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The Eleventh
Annual Interactive Music Conference
PROJECT BAR-B-Q 2006
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
by The Fat Man, George A. SangerEleven BBQs. Eight Groups. Twelve cockroaches. One tarantula. No words to describe it. See Previous Reports.
Interestingly this year, every group's action items involved the gathering of information of some kind. Some groups proposed the gathering from users of information about room acoustics, systems, and music usage. Other groups advocated gathering information from professionals, and everything was somehow “self-discovering.”
Several other characteristics differentiated this BBQ from others. There was a lot of movement of individuals from one working group to another, a lot of splitting and re-merging of groups. A great deal of attention was paid to ways in which we might improve quality of life. We gave special respect to the idea of “flow,” and to quality of product delivery and user experience.
The Balloonatics took a look at the technology and complexity barriers to high quality audio on computers—of getting what is at the source to your ear. The result was a clear and elegant vision of a direction that we can take towards an uncomplicated computer sound system with no wires and only one speaker. Microphones sense for the arrangement of the room and self-correct for the acoustics. A single speaker projects all sounds in fully realized 3D.
The Mixolydians began by asking why game soundtracks have to sound so bad, and imagined what would happen in they could put a world-class mixer like Bob Clearmountain into a box to mix audio for the dynamic drama that occurs during a game. They will create a WIKI for “The Art of Interactive Audio Mixing,” gathering articles dedicated to the aesthetics of game audio. They plan start an IASIG working group on interactive mixing as well, and they will be drafting a proposed architecture for an intelligent, dynamic mixing environment.
Content ER looked at the fact that for most amateur artists (YouTube, Google video, etc.) MP3 is the standard, and it’s “acceptable”. They set out to fix the emergency. Their proposal is to get usage and equipment information from the user to the artist, thus giving the user a voice, and get the artist's intent to the user.
Not Yet Rated: After a very interesting start which seemed to take them over familiar BBQ territory, and seemed to be taking far too long, this group landed quite squarely on a simple, do-able and potentially very effective big-picture solution to many of our old issues. By extending the Vista “WinStat” system, a simple rating system will generate a score for a consumer’s audio system, thus giving users a metric for their computer's audio capabilities that they can understand and do something about. They recognized, too, that the metadata gathered for their rating system is similar to that would be used by the Content ER group.
Digital Rogue Monsters began with the question, “to DRM or not DRM?” They pulled a very interesting sort of end-run on that sticky question by transforming it into, “to monitor the web or not to monitor the web?” They identified the fact that the gathering and tracking of information accomplishes the most important purposes of what DRM is intended to do. The goal of protection, they said, is not to sue people, but to offer the consumer secure content portability and to remove anonymity in the consumption of higher quality audio. An additional benefit is gained in getting info to artists so they know how better to sell their music and where to give concerts.
The group facilitated by Van Webster went into three directions:
Remote aggregation of music synergies looked at issues involved in facilitating remote jamming, both in synchronous concerts/rehearsals and in asynchronous music composing and mash-ups.
Beep Beep Beep got into polite audio, and audio as an attention getting mechanism, first identifying the need for a GUI design manual for audio alerts. They looked at characteristics of Flow and explored the idea of computer sensing of the user's state of flow, and ways to manage audio alerts in accordance to that state. It was all focused on the goal of making work fun.
Prug and Pray: Why doesn't it work? It used to work. In an epiphany, Van conceptualized a new approach to the appliance-versus-computer question (see past reports mentioning “Appliantology.”) In this system, there would be a series of modules, containing processing and app together on a single unit dedicated to a specific software function. They all would fit into a rack system that automatically senses them. This approach would remove obsolescence, OS issues, driver issues, and most if not all of the support problems that happen when using a PC as an audio tool. Adoption of the system would be driven by a mass market app such as a module that comes with a set of speakers and adjusts your computer's EQ to those speakers.
I don't know what to say. I'm blown away, out of time, ready to celebrate with these amazing people whom I'm proud to call friends.
The Fat Man,
George A. Sanger
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