Power and Responsibility: Politics, Identity and Technology in Music || Making Music on the Web

Making Music on the WebAuthor(s): William DuckworthSource: Leonardo Music Journal, Vol. 9, Power and Responsibility: Politics, Identity andTechnology in Music (1999), pp. 13-17Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1513470 .

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RESPO NSIBILITY

Making Music on the Web

William Duckworth

In its earliest days, the Internet was not condu- cive to presenting music. Until recently, the barrier to provid- ing real-time (streaming) audio transmissions on the World Wide Web was file size. Most audio files were so large that

they were impractical to stream, often breaking up if not ac-

tually crashing. Today, a variety of compression formats for music, called codecs, exist. These include everything from Real Audio (the codec employed for web radio and

webcasting) and MP3 files [1] (another codec offering high compression rates with minimal quality loss) for those who

primarily want to listen, to a handful of real-time, interactive

plug-ins (such as Shockwave and Quicktime) for those hardy few who have the necessary equipment and expertise to participate in a live on-line jam. But as the newer versions of browsers turn the downloading and updating of plug-ins into an invisible background operation, and Web TV encourages nearly everyone to explore the World Wide Web, the esti- mated 2% of web sites that played some form of music during 1998 is expected to grow to more than 12% by early in the next century. Musical commerce aside, the art of music-mak-

ing is staking its claim for a place on the Internet. The Web is the new frontier of music.

DESIGNING CATHEDRAL: AMSTERDAM 1996

My own involvement with putting music on the Web began in Amsterdam in the late winter of 1996, when I decided to create a piece of music that would exist as a web site. A large multimedia work, already called Cathedral, had been developing in my mind over a period of months, but I originally intended it to be in a more traditional concert format. In fact, my colleague Nora Farrell and I were in Amsterdam that winter to visit the Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music (STEIM), a government-sponsored organization committed to developing new technologies for artists, in hopes of adapt- ing their MIDI (musical instrument digital interface) triggered glove for our own live performance. Before the week ended, however, the two of us had not only restructured Ca- thedral as a piece for the Web, but had also decided that it would be a work of long duration, presented and experienced in a non-linear fashion over a period of 5 years. From the beginning, we intended Cathedral to grow toward the year 2001, when it would culminate in a live, on-line 48-hour Web concert, with sounds streaming into the piece from sites around the world.

Later that year, Nora and I-by then co-artistic directors, with me handling the music, she, the graphics-decided that several components of the site should allow the audience to interact with Cathedral. With the help of Charles Wood (a pro- grammer as well as a composer who became our technical di- rector in the summer of 1997), we began to envision both vir-

tual performance spaces where listeners could jam and new virtual instruments capable of allow-

ing listeners to play along in real time with the site. Exactly how this was all going to be accom-

plished in the context of 1996 was unclear, since the necessary technology had yet to be devel-

oped, but we were confident that it would appear [2].

By the time of the 2001 webcast, Cathedral will consist of both acoustic and computer-generated music written for the site, as well as music created by individual lis-

ABSTRACT

Cathedral is one of the first extended works of music and art created as a web site. On-line since June 1997, it includes both acoustic and computer music, live webcasts and newly created virtual instruments. The author discusses the conception and development of the site, and outlines future plans for a 48-hour web concert in 2001. Cathedral may be visited at <http:// www.monroestreet.com/Cathedral/ home.html>.

teners worldwide and performed on virtual instruments we have invented such as the Sound Pool, the PitchWeb and Chaos (all described below). Active audience participation is a

primary feature of all the virtual instruments being developed for Cathedral. Our intention in creating these instruments is to build a place on the Web for community music-making that blurs the traditional distinctions between composer, per- former and listener, and provides anyone with Internet access an opportunity to play music on the Web.

LAUNCHING CATHEDRAL: NEW YORK, 1997 Cathedral went on-line on 10June 1997 at 12:34 A.M. The first of the orchestra pieces associated with it, Mysterious Numbers, had been premiered by the Cleveland Chamber Symphony 2 months earlier. From the beginning, my musical intention was that each piece of Cathedral would exist in multiple formats and could be expressed by several different types of in- strumentation, including acoustic, electronic and virtual. This first site structure consisted of animated titles with music; a navigation page with music; a featured piece of music with animation; a Codex, housing eight of the 32 basic source texts that were the inspiration for Cathedral; and a Mandala, intended as a repository of associated images. Although much of the artistic structure of Cathedral is still slowly being revealed on the web site, the overall theme centers around five mystical moments in time, designated the Building, the Bomb, the Pyramid, the Web and the Dance. These titles re- fer respectively to the groundbreaking of Chartres Cathedral, the detonation of the first atomic bomb, the building of the

great pyramid, the founding of the World Wide Web and the

beginning of the Native American Ghost Dance religion. My

William Duckworth (composer/teacher), Department of Music, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA 17837, U.S.A. E-mail: <[email protected]>.

LEONARDO MUSIC JOURNAL, Vol. 9, pp. 13-18, 1999 13 ? 1999 I1SAST



E Netscape: CRTHEDRAL I Home

Back J I Home | I Reload Images J Open Print Find I|

Location: )http :'//wwn.monroesttreet.cornmCathedral/horne.html

Fig. 1. The Cathedral home page, outlining the site's seven main information areas.

Fig. 2. The Sound Pool is an interactive, sound-sharing interface through which users ger sounds and images into a musical mosaic of their own creation.

intention is that Cathedral be a work of 3S art that encourages contemplation of

and reflection on these five mystical events in human spiritual history. I se- lected these particular five because they seem to me to be pivotal points offering visionary glimpses that, due to their un- finished or unexplained natures, still have the energy and capacity to influ- ence and alter the course of contempo- rary life (Fig. 1).

THE MUSIC The music of Cathedral comprises three

types: virtual, acoustic and interactive. I consider "virtual" music to be electronic music written specifically for the Web as either sound files or MIDI files, both of which are streamed to the site and heard in real time using either the Shockwave, Beatnik or QuickTime plug-ins. The acoustic works are being incorporated into the site via a series of

3? 1 live webcasts, the first two of which oc- curred at the Spoleto Festival U.S.A. in Charleston, South Carolina (29 May 1998), and the Franklin Institute Sci- ence Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsyl- vania (2 October 1998).

When completed, Cathedral will include 32 electronic works for the Web; eight chamber works, some incorporat- ing one or more of the virtual instruments; five orchestral pieces, one of which is forJavanese gamelan orchestra; plus numerous pieces of incidental web music and on-line performances by the Cathedral Band, an Internet combo

consisting of myself, Nora Farrell, Charles Wood, John Kennedy and "Blue" Gene Tyranny. The band, which has both virtual and live identities, will be the unifying force behind the 2001 webcast. During a live webcast, the web audience can choose to listen to the concert, play along on a virtual instrument or visit other parts of the site.

THE VIRTUAL INSTRUMENTS: SOUND POOL, PITCHWEB, CHAOS The interactive music of Cathedral oc- curs in specific rooms within the web site. The first of these virtual performance spaces, the Sound Pool, went on-line on 16 December 1997. Devel-

oped by Wood from source code written by Nina Amenta and Mark Phillips at the University of Minnesota Science }

IgJ and Technology Center, it is an interac-

14 Duckworth, Making Music on the Web



Fig. 3. The PitchWeb in performance. This virtual instrument, the sounds of which are graphically ma- nipulable, is designed to be playable by people of any musical ability.

tive, sound-sharing interface through which users trigger sounds and images into a musical mosaic of their own creation (Fig. 2). Technically, the Sound Pool is a sound-plot of hidden nodes in which each line of music in the Pool is

triggered individually by the user acci-

dentally or randomly clicking on one of these nodes, all of which are located within a growing web of multicolored

geometric patterns. Successive clicks both alter the visual pattern and build

up a mosaic of sound. New MIDI files contributed to the pool by listeners are hidden in the nodes, replacing older files. Additionally, the lines of music

change location randomly among the nodes because the order and place- ment of the sounds are determined by the images that the user draws, which are influenced by such variables as his or her mouse movements and the charms of chance. As a result, each user creates his or her own unique experience and never encounters the same Sound Pool twice. Although all of the

original sounds in the pool were written by me, listeners can contribute their own MIDI files to be mixed in. By 2001, our plan is that the Sound Pool will evolve into a multi-user domain where on-line jammers can contribute MIDI files in real time as they partici-

pate in an ongoing collective visual and sonic performance.

The primary virtual instrument that listeners will use to play along with each other, as well as during the 2001 webcast, is the PitchWeb. I debuted the PitchWeb on-line at the Franklin Insti- tute Science Museum in Philadelphia on 2 October 1998, with the Relache En- semble and audience members on their

laptops and on computer terminals sta- tioned around the hall (Fig. 3). (Volun- teers with laptops were asked to come

early so that the PitchWeb could be in- stalled and they could receive instruc- tions in the use of the instrument.) Us- ers with any amount of musical ability can play the PitchWeb by selecting and

manipulating shapes (circles, squares, triangles, diamonds) that are mapped to individual sound samples. PitchWeb users can also select and manipulate individual sounds from the sound palette and play them back with their computer mouses. Alternately, users may produce sounds by entering words or predeter- mined combinations of characters in

any language into the Type Entry sec- tion. These are automatically converted into musical passages through an

autoplay function that maps text to sounds. Currently, the PitchWeb consists of two banks of 64 sounds each. In its fi-

nal form, it will contain multiple banks of 64 sounds each and will be capable of customization and live, real-time, interactive performance. An important as-

pect of the PitchWeb is its ability to in- volve each listener, regardless of native

language or learned musical skills, in the process of making music on-line. The goal is to brirg traditionally passive audiences closer to the actual creation and performance of music.

Chaos, another of the virtual instruments designed for Cathedral, deals with

pictures rather than sounds. It is a browser-based visual instrument that col- lects images from other web sites (different for each webcast according to the music being performed) and allows the user to manipulate them in ways of his or her own choosing, including resizing, trailing, magnifying, zooming and mul-

tiple-imaging. This allows for listeners to create their own unique visual counter-

parts to the actual webcast-a visual im-

provisation, as it were. Chaos debuted on 29 May 1998, during the first Cathe- dral webcast from the Spoleto Festival U.S.A., when Nora Farrell played a pro- jected version in the hall in Charleston with the Spoleto Festival Orchestra while the Internet audience accessed it on-line. We developed both Chaos and the PitchWeb in cooperation with Jon

Duckworth, Making Music on the Web 15

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CATHEDRAL SITE PLAN

Fig. 4. Cathedral Site Plan. The site will stay on-line in archived form following the 48-hour web concert in 2001.

i i 4 i i THE THE THE TE HE HE

BUILDING BOMB PYRAMID WEB DANCE

E-------- ) - ----- / \ ----- -- DANCEJ

Child, an independent designer/pro- grammer working in New York.

THE CATHEDRAL SITE TODAY

Today, a visitor to the Cathedral web site will find seven main areas to explore (Fig. 4): the Virtual Instruments; the

Stage, where live webcasts and performances by the Cathedral Band and oth- ers occur and where previous webcasts are archived in their entirety; a slowly accumulating suite of musical pages for each of the five Moments; a Codex containing the 32 source texts of Cathedral; the Chronicles, a collection of literary thoughts and postmodern documenta- tion by writers associated with Cathedral; a Contact area containing a mailing list, guestbook, frequently asked questions (FAQs) and help pages; and a Mandala, archiving previously featured music

within a web of continually changing cir- cular images (Fig. 5). The Mandala, inci-

dentally, can be experienced on three levels: passively, as images randomly change positions on their own; actively, with mouse-overs controlling the location and speed of image positioning; and directly, with mouse clicks yielding either enlarged versions of images or some random part of the musical archive. The Mandala's interface is built with a combination of the Common

Gateway Interface (CGI) standard and Java script that causes thumbnails of files to rotate positions based on the level of user activity.

Surprisingly, writing the actual music for Cathedral is not that different from

writing for traditional ensembles. Al-

though I am dealing to a great extent with disembodied web sounds created on computers and existing as MIDI and

sound files, my concerns as a composer remain the same: balance, proportion, symmetry and form. Beyond composi- tional concerns, however, are the skills

required to maintain an active web site. Web pages must be designed and posted, requiring both a skilled technician and a talented artistic eye; cross-browser and

cross-platform applications must be de-

veloped, often resulting in the need to create multiple versions of the same ma- terial; and rapidly advancing Web tech-

nology means that not only must a pa- rade of new programs be learned, but new versions of old ones as well.

Listeners also have a new responsibility with Cathedral-to stay current with the plug-ins needed to hear the music and view the site. As new technologies are developed, those of us working on Cathedral are attempting to put these new features at the service of art. Our

16 Duckworth, Making Music on the Web



Netscape: CRTHEDRRL I mandala

[ Back 1 Home I IReload Images I Open I Print I Find

Location: Iht. t, : . . "../ , .minr ,: es t' e t .: r,/:, i/rn, r,, , . i

ri. . eI |th o lt 1a

Fig. 5. The Mandala, an archive of previously featured music within a web of continually rhsnging images.

goal is to make web music accessible to

everyone, notjust those fluent in the lat- est Internet technology. Without an active commitment from our listeners, however, much of the artistic potential of web music will be lost or go unno- ticed. The site is designed to give every listener an experience of Cathedral, but the full experience is attainable only with the proper browser and plug-in configuration. Ultimately, web music is a

group responsibility, not only among the team creating the site but between the creators and the listeners as well.

CATHEDRAL IN 2001 Cathedral will culminate in a live, on- line 48-hour web concert in 2001. Dur-

ing that time the music written for Ca- thedral will be performed, as will interactive improvisations with the Ca-

thedral Band and real-time music made with sounds provided by groups and in- dividuals from around the world. Asso- ciated sites in New York, Chicago, Se- attle, Phoenix, Philadelphia, Amsterdam, Berlin, Rome, Melbourne, Mitchelton and Sydney are planning to

participate. Following the web concert, Cathedral will cease to grow as a web site. Instead, it will stay on-line in archived form: the virtual instruments will remain available and playable and the stage will, from time to time, host concerts, interactive performances and other special events. It is impossible to

say, of course, what music on the Web

might be like by then, or even how music may be delivered. The trip has just begun; it is too soon to know the desti- nation. The new paradigms of web music, like all new art forms, are self-defin-

ing, and the Internet will dictate its own

styles and forms. These are, after all, the early days of music on the Web.

References and Notes

1. MP3 is short for MPEG layer 3. The Motion Pic- ture Experts Group (MPEG) is a committee of the International Standards Organization, which is re- sponsible for the generation of generic audio/video compression standards. Layer 3 audio coding allows the user to compress sound data from a compact disc by a factor of 12 without losing sound quality in a typical user environment. For more information, see the Ear Labs MP3 theory page at <http:// www.earlabs.org/theory/mp3theory.html>.

2. At this point, it seems our confidence was not mis- placed. Musical MUDs (multi-user domains) such as Res Rocket <http://www.resrocket.com> and Full Tilt Design <http://www.fulltiltdesign.com> (both of which offer rapid exchanges of MIDI data between on-line band members, similar in technology to Web-based chat rooms) already exist, and the cost of dedicated servers has dropped to within the reach of individual users, as web technology continues to recreate itself every nine months.

Manuscript received l9January 1999.

Duckworth, Making Music on the Web 17

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Power and Responsibility: Politics, Identity and Technology in Music || Making Music on the Web