauer (17:18.653)
Thank you.

Terry Lowry (17:24.558)
violinist from Italy on stage with a Syrian refugee who had sought asylum in Germany. It was hosted by the Franz Liszt Conservatory in Weimar. They were on stage and streamed in on a big movie screen was a cellist from the Cleveland Institute of Music. So we had North America and Europe and we put on the world's first ever E concert. We filmed the whole thing. We made a documentary about it. We showed it at the Cannes Film Festival. It won the World Silver Medal of the New York

Seth Fleischauer (17:47.165)
Wow.

Terry Lowry (17:54.512)
Film Festival. It is now on Apple TV and Amazon Prime and because of that video being out it was on 300 PBS stations. People knew that this existed. We had not released it yet though to the public. I'm a real knickler for getting it right and I wasn't happy with some aspects of Gig Room. It was this great thing that I had.

I could share it with a few musicians. We tried out, we're working on it. My dev team from Musical Overtures working on.

making it better, making it faster. But I didn't think it was good enough to release yet. And then the pandemic happened. And because the movie was out and people had seen the movie, we started getting calls from people, from music educators, from fine arts coordinators, from NAFME, people calling us trying to, you know, we've got 150 ,000 music teachers that were sent home and they're having a really hard time teaching music because we've got this latency thing. And you've somehow figured it out. Would you please release it? So we released a

really, I call it a down and dirty version, just as quickly as we can. It was browser based, so you went through Safari or Chrome or whatever, which had a good side and a bad side. The good side was, because it was browser based, it would work on any device, no matter what, because they're all basically Safari. So everything worked.

The bad side was there is this congestion control standard that's sort of present in a variation of it is present in almost every browser that puts in an extra minimum 400 milliseconds of latency. Though that the quality of a conversation like what we're having right now can be more reliable.

Terry Lowry (19:43.63)
start getting it faster than this then there are other things about the the pathway of the audio video packets that make it less reliable. So in order to make it more reliable the big players like zoom and Skype and FaceTime and all those people they build in some latency so that they can fix errors on the fly and resort packets according to time codes and things like that. But that latency

means that for about 15 % of our gig rooms, they were failing. 85 % were working great, mostly because there were school connections and they were on private school internet connections. So we're able to eliminate some of the problems that trigger the congestion control. But about 15 % of those were failing and to me that was just horrible. So after the pandemic, we took everything that we learned, which was a lot.

standalone application that would not require a browser, would not be at the mercy of anyone else's congestion control. We could do everything from top to bottom, from diaphragm to diaphragm, totally in our own control. That's what we've done. And so now once that product, that application, we had a working prototype for that version in November of 2022. And since then, we've had a 100 % success rate. We haven't dropped a call.

Seth Fleischauer (21:12.861)
Wow.

Terry Lowry (21:13.39)
averaging the average gig room right now is round trip time of 22 milliseconds which is and that's consistently up to four and five thousand miles apart.

Seth Fleischauer (21:19.613)
Wow.

Allyson (21:19.732)
So wonderful.

Seth Fleischauer (21:26.813)
Wow.

Terry Lowry (21:28.27)
And we've got endless audio and video.

Seth Fleischauer (21:31.997)
So how, without like getting into the like technical aspects of it too much, like, like how do you do that?

Terry Lowry (21:37.006)
Well, getting my attorney's mad at me, but...

Allyson (21:38.548)
I'm like, I want to get into all the technical aspects. I'm like, let's talk about the freeways and the highways and all the ways we can make them not congested.

Seth Fleischauer (21:52.701)
But so I mean, the question is, how did you pull that off? Do you have engineers that are leading the field? Were you just trying to solve a different problem that Zoom could easily be able to solve if they were trying to solve that problem? What's the story of you cracking the 22 millisecond nut?

Terry Lowry (22:13.614)
I think it's because I'm a conductor. So if you're a conductor, you've got to have these people playing these different instruments. I've got to have an oboe player that's an incredible oboe player. They can play that oboe way better than I can play the oboe and better than this cello player can play the cello. But I've got to have a cello player.

and I've got to have a trumpet player, and I've got to have all these people with these really highly developed specialties that can also work well together. And so that was the biggest thing, putting together the team, understanding that, okay, as a conductor, I've got the score to tell me who I need, what do I need, I need these players, so I've got to go out and find the best.

people to play these parts. With this, we didn't really have a blueprint like that. We were figuring out as we went along, OK, we need someone who specializes in this, someone else who specializes in this, we need some people that are specialists in this. And so it was just an ongoing and ever and still today going, trying to fill those chairs with the very best programmers that we can find with the specialties that are required for our task.

And that's exactly what we do as a conductor. And then my job is to kind of coordinate everybody and make sure that we're all on the same page. We all understand what we're doing with the help of my CTO who...

It helped a little bit that in the 90s I was really into computer music. So I was programming in C quite a bit. This is a version of C called C sound where you would write one computer program that creates an instrument. You start with a blank piece of paper and you would draw waveforms. What do you think? What type of waveform would create the sound that I imagined in my mind and you create an instrument?

Terry Lowry (23:58.896)
then you'd write a separate software program that would play it was called an instrument file that would sorry it was a score file that would play the instrument.

And so because I had that programming background and I taught that for a while back when I was a university professor, because I taught digital music synthesis, I picked up a lot of the vocabulary that's required when I'm talking to developers. And so it's funny, I'll have my dev team and I'll say, hey guys, can we do this, this, this? And they'll go, no. So OK, surely we can do this, this, this, this because we used to do this.

through somebody will finally go hey wait a minute Terry we can do that but not the way you thought done man so I kind of have the vocabulary and I you know I can understand enough of what's going on to again with the help of my CTO to be able to to kind of can lead this orchestra of developers so that's

Allyson (24:42.644)
Yeah.

Seth Fleischauer (24:42.977)
Hehehehehe

Seth Fleischauer (25:04.093)
Yeah, it's funny, you know, listening to you, it's like, if there are any out of work composers out there, it sounds like you could have a great career in project management, a lot of transferable skills there. Yeah. Huh.

Terry Lowry (25:12.046)
The program was two.

Allyson (25:13.876)
Yeah, I was just thinking the programmatic aspect. It's fun to hear you say that's another form of orchestra that you are conducting. I also wonder, are there, when you are the conductor and you have individuals playing in different locations, how is it set up for them as the player, if they're individually playing in a separate location, then maybe three or four people,

and then you're by yourself. How does that all work out, I wonder?

Terry Lowry (25:48.334)
Well, I mean, you're kind of limited by the size of your screen, right? So how much of this do you want to see? How much of this do you want to hear? When you're playing music, it's obviously what I'm hearing that's the most important. The second most important is that they can see me so that we're in sync together. It's not so important that my French horn player can see my clarinetist, right? So we can minimize screen sizes and that kind of thing, which those are just user interface.

Allyson (25:53.844)
Mm -hmm.

Allyson (26:05.844)
Okay.

Terry Lowry (26:13.006)
you know, choices, you know, it's not really a big technological breakthrough or anything like that. But we do try to create gig room to simulate the the act of making music in the real world as much as possible because musicians don't want to deal with the tech. They don't want to sit there and just tweak and play with settings and optimizations. And, you know, they're interested in that. They want to they want to hit one button. The thing comes on, hit a second button and they're ready to play.

Seth Fleischauer (26:40.381)
Yeah.

Terry Lowry (26:40.974)
a button to record it if they want to hit another button to hang up. I mean that's it. They want to be able to see me. They want to be able to see their music. They want to be able to hear everybody around them. And so that...

Seth Fleischauer (26:44.701)
Yeah.

Terry Lowry (26:53.102)
That's really the user experience that we provide. We keep the focus on making music, not on the technical aspect. If you want to look under the hood and see the stats, we make that an option. There's a button you can click to see all the latency stats and all the different settings that you can play with. Because some people are into that. I'm into that, but not everybody's into that. But the default setting is, hey, man, let's just make some music. Let's forget all that stuff. Because hopefully, and what we have

Seth Fleischauer (26:59.965)
Yeah.

Seth Fleischauer (27:14.557)
into that.

Seth Fleischauer (27:20.061)
Yeah.

Terry Lowry (27:23.008)
The feedback that we get is that our users generally forget that they're using software. It feels like they're in the room in real time. We're not on software anymore.

Seth Fleischauer (27:33.533)
beautiful.

Yeah, it's what I love about this story is it's well a lot of things but one thing I love about the story is that it's there was such a clear problem, right? Such a clear problem that you're trying to solve and then you went out yeah with your know -how, with your experience, with the people that you had in your orbit and you conducted the solution to that problem.

And here you are with this technology that does exactly what you wanted it to do when you started down this path so many years ago. And I'm wondering if within this story, a question that we ask on this podcast is about golden moments. These moments when the technology is just working exactly as you envisioned it to work. You've got all these people coming together making music. I mean, how can you get more golden than that?

But they're also coming from different cultures, from different places, bringing different things together. They are playing together when they couldn't possibly have done that if they were limited by their physical space. I'm wondering if you can share with us a story, a golden moment where everything just kind of came together like this.

Terry Lowry (28:48.174)
Yeah, well, there's the...

The first time that I made music with another musician using gig room where we got so wrapped up in the music that it wasn't about the software. At first you're trying this, OK, let's try this and let's talk about the latency. What's your picture? Are you freezing? Is it skipping around? So you're always talking about the software. And eventually the software works so perfectly that it's not about that anymore. It's just about making music. And I remember distinctly the first time that happened.

It was me and a tuba player and it was just this beautiful moment. Yeah. And then I remember a moment where the same thing happened with me and one of my players and the moment was for her. I had already experienced it, but she had never experienced it and she was...

Allyson (29:20.884)
You

Seth Fleischauer (29:21.469)
I used to play tuba.

Terry Lowry (29:32.078)
really worried about this piece that we were going to do with the orchestra. So she called me up and said, can you give me some help? Give me some, you know, what tempo you're going to take here? You're going to slow down, speed up here. And I just said, well, look, if you've got half an hour, I'll send you a gig room and we'll just do it together. And so she was playing her French horn. We had a recording playing on a third channel of the Vienna Philharmonic and Bernstein doing the same piece. And I conducted her while she played and it was just flawless. And when it was over,

you know her words to me was Terry this is gonna be life -changing for us because now we can do so rather than showing up at rehearsal scared to death and feeling unprepared she's ready to go now and so she's gonna walk in that rehearsal with all the confidence in the world because she had a private rehearsal with me and we were able to do this so that was another moment but even bigger than that that

the very first gig room, the first E concert that I mentioned a while ago when we had the violinist and the pianist. To know that Syrian refugee, her name was Rada Hanana.

After all of that and going through that entire process of being in the film and using gig room and connecting with these musicians on musical overture to know that she is now living in Germany. She's a professor, an adjunct professor at two different universities, completely financial stuff sufficient. She has her own podcast. She's releasing her own albums and doing concerts on her own. And to go from the situation she was in in Damascus where her life was in jeopardy, where her friends were being executed.

Allyson (30:52.98)
Yay.

Terry Lowry (31:09.04)
to now living this incredible flourishing life in Germany as just this incredibly talented pianist and composer. And just to know that it's not about us, it's about her, it's about that story and what she made happen. But to know that we were one of the tools that she used to get there, that's the golden moment.

Seth Fleischauer (31:33.053)
Yeah. Wow. Chills, man. What if it? What if?

Allyson (31:35.86)
Yes, so many chills. I wonder, I did get the okay from Veronica to ask this question, but to talk about other life -changing ways that GIG Room is going to be used as a tool. I wonder if you wanted to talk a little bit. I know that it's just kind of like a teaser about the Stars Align project that connected you, myself, and Tammy Terry, which is connected to a pretty awesome program where

We're gonna try to connect people through music, live, virtually.

Terry Lowry (32:13.038)
Yeah. Well, so imagine this. And it may not be exactly like this, but just imagine something similar to what I'm about to describe. So you have someone like a big name, say, a Paul McCartney, a Brian May. You have astronauts on the International Space Station. You have these types of people on a...

in what we would say in a gig room, making music together in real time with a live stream that's then fed to every student in the world, where every student in the world stops what they're doing.

stands up next to their to their desk and sings the same song at the same time. A song such as Paul McCartney's love song to to the earth. You know, a billion children singing together at the same time as they're being led on the screen by Paul McCartney, Brian May, an astronaut at the International Space Station, all in real time. And we can make all that happen.

Seth Fleischauer (33:32.413)
hands across America, try hands across the world virtually. I love it.

Allyson (33:34.004)
Yes, and all in the stars too. So everybody, we'll drop more information into the link, but we'll, and we'll share more as it comes up, but Terry is really leading the way in that, in the musical conversation. So just wanted to make sure we could chat a little bit about it.

Seth Fleischauer (33:52.445)
Terry, another question that we ask to all of our guests on the podcast is the titular question of our podcast. With your experience with what you've done with who you've brought together, when you hear the question, why distance learning? How do you respond?

Terry Lowry (34:10.158)
Well...

because it's impossible for us to all live in the same place. And geography should not separate, should not keep us from learning. Geography should not keep us from being able to learn and to teach and to share and to come to that shared interpretation of whatever it is that we're doing. And if we can create technology and use technology to...

simulate or recreate, there's a better word, to recreate that feeling of connection that we have when we're in the room having a conversation. If we can get to the point to where we forget we're using technology and we're just sharing with each other. You see, the thing about this, and especially with music, see, I think one of the big problems that we have in the world is that we're not as good at listening as we could be.

We're good at talking. I'm good at, you know, I was waiting to be quiet so I can get my words in. Or I can talk over you, watch the news and you see all the talking heads and they're all just talking over each other. Everybody's got what they want to say. But we're not as good at listening. When you're using gig room or whatever you're using and you're trying to make music together, you are probably listening harder than you ever listened in your life. Right? Because that's all you, you know, that's what you've got to do. So.

distance learning I think does two things. It helps us to make those creations, to recreate those connections and bonds that we have when separated by a great distance, which is just a reality. But because of the nature of distance learning, it gives us the opportunity, it requires of us that we become better listeners.

Terry Lowry (35:59.822)
Though in a lot of ways it becomes an even more effective means of sharing information. That's my.

Seth Fleischauer (36:08.413)
I think that's so well said. Yeah. When I think about it, it's not just about the listening, right? It's about really honing your vision and what you're seeing, really trying to pick up on the nonverbal cues that you are, obviously it's limited, you're not getting the entire body, but what can you pick up from what you're being given? Kind of like how if a person loses their vision later in life, the other senses pick up the slack, right?

Allyson (36:09.232)
Mm -hmm.

Seth Fleischauer (36:36.381)
And I think that, you know, because we have this little slice of both the audio and visual spectrum, we do need to work harder to like to get to that point where you can be in real time with someone where you can get to that shared interpretation. But to me, yeah, it's exactly that. It's a honing of those skills that you can then go off and apply them to the real world and be even that more more present, even that much more present. Yeah.

Well, Terry, this has been such an inspiring conversation. I really, really appreciate you coming here and sharing this story. You've mentioned a couple things, your podcast, and also the Apple TV movie. What's the name of the movie?

Terry Lowry (37:16.852)
it's got hear us. Yeah, absolutely named, but they got hear us. Yeah.

Seth Fleischauer (37:18.237)
Hear us. awesome.

Is there anywhere else that you'd like our listeners to find your work on the internet?

Terry Lowry (37:27.566)
Well, if they'll find me at musicaloverture .com, the way we meet musicians all over the place, I'd love to meet people. That's what it's there for, a way of connecting.

Seth Fleischauer (37:37.725)
Awesome. My stepdad is an incredibly talented musician, plays a lot of different things. The soprano sax is his big instrument. And I think that he might really enjoy this when I tell him what I've found for him here today. Well, thank you so much, Terry. Really do appreciate you being here.

Allyson (37:49.652)
Hehehehehe

Seth Fleischauer (38:01.917)
This, again, I think our listeners are going to be extremely inspired by your story and, you know, we'll definitely send them to Musical Overture to check out Gig Room and the other work that you can find there. To our listeners, please do check the show notes. We'll have all the links in there. Thank you to our editor, Lucas Salazar. If you want to support the podcast, please do tell a friend, leave us a rating, a review, or follow us.

And if you want to know the answer to the question, why distance learning? Check out the people we highlight on this podcast. These are the people who are leveraging this amazing technology to truly transform the learning experience. Why distance learning? Because it's accessible and it's awesome. See you next time.

Allyson (38:43.252)
Bye!