Trussal

Q: What is the primary research question?

A:  Can Dannenberg and Liloia’s (2025) work on the Global Drum Circle support an extension of the cyclic fake time approach to a wide variety of pitched instruments in live, collaborative, and remote social settings over video conference?

Q: What broader problem(s) could Trussal solve?

A: Providing access to a musical medium with multimedia capabilities that exists online when attendance at an in-person venue may prove prohibitive, or cause undue hardship upon a performer or audience member, and in a manner that establishes authority as an artistic medium distinct from live in-person musical performance (Gabriela; 2022).

Q: There are many editors. What does that mean?

A: The bottommost editor in Trussal Studio when not focused on a bot is one’s own editor. It should have the ‘personal editor’ preprocessing directive. Only you can edit your own program. The editor above it is an interface for a CRDT document that stores a Metaprogram created by all participants together and executes code that affects all meeting room participants. Bots’ editors have the ‘bot editor’ preprocessing directive and their code can be edited by their respective spawning human meeting participants.

Q: Is it not physically impossible to perform with people far away, especially when it comes to audio?

A: It is true that audio samples cannot travel faster than the speed of light, networked performances are quite easily perturbed by typical network conditions, and human perception is very unforgiving of much less latency in a live audiovisual performance compared to in  speech applications. 40ms is approximately the upper bound for being able to compensate in a typical concert setting, whereas users having a conversation about tomorrow’s dinner tend to accept 100ms or more of round-trip latency (Konstantinos et al; 2025).

However, Trussal embraces this by offering delayed cyclical playback and network-modulated global audiovisual effects in a setting that minimizes the contrast between the video conferencing features and the performance by supporting multiple additional conference features, such as text and meeting reactions as possible live coded patterns.

Q: Is 50ms of round-trip latency really that big of a deal to performers?

A: Yes, it actually is. Humans have evolved to be able to sustain speech in a much broader range of conditions. The same cannot be said for modern mainstream approaches to music performance.

Q: How can I figure out when it’s my turn?

A: If your meeting participant identifier does not show up in the Metaprogram, which is the program corresponding to the code in the top editor,

you will not get a turn unless the Metaprogram is in consistent hashing mode. Otherwise, your identifier will have a rectangular outline. The only way to see your own video and hear your own audio is to call a combination of Hydra’s external source methods and pass one or more of your peripheral device names to liveCapture.

Q: Where can I learn more about JPattern?

A: There is a full JPattern reference at https://trussal.com/documentation. The syntax is very similar to Strudel’s syntax.

Q: Something happened all of a sudden without me touching anything. Why?

A: MediaPipe’s gesture detector can be very sensitive. You can print the current gesture map to the browser console or disable it by clicking the ‘x’ button on the gesture detection and virtual keyboard UI windows.

Q: Why live coding, Jitsi, and MediaPipe?

A: Live coding environments tend to natively endorse cyclic approaches to real-time media scheduling. Furthermore, live coding software spans numerous open source options that provide immediate access to versatile audiovisual synthesis and DSP capabilities.

In particular, Strudel and Hydra specialize in browser-based live coding, allowing for relatively OS-agnostic application portability compared to a desktop GUI environment, as well as usability outside of devices where one has already installed a separate application. The Strudel REPL comes with out-of-the box support for Hydra.

Similarly, Jitsi readily supports video conferencing in one’s browser and provides comparable social infrastructure to Zoom, the world’s first choice video conferencing platform during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Integration with MediaPipe arose out of the need to both support simultaneous acoustic instrument use, as well as a baseline accessibility feature for those with limited to no use of their hands.

Q: Where is the source code?

A: The Trussal source code can be found here.