[ >∞-îl_o_tré :: #03 | #02 | #01 | #00 -<]

old bears new tricks

may 31, 2004.
[>∞-îl_o_tré-#03-<]

Placard friday was the sunniest and hottest day of the week. Before starting our net-streamed sessions, Martin, Peter and I went to the beach for a 'final stroll'. Martin brought his family and the Park equipment over in his old van, and touring the island in Martin's vehicle, be it only to go out to eat, or buy some beers in the supermarket, brought out these feelings of 'a band touring' ... But then, of course, in a way, we were sort of a band these days.

The Placard that we set up in Hollum was a première in more than one sense. Most noteworthy: this has been the first ever Placard in the Netherlands (and in a pretty unusual place as far as that country goes). It was Peter and Martin's first participation in a Placard. And my first time as an organiser and emitter.
Hollum is a very small village, with a mere 1100 inhabitants, and only slightly less traditions. Part of these is the local announcer, which one may hire to announce events in Hollum (or else on the island). He drives out in his car, that has two loudspeakers mounted on its roof, and slowly drives through the villages' streets, loudly speaking his announcement, accompanied by a tape full of merry tunes.
Okay.
We hired him to announce our placard event ... You can have a look at a small QuickTime movie of the announcement ...

Soundwise we mostly kept to our usual, pretty ancient, tools: our vocal chords, an old clarinette, cheap electric guitars (no effects), two kraakdozen (crackle boxes), (lo- and hi-fi) field recordings (those made for last year's GeluidEiland (Isle of Sound) project) played back through an MD-player and my usual assortment of dictaphones, or, sparingly though, via mp3-playlists on a laptop. Martin added to this the possibility of an occasional touch of electronica, with a small MIDI-keyboard and equally small digital mixing panel controlling Cubase installed on an iBook.
Well, I guess this can hardly be considered a limitation. Rather, it is a choice, that, as far as Peter and I are concerned, is rooted in a common history (old bears, say).

Beforehand I had planned to also build small sound producing contraptions, using objects found on the island. But I simply did not find the time to go out and find things. That would have taken, at least, one more (sunny) day on which to bike and stroll around to look for 'things'. And then one more (rainy, if need be) to build and experiment. There's an echo of the idea, though, in the last-minute grabbing of a small metal bucket filled with stones and shells that I saw standing near the entrance to the studio, and that I then used in the stream sessions. I was pretty pleased with its sounding result, even though I think I hardly touched upon its true potential. Still something short of a small universe to be explored here.

And what about the aesthetics of streaming? Well there's drops, and there's clips, and there's glitches, but probably the interesting first thing one should mention about streaming live on the internet is the amazing lag, that, in our case, turned out to be as large as 6-10 seconds. (In the irc-chat Erik Minkkinen even mentioned noticing a lag between the stream-signals received by two distinct machines in Paris.) I remember being warned about the lag. But we do have a thing with 'lags', we do. Rooted in a common history (old bears, say). And I guess this hardly can be considered a new trick, but of course we immediately fed back the stream into the stream. In last friday's Placard we set up and played an internet echo-loop ... and thus, (time warp) -pretty much incidentally - bridged near a quarter of a century.
Instantly.

Could one ask for more on an île au trésor?

[ technicalities : We used QuickTime Broadcaster to sent our mpeg4 stereo audio and (very lo-res) video signal to Park's QuickTime Server. All was almost trivially simple to be made to work, but then of course Martin already had done the bulk of the work when setting up the server.
On the receiving end: us being on MacOSX-only made it impossible for us to listen to the Ogg Vorbis-encoded stream sent by dokidoki; we were able to get some of the parisian 'ambiance' though, via an improvised qt-stream, that Erik M. sent to Park's server: I gathered from the irc-chat that he simply put a set of headphones over a computer's internal mike ... ... Btw, thanks to all that listened over there, including those that picked up the stream-url in the chat. ]

[ links : www.park.nl :: schateiland ]

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