Yale-led effort yields Zoom upgrades

YALELED EFFORT YIELDS ZOOM UPGRADES

Even as a careful return to some in-person learning “There wasn’t a quality way of actually teaching,” and teaching got underway at the beginning of the Matthew LeFevre, YSM’s media-production manager, fall semester, much of that experience happened said. Students were recording and sending videos to on Zoom. Students and their teachers had been able to teachers. “That’s how lessons were working at the see and hear one another since the beginning,” LeFevre said—the beginning world went online in March, but their a reference to the arrival of COVID-19. work was disrupted, even with the digital tools of the day. Where the tech LeFevre, Berman, and others at YSM began world couldn’t make the pandemic go away, it did act quickly to make The audio troubleshooting, experimenting with a combination of Zoom (for video) and those tools better, in response to a loud ask from administrators at Yale quality took Cleanfeed (a recording platform, for audio), seeking a sound “closer to reality,” Berman and their colleagues across academia. a huge jump said. While those coupled technologies did provide a “higher veracity of the sound,” In September, Zoom released a new “high fidelity music mode,” which forward. Berman said, using a combination of platforms was a little bit “cumbersome.” enables users to turn off some features that hinder music-making while taking They got rid Yaffe had started a conversation with advantage of a sampling rate that’s much higher than it was previously. of the filters John Barden, Yale University’s associate vice president and chief information The new functionality was created at the request of more than two-dozen that were officer, about the predicament in which music instruction—provided privately, music schools in a Yale-led effort. negatively at community music schools, in pre-Kthrough-12 classrooms, and in college When study and instruction moved and university music programs—had online in March, faculty pianist Boris impacting suddenly found itself. “Music schools Berman and his colleagues were have a unique problem,” Barden agreed. immediately “concerned about this live music. form of teaching in general.” There Yaffe had also reached out to Scott are certain things that can’t be done Metcalfe, whom he’d known since they online because of latency (a problem both worked at the Hartt School at the that’s currently without a solution), University of Hartford. Metcalfe, chair of Berman pointed out, not to mention the music engineering and technology/ the loss of human interaction. matthew lefevre recording-arts program at the Peabody Above all, he said, “the quality of Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, sound itself was a huge concern.” had been conducting audio-quality tests with students there and noticed that Zoom’s sound Most music teachers, YSM Associate Dean Michael Yaffe quality in general wasn’t adequate. “Everyone kind of said, “were completely unprepared” for the moment. Music had the same complaint,” Metcalfe said: We can’t use education, he said, was suddenly “a profession in crisis.” this audio. Just as LeFevre and his colleagues at YSM had tried using Cleanfeed in conjunction with Zoom, Metcalfe and his colleagues at Peabody had started troubleshooting using Listento, a product that allows musicians and producers to listen remotely to a recording session. The music community needed something more user-friendly. “To have a one-stop shop for both audio and video adds a lot less friction to the process,” LeFevre pointed out. Zoom needed to upgrade its service. Barden suggested leveraging the collective power of higher education. Ted Hanss, associate chief information officer for Yale’s medicine and health divisions, previously worked, on

loan from the University of Michigan, for Internet2, a university-led consortium that provides connectivity for the U.S. research and development community. He tapped into that network for more support.

On June 26, Barden, having tapped his own connections, sent a letter to Tain Barzso, Zoom’s product lead for education, and Brendan Ittelson, the company’s chief technology officer, that read, in part: “Leaders from a number of music education programs across the country have been in dialog about specific concerns regarding effective online music instruction. … There is a sincere hope by all engaged that we can maintain a singular-provider approach to these issues.” The letter, which was authored by Yaffe with more than two-dozen schools including Peabody, the Bienen School of Music at Northwestern University, the San Francisco Conservatory, the University of North Texas College of Music, and the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music, among others, pointed out that “this issue is of immense interest to anyone involved in music instruction and performance”—including “music programs at colleges and universities,” “K-12 music programs in schools,” and “private music programs.” The letter explained that “Zoom’s current audio functionalities are well-suited for human speech but are insufficient to capture the complex harmonic components of singing and instrumental music” and outlined specific technological asks.

“We were very careful to ask for reasonable specs,” LeFevre said. The ask, as Hanss explained, sought configuration changes to the existing Opus codec.

“It wasn’t a huge lift for them to do what we were asking them to do,” Barden said. Barzso agreed, saying the request was “pretty straightforward.”

“Our engineering team is very agile, very flexible,” Walter Anderson, Zoom’s senior product manager, said. Tweaking the product wasn’t a challenge. The advanced setting “already existed,” he said. It’s just that it only turned off part of the noise cancellation and part of the echo cancellation while continuing to apply sound compression.

“We actually asked them to take away functionality that was getting in the way of the music,” LeFevre said. Rochester’s Eastman School of Music, and the Bienen School, Zoom’s engineering team reconfigured the codec and redesigned the user interface in the settings menu.

Explained in a blog post published on the Zoom website in August, the new functionality allowed users “to disable echo cancellation and post-processing and get rid of compression” and increased the “audio codec quality from 22kHz to 48kHz, 96Kbps mono/192Kbps stereo for professional audio transmission in music education and performance applications.”

“The biggest change,” Anderson said, “was to run the Opus codec at a higher bit rate.”

“We got pretty close to what we were after,” LeFevre said. “The audio quality took a huge jump forward. They got rid of the filters that were negatively impacting live music.”

Using the new functionality, Metcalfe said, was a matter of “clicking a couple of preference settings.”

The enhanced functionality “is, of course, a positive step in the right direction,” Berman said, a useful tool in an immeasurably disruptive moment. q

YSM students rehearse with safety measures in place