The concert!

[Magnus Danielson]

>>>>> "B" == BJ  <zzynt at swipnet.se> writes:

 B> And the other nice thing that may happen is some strange 
 B> live performances may appear.

 B> This weekend at Sunday it was a nice concert, there was a live concert
 B> over
 B> satellite and internet at the same time at three different places!

 B> The places involved was Darmstadt with four persons playing live,
 B> Karlsruhe with three persons playing live and Stockholm with three
 B> persons performing live.

 B> Each place had it own big video screen 10 by 10 meters divided by tree 
 B> sections so the public could see and hear what was going on at the other
 B> two places!
 B> Each performer had their own video monitor with some sync 
 B> and performance related information.
 B> It was quite odd to know that the physical present 
 B> audience was divided by two other places by 1000km away!!Darmstadt and
 B> Karlsruhe.

 B> So this concert was a sort of a cyber concert with the satellite
 B> connection as the centre
 B> pole of the event.

 B> Any one who was on the net this weekend could attend the concert and
 B> play along
 B> with the live performance and it could be seen and heard by uss in the
 B> audience.

 B> And people did, it was quite amazing to se this happen and i
 B> guess it all was synched by showing some time frame clock info at 
 B> the performancers video monitor? 
 B> Nevertheless to me ears it was synched.

 B> This concert was broadcasted via radio and TV in Sweden and Germany.
 B> Perhaps some of you did hear or saw the concert?

 B> The people attending to the concert via internet was displayed on a
 B> world map
 B> by another video screen in Karlsruhe.As son as some one triggered the
 B> the key or whatever triggered by the net, a dot or a part of the country
 B> would
 B> turn white from where the origin was, and a sound was played.

 B> Eumsat and Deutsche Telekom AG stand for the satellite connection.
 B> They used some whether satellites for this event.

 B> A very interesting concert i might say.

 B> My question is ,have this type of concert taken place 
 B> before or was this the very first one?

Well, it might be one of the first electronic music concerts
performed, but there is some net related concerts prior to that.

A small band called Rolling Stones wanted to become the first band to
play live on the Internet, however a small local band (Severe Tire
Damage) in Silicon Valley acted as a unplaned warmup band for them,
playing live from the roof of the beloved Xerox PARC (Palo Alto
Research Center) thus making the Stones the second band to play live
at Mbone! Xerox PARC is the birthplace of much of todays computer
electronics, such as Ethernet, WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menu and Pointing
device (mouse that is)) etc. Check out their homepage at
http://www.std.org/first.html
It should be noted that STD appeared for the second time when they
opened for Rolling Stones...

However, the Severe Tire Damage was at one site (even the same roof)
where as I recall a strange moment on Mbone when there where 18 people
that joined in for Mark's birthdayparty in a puase of the Stockholm
IETF. There where 18 simultanious video and audio streams (which BTW
was a new record, people really scraped of bandwdith for these
transmissions back then) but when people from 4 different continents
tried to sing "Happy Birthday" it was certainly out of sync and
everyone cracked up ;)
I was among the few that was on sight to share the Champange and real
birthday cake (we had a virtual birthday cake as well, the proud geeks
that we are). Thing is, we even had it showing up on the news, since a
TV crew just HAPPEND to be in the building...

Either of these moments may not share the technical glory that the
Darmstadt/Stockholm gig did in synchronisity, but they where there...

 B> I do know that Farlight CMI vas involved in the 80's with a 
 B> satellite connection thing where two CMI III was connected together
 B> and played simultaneously, but as far as i know that was not a real
 B> concert!

The roundtrip time for a satelite is in the 900:s of ms and humans
kind of mess things up at 150 ms, so either you have good musicians
that can actually take delay (hard to find thought) or you provide
local metronomes and then delay stuff into sync.

Thing is, as technology has improved, we still haven't improved the
speed of light that much...

Magnus, in the land of bad singing