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The Seventh
Annual Interactive Music Conference
PROJECT BAR-B-Q 2002
by The Fat Man, George A. Sanger
This year's group added admirably to the proud heritage of BBQ, and that's saying something.
The theme of this year's BBQ t-shirt suggested the erasing, rather than drawing of lines in the sand. Then the challenge was put forward not to cross a line but to "Get over it."
Remarkably, conventional barriers to creativity were broken down, and the results of the grueling work of this weekend further reflected the theme, and offered hope that walls will be broken down, communication enhanced, and a better world created for consumers, manufacturers and content providers.
This was illustrated and emphasized by the fact "peer-to-peer discovery" between components, a term that had barely been in our vocabulary before, was mysteriously and simultaneously found to be a crucial component in three of the four working groups. We took this as a strong indicator of the impending importance of peer-to-peer discovery, and would recommend that the industry pay close attention to this aspect of hardware/software design.
SPEAKERS
Keith Weiner took the dangerous Thursday night "campfire" slot for his talk, choosing to lay it all on the line and point out many specific areas in which we, the industry, have "poisoned the well" of audio by creating and shipping faulty systems and components that have damaged the quality, utility, and reputation of computer audio.
We were honored to have inspiring talks by venerable synthesis pioneer Morton Subotnick, the interactive storytelling sage and founder of the Game Developer Conference, Chris Crawford, and this guy named Dave Zicarelli, who runs Cycling 97 and was really funny and smart.
GROUP HIGHLIGHTS
THE MYSTERIOUS CLOUD OF RESONANCE took on an
impressive 5-15 year view of the future of consumer hardware, including
creating a sensible transition strategy, intended to get the industry
to a zero cables, wireless universal plug n play system for interconnectivity
between devices. Key to the transition was to evangelize that consumer
systems be Networked and interoperable. Key was an EZAV rating system.
THE GIANT MAGIC GLOBULE attacked the problem of unsatisfactory control in user interfaces for audio creation tools, and made it their goal to enable artistic creativity by establishing a consistent and intuitive workflow in tools. An important step was to decouple the UI from the tool, and provide an integrated, standard geek/freak interface for the app to talk to itself within the system.
THE PLUMBERS identified many unsolved issues
of universal audio architecture, and formed a task force that would continue
looking at sync and latency issues in a component framework context.
The notion was put forward that if the music/computer industry "gets
what it wants" by effectively implementing Digital Rights Management
(DRM), it will hurt itself badly because of technical subtleties such
as compromised synchronization that aren't yet realized by DRM's proponents.
They made it a mission to evangelize BBQ's stand on this issue.
THE HARSHMELLOWS realized that among game creators there is a lack of awareness of what is necessary to maximize the resources available to achieve quality audio. The solution was a proposal to create a living document to give to the game producer, explaining the money proposition of audio. Secondly, plans were made to create and execute a research project to quantify audience reaction to specific audio values.
Personally, I feel tired, proud and happy. I expect that I share these feelings with the other remarkable BBQ Brothers. Moreover, I feel very very blessed to have been a part of this beautiful, positive, very productive and hopefully very influential event.
Thank y'all very much.
Your friend, admirer, and Fat Man,
George A. Sanger
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