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Intercontinental Real-Time Surround-Sound Full-Scr...
phrawzty writes "According to CBC, "Researchers, musicians and engineers at McGill University in Montreal, have made I nternet history. They set up the first intercontinental netcast of a live concert in surround sound and full-screen video, Wednesday night." " Thats a whole lotta buzzwords to basically say that we're one step closer to having actual good video over the internet. The freaky part is the long term goal: mimicing environments down to floorboard vibrations to allow musicians to perform together from around the world.
Of course, that would not at all be the same as "playing together", but it would be almost as good as a typical commercial multi-tracked recording, which would be good enough to produce plenty of hype.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I wonder if we're ever going to reach a point where artists just record a concert once and have it broadcast to venues all over the world, instead of actually travelling.
Also, it's not like being at a big concert is all that different from watching on a big screen - you don't exactly touch the artist.
I've got to disagree. There are a number of things that being at a live concert/gig/performance has over a recorded event. There's the reaction of the rest of the crowd. This is hugely important - experiencing the crowd dynamic, jumping into the mosh pit, digging the froody groove with the rest of the acid-washed hipsters. Being there in the company of like-minded fans. Absolutely essential.
Then there is knowing that what you are experiencing is a one-off performance. This band aren't ever going to sound quite the same as tonight. The vocals will be particularly raw because they're on zero hours sleep and pumped full of vodka. That happy-poppy solo is going to be particularly sweet because the keyboardist just got laid. That sort of thing. This is the essence of human contact between you and the performers.
You are never going to successfully reproduce this remotely, because the core of the experience is that you are right there at that particular time with that particular bunch of people listening to that particular group play that particular song. This is why listening to a live concert recording is almost exactly the opposite experience to being at the same concert.
Sailing over the event horizon
In fact, the "click track" could contain timestamps. Those timestamps would be transferred to the data within the packets containing the music (as opposed to being the timestamps on the packets themselves). Then the mixer doesn't have to have the delays preconfigured. It can mix the packets based on the "click track" timestamps that arrived with the music.
The ultimate test will be an astronaut on the moon singing along with ground control on Earth. All of them will be in sync and none of them in key.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
Artists have already taken to projecting themselves on massive screens, a logical extention of the huge wall shadows and Big Suit used by the Talking Heads in the Johnathan Demme concert movie "Stop Making Sense", or the massive portraits of Stalin and Chairman Mao that were once hung on buildings during political appearances.
It would be interesting to see if the crowd would react as strongly to a projected image knowing that the artist is not actually on stage at all. (Bono of U2 sang a couple of songs from the backstage dressing room during the ZOO-TV tour, and the crowd seemed to go along with it).
I'm betting that somebody from the Disney corral of kiddie-stars (Brittany Spears, N'Sync, etc.) will be the first to try it. Their performances are pretty much phoned in anyway.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
In 1992, I was on USENET (no web) and somebody posted an animated picture of a woman doing something with a Coke bottle, if you catch my drift.
The poster was soundly thrashed by the entire newsgroup. People lamented that "if this kind of thing is allowed, the Internet might be shut down". The poster was rumored to have lost net priveleges after that.
This was certainly not the first porn on the Internet, but it was my first experience of USENET porn. It's interesting how attitudes have shifted.
BTW, the only way we could view pictures was to uudecode (by hand) cat the (usually several) files, and then utter curses if we didn't have the proper viewer installed. I never went through the trouble to decode the picture, I just saw respondants objecting to it.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Ok, I've gone through this whole thing in my head again, and I'm pretty much wrong. Silly me.
Here's what WOULD work:
A guitarist is playing his guitar in Japan. As far as he knows, nobody else is playing with him. He is the leader. He can't hear the other musicians.
It's possible for other musicians to join in. That is, I can play with any musicians who are within the lag period of the guitar.
Example: guitarist plays in Africa. 5 seconds of lag between him, and me, in Canada. Some dude in South america joins in on drums. He's only 3 seconds lag from me, and 2 seconds lag from the guitarist, so he can hear himself, and the guitarist (albeit, 2 seconds AFTER the guitarist plays). He can't hear me. I, though, can hear both of them, 3 seconds after the drummer plays, and 5 seconds after the guitarist, so I can play my bass along with them. Neither of them can hear me.
I know that this really isn't an ensemble, or a 'band', but it would work, so long as you don't try to pump bass back to the guitarist, which would be 10 seconds too late.
Sorry for being dumb earlier (-: I wish it was Friday.
Since Babelfish doesn't yet have a Hype-eeze to English converter up and running yet, I will translate it directly:
Translation: We've done something not very remarkable on the Internet. Any company that tries to use this as a business model will be history.
Translation: We've managed to broadcast a concert in a screen that doesn't look crappy in a tiny 1 1/2" by 2 1/2" box on your PC; it looks crappy (with tons of compression artifacts) on screen the size of your TV!
Translation: The freaky part is that they are so clueless that they can't think of any application of Video over IP except for a physically impossible, economically impractible, and totally useless excercise of trying to get musicians on different contenents to overcome variable lag to play together.... badly.
I work in the real TV/video industry. Video Over Ip is a technology looking for a way to bilk investors and then die.