Imagine the flexibility of independently producing one CD that can act as both an audio and Rom medium in a Mac or Windows environment. Remember Fusebox, or more recently, Silver Chair's single Cemetery? Yeah, they had record company backing and programmers to create them.
Out in the burbs, a new hybrid of muso is emerging as all art mediums are being melded into a common pot. The goal is the individual's command over enough arts and technologies to retain artistic control of their expressions in sound, visuals and interactivity.
The Black Material have launched what may be the first do it all yourself release of an Enhanced Music CD (EM-CD) in Australia and taken it one step further by releasing a scaled down preview of it on the web.
The EM-CD is titled Clearing the Water. It consists of 7 audio tracks and a 130 megabytes interactive multimedia presentation. The audio tracks are accessed in a normal CD player and as a bonus you can insert it into your CD-ROM drive to access the interactive multimedia presentation that is compatible with both Mac and Windows - a feat in itself!
The production of the EM-CD is largely the work of Colin Black, guitarist and cyber artist for the band. "The challenge is not to get locked into preconceived ideas of traditional mediums, but explore the possibilities of the computer driven media." Interactivity and computer generated random events are two ideas used in creating Clearing the Water.
The Audio
The band recorded the music onto
two ADATs, mixing and mastering onto an Audio CD. The audio was
then digitally transferred directly to the hard drive, retaining
it's sampling rate of 44.1kHz (16 bit), downsampled, prepared
for loops and set to optimum levels using SoundEdit 16 v2.0.4.
The Visuals
Using Adobe Photoshop 3.0 TBM scanned
in and manipulated the photographic content of the EM-CD. You
can get some interesting effects by cutting, pasting and superimposing
images together.
The Video
For the videos Colin used Adobe
Premiere. "After shooting the footage I digitised the video
from a normal VCR to an AV Mac. I then cut the files to size and
imported them into SoundEdit16 v2.0.4 where I mixed and edited
the audio tracks, adding compression on the vocals for better
audibility. As our minimum requirement for the Enhanced Music
CD was for use in 2 x CD-Rom drives, we had to compress all Quicktime
movies for optimum playback under these conditions. To achieve
this, I chose Cinepak compression with a limited data rate of
< (300k/sec minus Director's transfer rate for that part of
the presentation)."
The Multimedia- Bringing It All Together
For the full blown version of Interactive
First Kiss that appears on the CD we looped the verse without
the lyrics and then transferred the vocal track from the ADAT.
Once we had the vocal track on hard disk we edited the words into
individual sound files, then using Director's programming language
"Lingo" we combined the visuals, and sound to create
the interactivity.
The presentation was prepared on an Apple Power Mac and then crossplatformed to the Windows environment using Director for Windows. To achieve this, the Mac Director file was transferred and opened on a Windows Machine that had Director installed. The Lingo programming and colour pallets then had to be fine tuned to make the presentation run smoothly from within the Windows environment. From this, two executable files for Windows 95 and Windows 3.1 were made.
Mastering The Enhanced Music CD
With Toast CD-ROM Pro 3.0.5 and Apple Interactive Music Tool v1
on a Power Mac Colin used a Yamaha CD writer to combine the original
mastered Audio CD and the Director Multimedia files for Mac and
Windows on to one CD.
The Apple Interactive Music Tool software instructs Toast to comply with the international Blue Book Standards and protocols. It also gives you the facilities to encode the song titles, copyright owners, style of music, website addresses, artwork from the CD, lyrics and synchronised lyrics.
The result was an Enhanced Music CD master, to the Blue Book Standard, ready for duplication.
Constructing the Website
As part of our distribution and marketing campaign, we constructed
a web site where we could net-release our debut single First Kiss,
plus a scaled down sample of the multimedia version, called Interactive
First Kiss. In successive weeks, we also released two other audio
tracks, Earthbound and Painting Memories, on the site.
The website was constructed using Adobe PageMill 2.0 and Netscape Navigator Gold 3.0. These programs manipulated the visual layouts of the site. Once the audio was transferred, we started to master the file for playback across the net by mixing the stereo tracks to mono. We downsampled the files to 22.05kHz (16 bit) and eliminated the very high and low end frequency content of the audio by cutting all frequencies below 60Hz and above 6kHz. We set the audio file to it's maxim level by normalising it. Now the files were ready for shockwave compression.
The shockwave compression is quite remarkable. It takes the original 13 meg file (22.05kHz, 16 bit, mono) and compresses it to 627k! Using the Shockwave technology, the web browser can now have the audio signals streamed live across the net.
For Interactive First Kiss (which is a scaled down sample of the real full screen version) we used Director 5.0.1 to give it interactivity and a non linear form. The user can chose a number of options including the order of the words in the verses, each verse's duration, the overall form of the composition and when and where the song finishes. This operates in conjunction with a visual interface of the presentation.
Finally, the scaled down sample of Interactive First Kiss on our site had to be compressed so that the file could be crossplatformed and functional from within the Shockwave compatible web browser. The original Director file of 2.1 meg was compressed down to 418k.
The Response
Clearing the Water has been chosen
to be listed on the American website Enhanced CD Database by Premise.
Bill Dawson who edits the site said "I love the Shockwave
file (Interactive First Kiss)!" We got a similar response
from England's Music Network International.
To date, TBM's site has averaged 7 hits/week. Not bad when people have to find it through a search engine. The site location has only been printed once in Drum magazine and the Music Industry Directory listed the it under an incorrect name.
"We also let people know by word of mouth and had a "hot" period when we received emails telling us that the site was great and the songs were being requested on JJJ," said Colin.
There seemed to be a lot of confusion over what an EM-CD was and how it was differs to a mixed mode CD. When Triple J were contacted, they said that they may give it a listen if it "didn't make that awful noise like the others" they had received.
Industry professionals were also challenged by the idea that the artist had also constructed the website and multimedia and that that was new. One such person responded immediately, to an introductory email from TBM, to inform them that Boom Crash Opera, GF4 and Fusebox had previously released EM-CDs. TBM responded, explaining that as far as they knew, these bands had record company backing and the musicians had not constructed the multimedia components. Computer programmers did that.
It seems that the public and the industry still heavily rely on traditional mass media to be informed about music. Independent Australian material needs Australian airplay. Maybe things will open up as more people use the web.
Is it all worth it?
There is obviously a great deal of satisfaction from discovering what can be achieved and doing it independently. And for TBM the interactivity is still an artistic exploration rather than a commercial venture.
At the moment TBM are working on recording a dance mix of their single, First Kiss, not because everybody does, but because the song lends itself to that genre soooo well! They are planning another music and multimedia project for future development.
As an artist at this point in time, Colin is interested in the enormous potential to create in new ways. "We are still defining the ways in which to work with multimedia. There are no rules. "
The net surfer can now download the sample version of Interactive First Kiss or order Clearing the Water directly from The Black Material's website at http://www1.tpgi.com.au/users/cydonian/tbm.html.
Australian Musician Magazine, issue 13, Autumn 1998, page 30 - 31