How the Pandemic Made UCI Composer Michael Dessen’s World Go Zoom

Michael Dessen (Photo by Bill Douthart)

By Peter Lefevre
September 11, 2020

"If you’ve ever been in a video meeting, you’ve had this experience: Someone’s lips move, and a fraction of a second later, you hear the sound of their voice. That millisecond of being out of sync, that delay between when a sound enters a system and when it comes back out again, is called latency, and it’s something Michael Dessen has been studying for more than a decade.

Dessen – composer, trombonist, bandleader and professor at UC Irvine – has been performing networked musical performances, “telematic” music, for years, creating live concerts via the internet with musicians from around the globe. He understands better than most how to work with that effect, and how reducing that latency gap can lead to better online performances. And now, suddenly, with every concert hall in the nation boarded up, that knowledge is very, very useful."