Computer Music in 2011
The report from Project Bar-B-Q 2006 is now online, and its annual predictions are as provocative as ever.
Bar-B-Q (I'm on the advisory board) is a four-day conference designed to shape the future of music on computers. Hosted by the Fat Man on a Texas ranch each October, it brings together 50 experts in chip design, music software, game music, online music, electronic musical instruments, pro audio, and numerous related fields to brainstorm five-year solutions to the industry's most pressing problems.
Line 6 designer (and ADAT co-inventor) Marcus Ryle chats with producer Rory Kaplan.
Part of the reason Project Bar-B-Q has worked so well for the last 11 years is the majestic setting: there's plenty of food, drink, and cigars; beautiful sunsets over the lake; meteor showers; and well-stocked jam sessions so we aren't discussing music in the abstract. Attendees are forbidden to wear company logos that might blind them to competitors' ideas. One year, I saw representatives from two companies that were suing each other back in the corporate world sit down and work out a shared reverb algorithm that later showed up in the Xbox.
BBQ attendees brainstorm dozens of topics before coalescing around four to six to solve. My group tackled the game-audio mixing challenge, introduced by Peter Drescher as "Why do game audio soundtracks have to suck so bad?!"
Instruments and P.A. are available 24/7 for impromptu jamming. Here sound designer Scott Snyder jams with Universal Audio VP Joe Bryan.
The Mixolydian group tackled Rory Kaplan's challenge of making video games sound like there was a tiny human mixer in the box. Here Dr. Pierre Lemieux of Dolby Labs, Pat Azzarello of Microsoft, Matt Tullis of Dolby, Peter Otto of UCSD, and Jonathan Pilon of Ubisoft support Peter Drescher in delivering our final presentation as I hover nervously in the background. You can read our report here.
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Hi David,
Thanks for the response!
Sounds like a very interesting conference. Love to be a fly on the wall there.
Anyways, really enjoyed reading your articles.
Have fun!
Hey Gary. For such a blue-sky conference, BBQ has a strong commercial undertone, and quite a few products and specifications have been born there. The 13th annual session is this week, and I'm really looking forward to it.
Hi,
Say, when you fella's get the next generation stuff figured out how about letting some of us recently enabled computer musicians take it for a test drive?
Thanks for what you've done so far!