“Real time in different spacetime”: a phenomenology of networked music performance

What counts as “real time” when musicians perform together across distance? Networked Music Performance (NMP) challenges conventional assumptions about simultaneity, presence, and ensemble by making perceptible the relations that co-located music performance often leaves tacit. This study presents a phenomenological analysis of interviews with 15 experienced NMP practitioners, yielding three primary themes: intimacy at a distance, improvisation, and practical hope for the medium. The central essence of the experience was a felt sense of expanded musical possibility across physical distance. Participants described feelings of intimacy as shaped by studio-quality sound, domestic comfort, and the simultaneous chance for globe-spanning connections. They also described adapting to latency through flexible temporal strategies and musical creativity. Practical hope for the medium appeared in participants' pursuit of appropriate tools, recruitment and onboarding of newcomers, and a willingness to directly confront skeptics of NMP's potential. Interpreted through Actor-Network Theory, these accounts suggest that NMP is assembled through relations among musicians, instruments, tools, software, and infrastructures, all of which enter directly into the lived musical event. Findings position NMP as a contingent but meaningful temporal ecology in which multiple presents can coexist and musical relation remains possible under conditions of network mediation.