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Java does a lot of things well, but the language has done little to impress audiophiles - until pop star Thomas Dolby Robertson signed up. Sun Microsystems has licensed Internet music technology from Robertson's company, Headspace, for use with Java.
Headspace was announced Thursday at the JavaOne convention in San Francisco. Until now, Java has only featured low-quality, monophonic 8-bit technology. But Headspace's format allows music to be integrated with much higher-fidelity, digital audio while keeping minimal file size and platform independence.
In an interview with Wired News on Wednesday, Robertson described his system as not only a more efficient way of delivering music, but a more appropriate way of making "sound tracks for Web productions."
Robertson stresses not only the quality of sound that the Headspace engine produces, but also its interactive capabilities - sounds can be triggered by mouse-overs or other scripted events. Pitch and tempo can also be changed to use the same sound file in many different ways.
Robertson equates Headspace's innovative method of delivery to that of text. If email were handled the same way sound files are, you'd print out the text, scan the page, then send the picture that resulted - a process resulting in a cumbersome binary file. But with Beatnik, Headspace's engine, the sounds themselves are not sent, just their descriptions, which are played back using Beatnik's built-in synthesizer.
"We don't need to send the wedding cake, just the recipe," says Robertson. With this approach, Beatnik's pared-down descriptions of sounds are much smaller than samples, and of higher quality.
Other musical plug-ins for Web browsers, such as Crescendo, have previously used the MIDI file format. Though rooted in MIDI, Beatnik is a hybrid format, which also uses and encapsulates other types of musical files, such as WAV, AU, or AIFF, into the same format, called RMF for Rich Music Format.
Robertson admits that Beatnik offers very little to compete with standard streaming audio plug-ins such as RealAudio. Rather, he hopes Beatnik will shine in the area of Web development.
"I know how important audio is when you're playing a game," he said. "It's not just a question of quality, but of appropriateness." Robertson believes that Web sites can have the same level of soundtrack-enhanced flavor.
Ben Denckla, a graduate student specializing in music at MIT, notes that MIDI is proving to be a popular format with Web audio developers. Companies such as Microsoft, he points out, have also created MIDI-based browser plug-ins. Denckla feels Headspace's addition of open sampling is an important leap. "The best General MIDI implementations are sample playback, but with a fixed set of samples," he said.
Robertson developed his appetite for creating new music software after years of hacking sound tools to get them to do what he wanted. Even as off-the-shelf music software vastly improved, Robertson realized that he was at his most inventive when he was doing things his own way, and eventually started working with engineers to develop new software.
