Stars like Peter Gabriel, U2, Todd Rundgren, Prince, David Bowie, and the Residents are launching interactive Rock and Roll. (But can you dance to it?)
You're Peter Gabriel. You've been at the cutting edge of everything. You were in a supergroup. You left to go solo and earned superstar status on your own. Your videos made MTV worth watching. Your mantelpiece is crammed with Grammys and other awards. So, what's next?
For Peter Gabriel, the answer was obvious: interactive music. Gabriel's Explora CD-ROM, due out this fall for $49.95, includes music and videos from Gabriel's latest album Us; an interactive tour of his recording studio, situated on the grounds of a beautiful estate somewhere in the English countryside; and a visit to a World Organization of Music and Dance (WOMAD) festival, all with Gabriel acting as your interactive tour guide.
By letting people look at the artistic process from the inside, Gabriel hopes his work will help blur the distinction between artist and non- artist. "I hope this technology will empower people who have a sense that they have as much right and ability for self-expression as anyone who goes under the officially approved category [of artist]," he says. "In some societies, the idea that anyone alive would not be an artist is ridiculous. I think that often the first generation of new technology can be dehumanizing; but the second generation can be superhumanizing."
Interactive technology could change both the public's conception of musician as well as the economics of the music world. Gabriel isn't alone in grasping the importance of music's newest medium: Every major Hollywood studio and media conglomerate is jockeying for a stake in the latest digital opportunity. Time-Warner, Viacom, Sony, MCA, Paramount, Fox, Philips - you name it - they've all got an interactive strategy. In fact, refusing to acknowledge interactive music nowadays would be about as smart as pretending video didn't matter during the ascendency of MTV.
Not everyone is so sanguine, however. "There are real questions in my mind as to whether even talented musicians can make a compelling interactive experience," comments Jac Holzman, founder of Elektra Records, now chief technologist at Warner Music.
Indeed, a cynic might argue that interactive music is yet another marketing trick foisted upon the consuming masses by aging rock stars eager to extend their popular lifespan. "MTV was essentially a new marketing methodology," Holzman says.
"The life of a rock-and-roll musician used to be short," he adds. "Now it can be 20 to 25 years." Holzman sees more renowned stars like Gabriel, Bowie, and others raising awareness of interactive medium's potential. But the artists who will truly define this new form have yet to be discovered.
"It's like the growth of the record industry as it came out of the '50s and '60s," says Holzman, who began his career when records still spun at 78 rpm. "The energy was with the independent labels." Inexpensive tools like Apple's QuickTime and Adobe Premiere will enable a whole new generation of artists to explore this medium, he adds.
Until then, veteran stars like Peter Gabriel, Billy Idol, David Bowie, and scores of others are working with computer technologists to add an interactive dimension to the music they've already written. Others, including Todd Rundgren, Thomas Dolby, and Cindy Baron, are creating music from the ground up using the new interactive technologies. Whether they create interactive music by integrating old tunes into new formats or by writing new music, both approaches yield what can only be described as an altered listening experience.
New releases from artists like Gabriel will let you do more than merely listen to your music. You'll be able to play along with the band, even if you're a tone-deaf klutz. You'll have the chance to create your own music videos, identify your emotional responses to certain kinds of music, and even explore a virtual musical world. And we're not talking some distant future - interactive rock and roll is happening right now.
Technologists and Artists
Today, creating interactive CD-ROMs requires both musical and technical knowledge. Some CD-ROMs, like The Freak Show, under development by the San Francisco-based performance-rock group The Residents, consume the talents of computer programmers, artists, designers, and computer- literate musicians. Musicians like Bowie, whose demo CD-ROM was produced by interactive wizard Ty Roberts, and Gabriel, who enlisted the help of technogeek Steve Nelson of Brilliant Media to produce the Explora CD- ROM, are working with the best technologists around.
The Los Angeles-based hard-rock group Motley Crue worked with programmer Tim Byers to produce a CD-ROM that will give you instant access to their hit song Girls! Girls! Girls! Other efforts, such as the No World Order CD-ROM by Todd Rundgren, is the sole creation of the renaissance man himself.
There's even a non-musician, Tony Bove, an interactive chronicler and historian, whose CD-ROM-based documentary-in-progress about the Haight- Ashbury days is based on recorded music, art, poetry, and news footage.
Make Your Own Music
The first wave of interactive music falls into three main categories: interactive musical compositions, which let you make your own music out of pre-constructed parts or let you jam along with the music; interactive rockumentaries, which bring you into the history of the creative musical process; and interactive experiences, which combine music, art, and even a sense of gameplay.
Interactive musical compositions include works with the primary focus on audio. The visual interfaces to these products let you set the mood of the music that's playing, remix or rearrange the various musical parts in the composition, or let you play along as one of the band members. "Any musical performance is actually a script of musical events: verses, choruses, solo sections, and other subjectively named musical events," says Todd Rundgren. "A traditional CD is essentially a list of these musical events.
"On my interactive CD, there will be three pre-defined scripts of musical events available. At the simplest level, it's like getting three albums in one, and you can choose the one you like best. If you want more, you can have the system create a custom script for you. You can control the tempo or mood. Or maybe you want to hear a certain kind of mix, like a very thick mix or a thin mix or a mix with no vocals."
Experimentation with mood and emotion is a major theme in the interactive music scene. Thomas Dolby describes how he designed a sound installation for a sculpture exhibit in an art gallery: "The nice thing about music is that when you add an element to a piece of music, your whole perception of it changes. You take a chord sequence played with a mellow choir sound in C major, and then somewhere else in the room you place a low throb or drone in A minor. As you move toward it, your mood goes from a happy major one to a more sinister, melancholy minor one. If you assign a different element to each event or character that the player can interact with, then he kind of creates his own mix."
What About Couch Tubers?
The obvious problem with this approach is that it makes demands of the listener. "The number of people who want to get inside the music and reconstruct it is relatively small," Warner's Holzman says. "Someone may want to pull out a guitar track, but that's a guy who is a guitar freak."
What if you're tone-deaf? You may not make "music" as we know it, but it still might be fun. At least, that's Rundgren's contention. "Music in people's lives is not an intellectual experience; it's a transcendental experience. The first major step is trying to convey to people that interactive is an expanded way of listening to music. They should not think that it changes their responsibilities in terms of music. People buy music because it brings them pleasure and enjoyment. It's not a job.
"For interactive music to become a popular concept," he adds, "it would have to be really simple to use. I think one of the most common ways that people will use interactive music is to set up a listening circumstance and let the CD-I player - or whatever - do the rest. Essentially, it will invent a record tailored to the listening circumstance. For example, tell the system that you're having a party and you'd like some fast upbeat songs."
Rundgren is practicing what he preaches. No World Order, due out this summer, will run on CD-I and Macintosh systems. The composition - performed entirely by Rundgren - contains a database of more than 1,500 musical segments and phrases, which you can rearrange to create your own composition.
Thomas Dolby holds a clear vision of the potential synergies between music, technology, and entertainment. In fact, he's already started his own Los Angeles-based company, Headspace, which he rather immodestly hopes will do for audio special effects what George Lucas's Industrial Light & Magic has done for visual special effects. At the moment, Dolby's doing the musical score for an interactive game on CD-ROM in which the music changes according to the dramas that take place.
Dolby agrees that for people to want to participate in making their own interactive music, technology must make the choices simple. "It's not a big leap when you have a graphic program that allows the user choices to create a sound score complete with music and special effects and even dialog that is generated and even modulated by the specific choices the player makes. But," he warns, "don't burn your hi-fi systems."
The Electric Arranger
So what is it like for a musician to produce an interactive music CD-ROM designed to let the listener mix and match? Liberating, says Edgar Winter, a rock and blues composer who got fed up with traditional ways of composing music. "Doing a traditional album is creative up to a certain point, because you're building. But then you get to where you have to decide what can stay on the album and what has to go - I always hate that. Sometimes I'll do a couple different solos on several different instruments and often I like all of them - it's hard to decide what to throw out in the final mix for the album."
Winter wasn't quite ready to put a name to his first title when I spoke to him at his in-home studio in Los Angeles, where he's producing his latest album using a Macintosh-based desktop recording studio. But he did say that computers have changed the way he sees music. "With the power of computers," he said, "there's no reason why you can't let the listener select among the different musical ideas and use them to create their own arrangements. I feel like computers will help people experience the album's creative possibilities more the way that I did when I was working on it."
Interactive Karaoke
Some people may want to do more than just rearrange someone else's music. They may actually want to play along with the band. Several companies, including Holzman's Warner, are working on products that teach music through interactive media. Others are working on titles along the lines of karaoke and Music Minus One - tapes of popular hits minus a key instrument.
Interactive Records's "So You Want To Be a Rock and Roll Star", an interactive music title for the Macintosh, lets you pick a popular rock song and replace one of the musicians; you even get some instruction on how to improve your licks. Interactive Records is producing other titles, including "Country Goes Interactive", which applies the combination karaoke and instructional approach to popular country tunes.
According to Steven Rappaport, the company's president, "The point of these products is to truly empower users so they can have a participatory musical experience, even if they're not musicians."
A fan of Thomas Dolby, Rappaport is in the midst of an imaginative project based on Dolby's music called "Astronauts and Heretics in the Land of the Pirate Twins: A Thomas Dolby Interactive Record". This project is an interactive adventure game based on Dolby's first four albums. Although Dolby is immersed in the technology himself, this project was conceived and is being produced by Rappaport under license from Dolby.
MTV with Buttons
Although music still provides the raison d'etre, interactive rockumentaries tend to make greater use of visuals and text to explore how the music was created. In an almost educational fashion, they impart information as you explore a terrain of songs and pictures and text via the computer screen.
So far, the interactive rockumentary has attracted the most commercial interest among the three types of this avant-garde musical genre. According to Michele DiLorenzo, senior vice president of Viacom New Media (corporate sibling of MTV), "Most so-called interactive music titles are really reference material about music, and shouldn't really be considered interactive music." In some cases, such as Compton's The Compleat Beatles on CD-ROM, the original artists had zero involvement with the project - the result is mostly re-purposed from existing documentary materials.
Gabriel's Explora
Some artists, on the other hand, actively participate in the creation of their products.
"Peter is very involved with the content of this project...we're really just here to help implement his ideas," says Explora Producer Steve Nelson. "[Explora] is not computers; it's not technology," Nelson adds. "This is entertainment. This is MTV on a disc."
Explora will play on any color Macintosh, or on Apple's Power CD connected to a Macintosh. A version for the potential huge Windows market is also planned.
In addition, Gabriel wants to see the new technology gain a stronghold in the Third World. "It's clear that some countries have the capacity to jump from an agricultural economy to an information economy without going through all the shit of an industrial economy. If you could get a very reliable, low-budget, self-sufficient information mode with computers, solar power, and satellite up and down links that could be dropped on any point on the planet's surface and kids there could be trained within three to five years in how to use all this stuff, they could then become information creators and processors able to compete equally with any other point on the globe."
Sound+Vision+Interactivity
The David Bowie CD-ROM, developed for Apple's Power CD player by interactive wizard Ty Roberts's company ION, shares some conceptual turf with the Gabriel production. Roberts, who has been a Bowie fan since his teens, projects his hero worship but skillfully combines it with special effects culled from his years of work as a music and video programmer.
Based on the song Jump, They Say from Bowie's new album Black Tie, White Noise, the CD-ROM allows the user to explore Bowie's creative process. Brewed from nine hours of outtakes and alternate scenes, the disc lets you see the behind-the-scenes creation of the album; view the Jump, They Say video; and then enter an interactive video studio and mix your own version of Bowie's video.
U2's ZOO TV
Supergroup U2 has been using interactive media technology in its live performances, where giant screens depict synthetic drummers, replicas of band member Bono, and another band thousands of miles away. They're now making the move to CD-ROM. U2 sees its forte in video. "What we're trying to create is television, except it's interactive MTV or beyond," says U2's producer Philip Van Allen. "The aesthetic for us is not computers. It's much more akin to the visual and audio aesthetic that's on MTV."
The project - ZOO TV Interactive - is still under development by Van Allen's Commotion New Media. Van Allen estimates production time will take one year. "Our approach is to create something that is not about the artist, but an expression of the artist. If all the music products are rehashing old material, we don't have an art form and we don't have a business."
Interactive Heavy Metal
Tim Byers, the producer and programmer who shaped Motley Crue's unreleased CD-ROM, compares his efforts favorably against the Gabriel disc. "The Peter Gabriel thing is a mammoth layer-upon-layer-upon-layer project. Our project is broken down by the album. It's very quick. If you want to watch Girls, Girls, Girls, within a matter of seconds, you're watching it. With Gabriel's thing, it may take you 30 minutes to find what you just saw yesterday."
Called Digital Decadence, the CD-ROM parallels Motley Crue's ten-year retrospective album Decade of Decadence. It includes virtual backstage passes to the show, so a fan can watch from behind the scenes. "The Motley Crue fan is into rock and roll; he doesn't want to go through fifteen layers of buttons and files to watch Girls, Girls, Girls," Byers says.
The group has yet to find a distributor for its product, which it hopes to sell for $39 to $59.
Exploring the '60s in the '90s
"I'm not interested in the fads, the backstage, and the groupies, but in why they decided how to write a song, how they used the studio to produce," says Tony Bove, who is producing a Macintosh CD-ROM rockumentary on the Haight-Ashbury era. "I'm interested in a more detailed examination of the creative process."
In its best form, the interactive rockumentary experience draws you into both the musical and documentary process to give you a much better feel for the subject, Bove says.
"By interacting with the multi-dimensional artistic and cultural spectrum of information on the disc, people will learn more about the Haight-Ashbury than they could by any other method in the same amount of time. I'm not just recording a traditional film documentary onto digital media," Bove asserts, "I'm actually trying to create a new form of documentary."
Bove's not a professional musician, although he does play a mean blues harmonica and has an ear for what sounds good. But he definitely has a mission: "The key thing for me is to explore the creativity that went into making the rock music and exploring the roots and the influences for the musicians. What was the cultural context for the music, and how did the music itself influence our culture?
"This project contains a lot of different material that's never been brought together before. It crosses boundaries and mixes media. The music for this disc will be from lots of bands: the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and others. There'll even be a special digitally simulated enlightenment at the end - Eastern philosophies merged with Western."
Bove plans to produce and distribute the CD-ROM himself, together with his partner and wife Cheryl Rhodes. The Rise and Fall of the Haight- Ashbury is scheduled for an early 1994 release.
The Interactive Revolutionaries
A few dream of venturing beyond interactive music, beyond the simple rockumentary, into a completely different realm. Devo founder Gerry Cosalis wants to produce a CD-ROM that could be a potent social force - maybe even a good one.
"In years past there have been a lot of examples of how a band could turn an audience into a mutinous angry mob, by pushing certain emotions," Cosalis explains. "That's what happened in the 1960s and 1970s with rock and punk. With computer technology and this new kind of complete interaction with the listener, you can be truly cyberpunk in a subversive manner that's potentially positive."
Cosalis is interested in reviving Devo as a virtual band, one that exists electronically as an interactive concept, returning to the band's roots of integrating theater, poetry, and music. To get at least a partial start, Cosalis has teamed up with the Voyager Company to produce a laserdisc, The Complete Truth About De-Volution, which is an artistically rich but technically simple rockumentary about Devo with rudimentary interactivity - limited by the constraints of the laserdisc medium.
A glimpse of The Complete Truth video gives one an idea what the potential CD-ROM might look like: mind-bending. Culling strands from their Dadaist and German Expressionist roots, the video mixes music, murder, mayhem, mime, and sheer mirth, all in what appears to be a chaotic format. It isn't. But the total effect is shocking and at the same time compelling.
Artificial Emotion
Like Devo did before her, alternative musician Cindy Baron is definitely marching to the beat of a different drum machine. Baron was exposed to both technology and music at an early age. At three, she started the Suzuki method, and her childhood pastimes included playing math games with dad, who was one of the founders of Mead Data Central, the online providers of Lexis and Nexis. "My father taught me binary code, set theory, symbolic logic, and as a result I became a budding young geek," Baron says. "One of my clearest childhood memories was sitting on the playground - all the other little girls had their Barbies and stuffed animals - but I was happily sitting there playing with my slide rule and logarithm tables."
Baron grew up to lead a double life as a software engineer and rock-and- roll musician - she's played with The Card Game and is now with the New York-based rock band 2.5D. "The way one thinks about music and music structures is very similar to the way one thinks about programming and programming structures," she says. "I really believe that programming and music are very closely matched." How is Baron applying her creative and technical talents in the interactive music arena? Baron has taken what she calls a "completely different approach" - using music and graphics to create what she describes as artificial emotion. She is working on a CD-ROM - which will be re-purposed as a traditional audio CD and a music video - that will help people "learn about their own emotional styles. People who listen and look at my product will get more of a sense of why my art is created than how it is created. Also, they are going to get a sense of why they respond to certain music the way they do."
Cyberpunk Rock?
A couple of years ago, rock star Billy Idol thought computers were only for geeks. Then he read William Gibson's classic science-fiction novel Neuromancer and realized that computers might be the hippest thing around. Idol's subsequent discussions with Gibson opened doors to high- tech enlightenment that "drove me wild," he says.
Idol's computer explorations quickly drew him to the WELL, an online service started by the Whole Earth folks (he's idol@well.sf.ca.us). So if you take Billy Idol, William Gibson, Neuromancer, a Macintosh, and the WELL, and stir them together in a big creative pot, you wind up with Cyberpunk, Idol's upcoming audio CD with accompanying software for the Macintosh. The product, published by EMI subsidiary Chrysalis, is due out early this summer. The album itself is "a musical manifestation of my explorations on the WELL," says Idol. The Cyberpunk software describes an underground science fiction movement that incorporates technology and art.
The Eyes Have It
Perhaps the most fully developed interactive experience is The Freak Show CD-ROM, based on a 1990 album and comic book of the same name, all created by The Residents, a San-Francisco based rock/performance group, with the help of well-known interactive artist Jim Ludtke. The Residents are an off-beat experimental music band - some of their music/video work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. The band performs only in disguise - the best-known being their giant eyeball masks with top-hats and tuxes. From our sneak preview, their disc resembles nothing so much as a modern-day morality tale - albeit at a low resolution. It is to be launched on the Macintosh later this year.
Homer Flynn, the band's manager, describes the disc: "The CD-ROM can be seen as an interactive book that's illustrated with graphics, text, and music. The interface is a tent containing an audience and stage. Some of the audience members will be interactive, as will the freaks performing on the stage. By moving through a door at one side of the stage, you can get behind the tent and explore the trailers of the individual freaks."
Ludtke's 3-D drawings are so surrealistic - a Dali sketchbook was lying open on the worktable when I visited - that you feel as if you are actually encountering Wanda the Worm Woman, formerly a nun. You explore her trailer, plush with baroque ornaments, and read her old love letters, which she received from a priest. Then you can click-wander your way into Harry the Head's trailer: He's a freak with just a head - no body - so you have to enter his mind to understand him. Of course, there's a message. "In some way we are all freaks, and all freaks are really just people," Flynn says. "But it's not a completely serious project; it's an escapist fantasy as well."
What also distinguishes this CD-ROM from many of the others is that the concept came from the musicians - not from an outside technologist or programmer. And, as with Gabriel's Explora project, the musicians worked closely with the artist (and a programmer) to carefully develop the vision projected by their music.
Free To Roam, for Now
The market is so disorganized in these formative days of interactive music, it's hard to even figure out what discs play on what machines (see The Platform Proliferation Problem, page 89). In this new medium, there are no real mega-hits and there are no real superstars. Creative freedom and artistic quality might flourish.
But the Hollywood sharks are already starting to circle. Madonna has launched an interactive company, Prince has announced that he will be doing interactive media and virtual reality projects, and two notorious Michaels - Milken and Jackson - are working on a massive interactive TV project that is under close wraps. Rumor has it that Milken will use his fortune to start an interactive cable TV venture that will use Jackson's vast media holdings - which includes much of the Beatles' work - as a content base.
Because interactive music is still in its exploratory and experimental stages, it is free from most of the constraints, oppression, and perversion of big-scale commercial interests. "Because the corporate presence is still fairly minimal on the cutting edge," says Peter Gabriel, "many explorers and artists have been left fairly free to follow their instincts and their hearts."
Some media executives feel this is as it should be. Viacom's DiLorenzo, who is in charge of developing her company's substantial content inventory (including MTV, Nickelodeon, and Showtime), prefers to train her producers and directors, and allow her developers to play for a while, in anticipation of the day when offline interactive (CD-ROM) becomes online interactive. "Right now, we're not really deciding what our strategy will be," she said. "Instead, we're doing a lot of creative R&D. If you shortchange the creative R&D, you'll end up shortchanging your ultimate business opportunities."
Although the ultimate forms and formats are still emerging, one thing is sure. No matter how the art is produced, it still will be judged by the standards we have developed in the past. Or, as Todd Rundgren said when I asked his advice to artists venturing in this still uncharted interactive territory: "It's the content, stupid. It's not the dazzling technique."
So will interactive media be significant? "Absolutely," says Jac Holzman of Warner Music. "When someone does something miraculous with it."
The first wave of multimedia music products falls into three main categories:
interactive musical compositions, which let you make your own music out of pre-constructed parts, or jam along;
interactive rockumentaries, which bring you into the history of the creative musical process; and
interactive multimedia experiences, which combine music, art, and even a sense of gameplay.
The Platform Proliferation Problem
Because we are in the early stages of the technology, there are far too many completely incompatible platforms for interactive material. Here's a run-down on some of the major interactive platforms, including a range of approximate street prices:
Laserdisc - The grandpappy of all optical media, this technology has been around longer than Reaganomics. You don't get much interactivity in this medium, but there are millions of them out there. Price: $350 to $1,000, depending on features.
Philips CD-I - One of the first interactive CD-ROM players, it took years to get to market and was met with lackluster sales. Price: $600.
Tandy VIS - Tandy must have been copying the wrong student's homework - it took a '286 PC, Modular Windows, a CD-ROM drive, and stuffed it into a box that looked like a VCR. Sales have been correspondingly bad. Price: $300 to 500.
Sega CD-ROM for Genesis - Never underestimate the power of a low price- point. Although this device isn't capable of producing good sound or graphics, a next- generation product is reportedly already well underway. Price: less than $200.
CD-ROM XA - A technical format for streaming together video and audio, CD-ROM XA is supported on various computer systems. Several handheld and table-top CD-ROM XA players are said to be under development.
Sony MMCD - The first portable CD-ROM XA player to make it to market. Price: $600 to $700.
Macintosh - Apple has started aggressively pricing and pushing its CD- ROM drives. The company expects to sell more than 1 million drives during 1993. Because Mac users seem to possess both an aesthetic sense and the greater financial ability to have purchased a Mac in the first place, this market provides a ripe target for interactive products. Price: more than $1,000.
PC - With several million CD-ROMs floating around in the PC universe, this market consumes a lot of CD-ROMs. However, the plethora of incompatible systems have made it difficult for interactive titles to do well. Price: more than $1,000.
Kaleida ScriptX players - ScriptX is a new interactive standard being promoted by Kaleida Labs, the odd-couple partnership between Apple and IBM. Price: most ScriptX players that hookup to TV sets are estimated to sell for less than $500; handheld models with built-in color LCD screens will cost around $1000. Expect the first ones out later this year.
Apple Power CD - This new techno-toy only lets you play interactive titles when it's hooked up to Macintosh. Future standalone models may play ScriptX CD-ROMs without the aid of the Macintosh. Available late this year for less than $500.
3DO multiplayer - This multiplayer (featured in Wired 1.2) is also being offered as a standard for licensing to other manufacturers. Panasonic has already committed to the platform, and others are said to be working on their own players. Due this Christmas for around $700.
Modular Windows players - Although the Tandy VIS machine was a flop, Microsoft is still a big booster of Modular Windows. Zenith, among other companies, plans to build a more powerful Modular Windows box that resembles a VCR. This platform could be a big winner if the hardware improves. Price: probably less than $500.
Interactive TV - Whether by cable, satellite, telephone, or radio, real soon now one of these technologies will bind your TV set to a higher intelligence. Microsoft, Intel, and General Instruments have teamed up to build '386-based PCs running Modular Windows into the cable TV converter boxes by early next year. Price: pay as you play on your monthly cable, phone, or other bill.
