By Tom Mulhern
Tom Mulhern is an Internet/intranet developer in San Jose, California. A bassist and guitarist with a background in electronic music, he gets his kicks from breathing life into web pages by infusing them with audio. He can be e-mailed at webwatch@mulhern.com.
If you’ve been on the Internet, you know how much emphasis there is on graphics, and how heavily laden it is with text. Sound has, well, lagged. Think of this, though: The Internet as a graphic medium (that is, the World Wide Web) has only been around for a few years. It’s still in its infancy. Before that, it was a medium for e-mail and file transfers. Currently evolving almost as fast as the hype surrounding it, the Internet may be the biggest medium ever for sound, presenting an explosion of opportunities for everyone connected with audio–from the player to the recording engineer to the people designing and making software and hardware (including speakers, computers, signal processors, recorders, etc.). This isn’t just marketing B.S. The Internet is a bona fide medium, and like the phonograph, radio, and TV, it’s destined to change the way sound is created, transmitted, and used. But unlike earlier media, the home recordist can get in on the ground floor; you don’t need a zillion bucks’ worth of high-tech gadgetry. A computer (with sound card, if it isn’t a Macintosh), some software, a modem, a pair of speakers, and ancillaries such as a microphone, mixer, and tape deck get you in on the ground floor.
Not only are there obvious applications for sound on the Internet, but like TV (for example), new applications are just waiting to be created. In the early days of TV, no one foresaw showing movies or teaching surgery or having talk shows, let alone people sitting in football stadiums watching instant replays on 2" screens. Nor did they envision MTV, surveillance via TV, pay-per-view, or broadcasting events taking place halfway around the globe–or on the Moon, Mars, or beyond.
Perhaps the biggest leap that the Internet represents is this: The medium itself costs nothing. That’s right: zero. Think of it: Cassettes, CDs, vinyl records, and videotapes are physical objects that cost money to make, warehouse, and distribute. Digital information, though, isn’t restricted in any of those regards because it’s information, stored digitally. If you’ve ever had CDs or cassettes duplicated, you know that, even in huge quantities, they’re never less than a buck or two apiece. Packaging? Shipping? They add up. And putting a CD into a padded envelope, stamping it, and then mailing it take time and labor, which again translate into costs. Then there’s the time it takes for the CD to reach its destination. Sound on the Internet can be stored in one place or many, and only the information is transmitted, not the medium. Plus, it reaches anywhere in the world as fast as the modem it’s pumped through.
Perhaps even bigger (but less publicized) than the Internet are intranets. These are just like the Internet, but usually within the confines of a company, university, or organization. Consider one facet, corporate training, where background sound and music add focus and emphasis to what would otherwise be just a bunch of text and static images. And presentations can include full-motion video, narration, music, and sound effects.
We’re not just talking sound in the sense of musical entertainment. The big picture is bigger, wider, deeper. There will be increasing need for voice-overs, sound bites, remixes, instrumental backgrounds (think of all the music behind the dialog on TV or in movies, for example), and more. Think of this one: Audio cues. In the real world, when a door creaks open, you know it’s a door creaking open. Online, how do you represent, say, the sound a button should make when a menu appears? You can be literal (think of America Online’s "You’ve Got Mail!") or more creative (a fanfare of synths and guitars?).
If you’ve ever used a modem to connect at 28,800 bps, you know how slothlike some pages from the Internet can move to your computer from wherever they reside. Yeah, it seems slow, and some deride it as the "World Wide Wait." But hold on. There are faster connections, such as ISDN and T1, and cable modems are starting to come on the scene, where you receive your cable TV broadcasts, as well as send and receive Internet data at blistering speeds. New compression schemes, plus plug-ins (software that works within an Internet Browser such as Netscape’s Communicator or Microsoft’s Internet Explorer), are constantly being devised to speed the delivery and increase the fidelity. RealAudio and HeadSpace come to mind (and the latter lets you combine multi-track audio with MIDI–truly impressive!).
So, don’t be discouraged if things seem a bit slow to move from Point A to Point B. That’s not your concern; everyone from the engineers developing the software to anybody using the Internet has a lot to gain from enhanced speed, so bet on rapid improvements.
The goal of our upcoming columns, then, is to get you up to speed on the techniques and technology of creating a richer, more interesting online world. We’ll dig into the nuts and bolts of creating, mixing, and presenting sounds, and talk to some of the movers and shakers who are blazing the path on the new audio frontier. See you next time.