You asked why I sent you fax. I did not realize that you were actually
subscribed to the list--I don't think majordomo allows me to find this
out. And the fax address at the bottom of your email was the only way
I could see of contacting you directly. I hesitate in sending this
(this message here) to the ideas list because (1) it begins as a
personal message and (2) the oudeis lists already have too much in
them to be efficient (when we need efficiency).
I want to reply to your reply (to my reply :-) to your message) but in
small bits. I think I should say something about Real Audio because I,
for one, had urged the Linz team to get some Real Audio files
together. Let me explain as briefly as I can.
Where I live, T1 lines are rare. Only one large lead-zinc smelter and
a multi-national forest products conglomerate have them (as far as I
know), and they manage them internally for their own corporate use.
Schools and government are doing well if they have 56K lines--we have
several at Selkirk where I work part-time. So my interest is in
optimizing solutions for end-of-the-dirt-road users (bottom of the
hierarchy). ISDN (a technology resurrected from a former decade) is
still coming. We just got cell phones last year and in several large
areas with small populations (20km up Highway 6 from me) they are
blacked out because of the mountains.
Prior to MMK, santiago sent out a copy of parodos in a RealAudio
format file and I could actually play it on my home machine
(6x86L-PR166+). I dloaded the file for later, but only discovered a
few days ago that it required a server like the other RA stuff.
Meanwhile, I recorded myself doing the invocation in a .wav file
(almost 2 MB) and then ran it through the RA Encoder which Yaco had
mentioned. Some reduction in sound quality, but the result was an .ra
file (187K, I think. About 10% of the .wav file size). This could go
on a Web page but would require audience to have the RealPlayer
plugin. That would be OK, I reasoned, for the Internet Caf=E9 where we
planned to have a parallel performance. We could have .ra files of
what would be used in Linz so that if our connection failed (as it had
in Vienna) we would still have something from the live show to play
for our audiences.
It was, in other words, never my intention to give the impression that
we hoped for a RealAudio Server to broadcast the actor's voices live
and in real time. I agree with santiago that we want that--but in the
long run. What *we* need are some interim measures that enable us to
give local audiences who may have travelled some distance and spent
some money to get their families to this show something to see and
hear. Whether it is syncronized or not is an issue that comes later.
Right now, oudeis doesn't exist at all for them. Kids who can't read
get treated to another *boring* day in town. So the parents look at
the Credits (on the MOO) and say who was that santiago pereson? Who
was that Ulli N=F6? Oh, right! They are the ones whose work we couldn't
see. They are the ones that didn't happen.
This is not acceptable to me. It is too easy for us to deliver
something--and the final vision is so complex and ambitious that we
may never deliver exactly that. But the people whose creativie work
is on display should have that work seen and heard even if it isn't
fully syncronized with the rest. Something simple. Send us the goddam
files. We will play them. (As Jim Morrison said, "Get West. We'll do
the rest.") People will get the idea and come back for the next stage
of realization.
Maybe someone will say, "But this isn't performance," and of course
that is sort of true. But theater is the magic of illusion. ("You mean
that wasn't a real battleship! Those people didn't really drown? But I
thought... ") As long as we can have live humans on the MOO for a
party after the show, we can create that illusion of live performance.
And what is more important, we can provide a focus that enables people
to have a multi-cultural, multi-lingual mingle/schmooze. The rest is
Bag of Tricks stuff and nobody's bizzness but our own.
So by Real Audio, I meant, "Send us the *little* files." Had nothing
to do with push technology. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
-- Jim Terral South Slocan, BC http://www.netidea.com/~jterral/ telnet://moo.hawaii.edu:9999