Yale-led effort yields new Zoom high fidelity music mode

Even as a careful return to some in-person learning and teaching is under way for Yale students this fall, much of what music professors and students do will happen through Zoom. While they have been able to see and hear one another, music instruction and study have been hampered. Zoom’s standard audio filters favor spoken word in a range of diverse environments. But echo-cancellation and feedback-suppression features disrupt the sound of musical instruments—until now.

Last week, Zoom released a new ‘high fidelity music mode,’ which enables users to turn off features that hinder music-making while taking advantage of a sampling rate that’s much higher than it was previously. The new functionality was created at the request of more than two-dozen music schools in a Yale-led effort.