Musicians on opposite sides of the Atlantic have begun recording an album together at the same time, in what is believed to be a world first.

Academics at Edinburgh Napier University and Berklee College of Music in Boston are using new technology to record music with each other in real time.

The band can see each other projected onto glass panels in each of their studios and can hear each other with a time distance of just 40 milliseconds each way, almost identical to being in the same room.

A regular Skype call has a sound lag of around 500 milliseconds.

They are using advanced streaming technology called "low latency" (LOLA) and cloud-based computing tools in order to record the album while 3000 miles apart.

The band consists of Edinburgh Napier lecturer Dr Zack Moir on saxophone, graduate Ewan Gibson on bass, researcher Dr Gareth Smith on drums and Dr Joe Bennett of the Boston Conservatory at Berklee on guitar.

Studios in Edinburgh, London and Boston are being used to record jazz tracks and rhythmic tunes, with the aim of pushing the technology to its limits.

Dr Moir said: "It has been a privilege to be involved with this project and it's fantastic to play a role in taking what we can do with LOLA to the next step.

"Being part of group involved in real-time interactive music-making, and recording tracks with players on either side of the Atlantic Ocean is something we could never had imagined doing just a couple of years ago.

"The potential of this system for use in the future for live gigs and performances across the world is incredibly exciting."

Dr Joe Bennett said: "We did some math in advance to figure out what the latency would be, and tried to guess the tempos and styles that would work for the session.

"Some of the tunes had a slow jazz swing, and others had a deliberately loose non-rhythmic feel. In the Boston studio we tried a simple mic'd up acoustic guitar and also a heavily processed electric guitar.

"The tunes that worked best, for me, were the ambient soundscapes, where we were listening as much for texture as rhythmic pulse.

"But we also managed some funky rhythmic patterns, and the tech team managed to set up the monitoring and streaming in such a way that the sax could play exactly in time with the guitar."