Internet rooms from Internet audio

Until now, "network room" has been an enclosed space only in metaphor, where for the connected inhabitants the place is a network location to gather and interact (chat rooms, game rooms, etc.). We describe an actual network room for musical interactions in which plausible, room-like reverberation is spawned between endpoints of our network audio software. Each new user becomes a node in a mesh and all sounds entering the mesh are reverberated by the mesh. The medium in which these echoes exist is not however air but the Internet and the acoustical properties differ because of the medium's distinct "physical laws." We focus here on a project which creates a mesh of local area internet rooms, a LAIR for the purpose of a sound installation which highlights the differences of this new acoustical medium. The paper describes a working implementation for distributed reverberation.