Musicians desperate to work together in harmony while kept apart by COVID-19 lockdowns have been collaborating with tech companies to shave milliseconds from delays on their online connections, driving innovations that will transcend music.

To recreate the experience of performing together live when artists and audiences are apart, a collective effort has been under way to reduce the lag between a sound being produced and being heard, known as latency.

In rehearsals for Rossini’s Barber of Seville, the San Francisco Opera has used a test version of a device called Aloha, developed by Stockholm-based Elk O.S., in partnership with Ericsson, Vodafone and Verizon.

The pocket-sized device cuts the lag from around 600 milliseconds, which would make two performers sound out of sync, to roughly 20 milliseconds, which is no greater than if the performers were in the same room. “That was shocking to me that technology has advanced that far,” said soprano Anne-Marie MacIntosh, who is performing in the production scheduled to open to socially-distanced, drive-in audiences.