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November 27, 2004
The Clarion Call of Rock 'n' Roll's Everlasting Triumph
Recently heard busting rhymes over the "99 Problems" beat, Richard Allen just popped up on the McSweeney's website with a humorous piece called Seven Questions for the Guitar Solo From "Stairway to Heaven." As interviews go, I'd have to say that's quite a 'get'. I can only dream that Katie Couric and Diane Sawyer might one day fight it out for the chance to interview the thunderous drum intro from "When the Levee Breaks". (Q: "How did it make you feel when you heard "Rhymin' and Stealin'" for the first time?")
Speaking of rock 'n' roll's everlasting triumph and people who love Led Zeppelin, the Black Taj song "Woke Up Tired" (6.99 MB) is one of the hottest things on Bandwidth, so download that monster jam already. Sadly, we may never hear another recording from this particular incarnation of Black Taj, which consisted of Dave Brylawski (Polvo, Idyll Swords) on guitar and vocals, Grant Tennille (Idyll Swords, Jimi Hendrix Inexperience, Prayer Flags, Kinko's) on guitar and backup vocals, Steve Popson (Polvo) on bass, and Thomas Atherton (Jimi Hendrix Inexperience) on the drums.
Black Taj is not the only track on Bandwidth to feature a Polvo alumnus, as there's also a track from Libraness, aka Ash Bowie (Polvo, Helium). "Sykes Temple Lane" (7.56 MB) is a really nice instrumental that starts innocently with warm pitch-bending bluesiness before taking some dark and unexpected turns over the course of 5 and a half minutes. I'm a big fan of most any song that features trombone, so I give this Libraness track even more points for the sliding horn sounds. If you like this Libraness track, I highly recommend the Libraness full-length Yesterday...and Tomorrow's Shells that came out on Tiger Style in 2000. It's got some vocals and a little more song structure to it...and the whole thing has a really great early 90s Polvo feel to it.
Posted by Tim at 05:52 PM | Comments (0)
November 26, 2004
Back From Holiday
I didn't intend to take a two-week holiday from this blog but it was a nice break all the same. But now that all of the entries have fallen off of my main index page, I guess it's time for the holiday to end. I'll pick up pretty much where I left off, by briefly plugging the fact that I'm once again DJing at The Federal tomorrow night, and by continuing to hype the WXYC webcasting anniversary. Local NPR station WUNC gave a good bit of airtime to the WXYC webcasting breakthrough on Wednesday's episode of The State of Things, and if you missed the radio version, you can listen to the archived show online. The show featured 20+ minutes of webcasting/technology chat with David McConville, Mike Shoffner, and SunSITE/ibiblio head Paul Jones, who blogged about the live radio experience here.
The second half of Wednesday's The State of Things focused on local hip-hop MC Phonte Coleman (Little Brother) and The Foreign Exchange, Phonte's trans-Atlantic Internet-enabled collaboration with Dutch producer Nicolay. Oddly enough, just last month NPR's Renee Montagne did a Morning Edition story about The Foreign Exchange. I guess Connected is sufficiently smoothed-out and R&B enough to appeal to the typical NPR demographic? Hey, more power to local hip-hop artists for making things happen. I like the way the cover of Connected kinda looks like a still from a Michael Mann movie. It's a wonder that Trans Am never used such an image on one of their album covers.
To tie this all back to WXYC's free Bandwidth compilation CD, one of the guest MCs on The Foreign Exchange's Connected album is Median, who also guests with Spectac on "Life Ain't Easy". Up-and-coming local producer Khrysis did the hot horn-laden beat for "Life Ain't Easy", so download it here (5.07 MB) if you haven't already. Spectac and Khrysis are also some of the many artists featured on a relatively new Neblina Records compilation called Definition. And if you're looking for more to read, both Phonte and Spectac took part in a post-election "hip-hop conversation" that appeared in last week's issue of The Independent.
Posted by Tim at 06:36 PM | Comments (2)
November 12, 2004
Federal Reserved
I'm DJing at The Federal once again this Saturday night. Without Halloween or an election or a WXYC webcasting anniversary as a tie-in, I may feel oddly theme-less. But perhaps that's for the best, it'll be nice to try to get back to basics. In lieu of any specific music/DJing details, I'll use this space to plug the new menu at The Federal instead. They just put in a brand new stove a few weeks back and from what I hear their new chef Andy Magowan has been going to town with it. A couple weeks back I had a plate of tasty fried green tomatoes as an appetizer and a pretty amazing main dish of shrimp & tasso (spicy Cajun ham). It was almost as if Crook's Corner had found its way to downtown Durham!
Speaking of Andy Magowan, music fans who were around this area in the mid 1990s may remember him not as a chef but as the bass player for Chapel Hill bands June and The Starry Wisdom Band. Magowan is still playing bass, now with local instrumental sextet Malt Swagger. Malt Swagger's contribution to the new WXYC compilation Bandwidth is one of my favorite songs on the whole CD. "Binger" is a strangely haunting soundtrack-y groove distinguished by its eerie violin sounds and mysterious vibraphone. Download this free mp3 (5.79 MB) and check it out for yourself. I am told that Malt Swagger have a really great double album in the works for next year....if "Binger" is representative of what's to come, I'll definitely be watching out for it.
Posted by Tim at 01:37 PM | Comments (1)
November 11, 2004
10 Years and Streamin'
(L to R: John Streck, David McConville, Mike Shoffner, Paul Jones)
This past Sunday, WXYC put on a panel discussion in honor of the 10th anniversary of the first-ever webcast by a radio station. I had very recently (re)discovered much of the WXYC/SunSITE-specific history while researching my In/Audible article, but even with this fresh familiarity, I still found Sunday's conversation to be really enlightening and eye-opening. The talk started with the 1994 webcast but gradually bounced around a broad array of topics related to technology and media and all the ways in which they intersect. Paul Jones and David McConville told some fascinating tales about the very early days of the World Wide Web, John Streck from NC-ITEC and NCSU explained the genesis and benefits of Internet2 & IPv6 (on which WXYC and WCPE are now streaming), and before long we were all talking about podcasting, disruptive technologies, low-power FM, Creative Commons, etc.
The UNC Production Services folks completely dropped the ball by not showing up with a PA for us to use, so we almost had to scrap all of the plans to simulcast the panel over the radio and record it for posterity. But luckily Brian Russell of audioactivism.org had shown up to say a few words about podcasting...and within moments, audio activism was happening in front of our very eyes via one portable digital recorder, two small mics clipped to upside-down coffee cups, some sound cables, a laptop, and an internet connection that streamed the sound over to the WXYC studio on the other side of the Student Union. When we realized that this last-minute setup was actually going to work, we had a collective chuckle about how appropriate it was that this webcasting panel broadcast would be just as creatively jury-rigged as the initial 1994 webcast (in which the output from a yard sale radio was sent into a Mac soundcard, which then converted the sound into a digital signal, which was then sent to a Solaris box running a videoconferencing/chat "reflector" capable of multicasting the audio to any videoconferencing software clients wishing to receive it).
Since the panel discussion was recorded as it went out over the airwaves, we wound up with a copy to archive online. And while I'm mp3-blogging audio files about streaming audio (the early MBONE users would probably feel right at home with this meta-ness), I should also plug the full version and partial transcript of the early 1995 DRS-3 report about the WXYC simulcast. A partial excerpt of this report wound up being the first track on Bandwidth, but I prefer the full version of Swiss people talking in German, typing away at a keyboard, and debating the future of radio while listening to a really choppy WXYC signal. Name That Tune buffs, take note: those two chopped (not screwed!) songs being heard via the WXYC simulcast are Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two's "Get Rhythm" and MC Ren's "Mayday on the Front Line". If you were forced to try and capture WXYC's musical format in a mere two songs, you could do a hell of a lot worse....
Posted by Tim at 12:17 AM | Comments (1)
November 09, 2004
Prelude to a Recount?
As my last few posts might indicate, I've been a bit fixated on November 7th being the 10th anniversary of WXYC's groundbreaking 1994 webcast. And I still have a few more things to post with regard to some of the WXYC events from this past weekend. But November 7th is also burned into my brain as the 4th anniversary of a very different event: Election Day 2000. Like millions of others, I rode the unbelievable emotional rollercoaster of that evening's network news coverage. My CrowdBurst coworkers and I had stopped working a bit earlier that day so that we could gather around my TV that I'd brought in to work several weeks prior for mass debate-watching. Everyone was in good spirits and many of us started cracking up whenever Dan Rather uttered some ridiculous metaphor like "shakier than cafeteria Jell-O" or "melted faster than ice cream in a microwave". We all cheered as some of the key East Coast blue states started to fall for Gore, and when Florida went blue it seemed like Gore was going to actually take the presidency. Of course we all know what happened next...the networks brought Florida back into the "Too Close To Call" column, and then overshot once more and mistakenly called the state for Bush. Soon after Bush was prematurely declared the winner, I left to go catch the bus, completely dejected and stunned about what had just happened. When I got home, I gave in to my late-night Internet impulses and started reading depressing election returns and excruciating stories about Bush's victory. Within the hour, however, everything started to change all over again...and Gore dramatically reversed his plan to concede. Shellshocked once more, I rushed to print out paper copies of all of the "Bush Wins" stories that my browser had cached, all the while gaining a really strange appreciation for the completely ephemeral and reversible nature of "news" and "official results" in our electronic-based data-driven society. I only wish I'd been able to print some of those earlier "Gore Wins Florida" web pages...that little piece of history was simply erased, in the truest Orwellian style.
As unforgettable as that evening was, I'm not rehashing Election 2000 solely for nostalgic reasons. We all remember the hanging chads and the endless weeks of legal wrangling, but I think one of the most intriguing and important things to remember about Florida 2000 is this: the reason the networks all called Florida for Gore in the first place was because they were all using exit polls performed by the Voter News Service. At the time, the conventional wisdom used to explain the network's collective projection fiascos was the assertion that VNS had terribly flawed/faulty data and that everyone had jumped the gun by using this bad data as the basis for their assumptions. Now I'm not even close to being an expert on this VNS data, and I fully admit that there might be a perfect explanation for actual VNS data flaws. If so, Florida definitely should not have been called for Gore so early. But one possible reason why the VNS data might have been "wrong" was that it reflected who voters thought they were voting for, and not how their votes were actually counted. So what did those exit pollsters hear from the thousands and thousands of Palm Beach County voters who meant to vote for Gore but unintentionally voted for Buchanan? They heard "Gore", because that was the intent. For all we know, they may have also heard "Gore" from lots of people whose Gore chad was not pregnant or dimpled enough, or whose Gore ballot was not counted for some potentially more nefarious reason: fraud, tampering, the hacking of election systems, etc. The exit polls may have conceivably been a better barometer of voter opinion than the actual election results.
I can't speak definitively about Florida 2000, but I believe that it is important to keep some of these mere possibilities in mind as we come upon the one-week anniversary of last Tuesday's historic election. Remember this before it is erased by stupid "mandate" talk: by mid-afternoon on Election Day 2004, the major political blogs, Slate, and even the Drudge Report had all posted exit polls that indicated Kerry was doing really well in Ohio and Florida. The conventional wisdom since the election has quickly become "once again, those exit polls blew it big time". But in trying to dig up some ulterior "liberal media" motive for bad exit polling data, even the extremely sleazy Dick Morris unwittingly let this interesting truth slip out:
"Exit polls are almost never wrong. They eliminate the two major potential fallacies in survey research by correctly separating actual voters from those who pretend they will cast ballots but never do and by substituting actual observation for guesswork in judging the relative turnout of different parts of the state."
Knowing this, critical minds should avoid jumping to conclusions and at least ask, "Is it at all possible that the 2004 exit polls actually were right and maybe it was the reported results that are wrong?". I don't have enough information to answer that question but there are a hell of a lot of incredibly strange statistical anomalies and disturbing fraud reports floating around the Internet these days. And knowing what we know about Diebold voting machines and how completely hackable and compromised they are (not to mention the partisan Republican leanings of Diebold leaders), I can't see how anyone can have confidence in last Tuesday's election results. Yes, I've been in denial all week, so forgive me if I sound like I'm being naively open to the possibility that Kerry should've won Ohio and thus the election. But I don't trust the system at all given everything that I'm hearing and reading....and at the very least, it seems that a lot of things need to be seriously investigated and re-examined before we march forward with this assumption that Bush won the election.
What I really don't get is why both John Kerry and 99% of the media have been so silent on these matters. Even so-called liberal news outlets like NPR and the NYTimes are avoiding these topics like the plague. As if the nation and even the world cannot handle the truth about how completely flawed and compromised the American election system is. (And this is before even taking into account the pathetic "separate-but-unequal" issue where, say, an urban voter in Cleveland has to wait in line for 7 hours to vote but a wealthy Ohio suburbanite can vote quickly with ease.) Last week my pet theory was that John Kerry was playing the good-PR game, conceding in public and putting those thousands of lawyers to work in private while we all waited 10 days for the Ohio provisional ballots to finally be counted, at which point he might conceivably re-emerge with a serious challenge. But I don't know if I even believe that anymore. The only reassuring sign that this whole debate might actually go somewhere is the fact that MSNBC's Keith Olbermann started covering all of this in a big way on tonight's edition of Countdown. Olbermann showed some of the sketchiest voting statistics, reported that some congressmen have written the non-partisan GAO and asked for an investigation, and interviewed a woman from the Cincinnati Enquirer who has come out with a story about how election officials in one Ohio county played the "Homeland Security" card in an unprecedented maneuver to keep the press away from the election-night ballot-counting.
All of this smells incredibly fishy to me. It is high time to spread the word about the mounting evidence of possible wrongdoing....and it's also time to demand that the news media do its job and pursue this investigation with full force. Read Keith Olbermann's latest blog entries for his very intriguing take on things...and then send him an email to encourage his integrity as a journalist. I always knew Olbermann was sarcastic, witty, and completely hilarious, but now he's my new talking-head hero.
In closing, consider this very interesting fact that Olbermann points out in his posting from Sunday night: "no Presidential candidate’s concession speech is legally binding".
This thing isn't over until December 13th.
Posted by Tim at 02:56 AM | Comments (4)
November 07, 2004
Bandwidth
Today is the 10th anniverary of the WXYC webcast (the first-ever by a radio station), so this morning we made the commemorative Bandwidth compilation available for free download. You can download the individual mp3s via the links in the tracklisting, but why not just grab the whole thing with cover art and liner notes included? Casey Burns did an amazing job on the cover (pictured above), and the CD has a ton of great local music: Black Taj, Jett Rink, Work Clothes, Shark Quest, Etta Baker, Spectac & Median, Shallow Be Thy Name, Jacuzzi Brothers, Protean Spook, Hotel Motel, and I could go on and on.
If you use BitTorrent, you can download Bandwidth via this torrent file. It's funny...if I recall correctly, the name Bandwidth was chosen in large part because of its reference to the early challenges of online streaming and because of the whole "band" connotation....but now that we've stored all of these large music files on the ibiblio servers and enlisted their help in packaging the whole thing up as a bandwidth-saving torrent, the title is that much more appropriate.
The weekend's other big webcasting anniversary events were fun and insightful...luckily, both of them were recorded for posterity. I'll write more about them later on...or maybe once we make the sound files available online. Until then, consume Bandwidth and think back to the days when you were really cooking with gas if you merely had a SLIP/PPP connection.
Posted by Tim at 07:43 PM | Comments (0)
November 05, 2004
In Cyberspace, Everyone Can Hear You Stream
Speaking of streaming screaming, I have some thoughts about the election and what appears to be rampant voter fraud and voter disenfranchisement, but I will save those thoughts for a post to come. This upcoming weekend is all about WXYC and its "10th Anniversary of Webcasting" celebration. On Saturday night, Local 506 is hosting a party/concert to celebrate the release of WXYC's brand new local music compilation CD, Bandwidth: Celebrating 10 Years of Internet Radio on WXYC-Chapel Hill. The show should be pretty great, it features eNtet, The Moaners, Spectac, and Jett Rink....with Billy Sugarfix MCing the proceedings. And then a few hours later on Sunday, the full contents of the CD will be available for free download at wxyc.org. How's that for experimenting with new means of distributing and transmitting music?
Sunday is the actual 10th anniversary date, and from 3 to 5pm that afternoon there's going to be a great panel discussion in Room 3203 of the UNC Student Union. Panelists will include Paul Jones of ibiblio, as well as two of the folks that did the most to get the WXYC stream going back in 1994, David McConville and Mike Shoffner. John Streck from NC-ITEC will also be present to talk about Internet2 and the brand-new IPv6 streams for WXYC and WCPE.
As I mentioned last week, I wrote an In/Audible article about the story of how WXYC became the first radio station in the world to simulcast its radio signal over the internet. The In/Audible PDF is still available here, but I thought there should be an easier-to-read HTML version online so I've reformatted it and pasted it below. Read on if you enjoy stories about technology and innovation and people who were "thinking outside the box" way before that phrase got ruined by business coaches and dotcom execs.
In Cyberspace, Everyone Can Hear You Stream
(or "How WXYC Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Webcast")
On November 7th, 1994, WXYC 89.3 FM became the first radio station in the world to continuously simulcast its signal over the Internet 24 hours a day. While this in itself is an impressive milestone, what really makes the accomplishment worth revisiting in detail is the fact that it happened solely as a result of the creative thinking and persistent work of a group of people who simply wanted to do something for the sake of doing it…and doing it first. In the wake of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act and the late ‘90s dotcom-fueled stock bubble, it's easy to forget that there was once a time when the Internet was not dominated by corporations, venture capitalists, copyright holders, advertisers, spammers, and other moneyed interests. The 1994 Internet was still an exhilarating and promising world where the prime time players were technologists, academics, hackers, and students. And it was during that time, almost a year before RealAudio even existed, that a group of technology geeks in the basement of UNC's Phillips Hall managed to harness their ingenuity and technical know-how on behalf of a free-form college radio station that approached its main focus (music) with a similar passion for pushing the boundaries and experimenting with possibilities.
In the beginning, there was the Sun. SunSITE, that is. In early 1992, Sun Microsystems put out a formal request for grant proposals from institutions interested in creating and maintaining an anonymous FTP archive on the Internet. UNC's Office of Information Technology (aka OIT, later known as ATN and now melting into ITS) submitted a proposal to not only establish an FTP archive but to enhance the archive/collection with early search technologies like WAIS and Gopher. UNC's proposal was accepted, and SunSITE was born later in 1992. Sun Microsystems provided computer hardware and funding, and UNC ran SunSITE out of offices in the basement of Phillips Hall. Later known as MetaLab and now known as ibiblio, the digital archive is one of the Internet's oldest and largest collections of free information and software.
SunSITE director Paul Jones started with a small staff consisting mainly of part-time students who were passionate about the promises and possibilities of technology and the Internet. One of SunSITE's early hires was Doug Matthews, an avid local music fan who would later start the alt.music.chapel-hill newsgroup and help create some of the earliest local-music-related websites. Several months later in the summer of 1994, SunSITE hired David McConville, a new graduate student in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. McConville would soon become a key player on a lot of SunSITE projects, including the WXYC webcast.
David McConville: I met Paul Jones and we immediately hit it off talking about the Clipper Chip proposals. I'd finished getting a BS in Audio Engineering the year before, and I had used the Internet enough to think I knew something (I'd actually had an account on LaUNChpad - the pre-SunSITE bulletin board system). I had researched a lot of the 3D audio processing techniques as an undergrad in classes with Bob Moog and I'd done some video editing, which made me familiar enough with digital media tools that Paul made me the "multimedia researcher" or somesuch. I was really interested in online audio/video/3D distribution, and he let me do basically whatever I wanted to as long as I kept up some of the funded tasks (running an online educational archive paid for by Sun and Cisco).
McConville and Matthews quickly became co-conspirators on a wide variety of projects dealing with music and the Internet.
David McConville: I worked with Doug Matthews quite a bit early on, scheming up all kinds of experiments. We contacted Negativland and made a site for them, putting the “U2” single online in MP2 compressed audio format as an experiment to see what kind of response Island Records might have. I called up the Church of the Subgenius and worked with Ivan Stang to create the almost indefensible "SubSITE". I created an audio archive of some NC sermons from tapes and transcripts at UNC's North Carolina collection.
Simply putting digital audio files online was pretty cutting edge for the early 1990s, but Internet technology was beginning to change very quickly. Prior to 1992, there was no acceptable way to "broadcast" sound on the Internet so that it reached multiple recipients at once. Sending a digital sound file to ten different computers required ten distinct unicast transmissions of the file, and such an inefficient use of bandwidth was completely impractical for sending out real-time audio. All of this began to change with the early 1992 advent of the MBONE, a virtual overlay network built on top of the existing Internet. MBONE stood for "multicast backbone", and the multicasting protocol used on the MBONE allowed high-powered Unix workstations to send information to multiple destinations in the most efficient possible way.
The MBONE was used to audiocast a 1992 meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force, and much of the audio content being transmitted over the network tended to be technical jargon and/or meta-discussions about the MBONE itself. One of the more notable uses of the MBONE was Carl Malamud's "Internet Talk Radio", an internet-only "radio station" that multicasted the "Geek of the Week" show at a specific time every week. Clearly this new technology held great promise for the future, but in 1993, things like Internet Talk Radio were only available to a select virtual few.
In early 1994, researchers at Cornell University released version 0.7 of CU-SeeMe, a piece of video-conferencing software that would drastically expand both the reach and the potential use of real-time multimedia on the Internet. The free downloadable software was named CU-SeeMe as a reference to both Cornell's initials and its video-conferencing capabilities. CU-SeeMe allowed users to both send and receive small grayscale video feeds (including optional audio) to any other computer that was running the software. What made CU-SeeMe such a milestone was that it could run on most any System 7 Macintosh computer that had a full (non-dialup) internet connection. All of a sudden, functionality that was once limited to those with extremely expensive hardware was now available to a lot more people.
Doug Matthews recalled his initial excitement upon the release of CU-SeeMe version 0.7.
Doug Matthews: I remember getting the email when CU-SeeMe was released and thinking, "Alright, this is gonna be really cool". We installed it right away. CU-SeeMe was basically a multimedia chat tool. It was essentially a half-duplex walkie-talkie model. You would say something, and then when you stopped talking, you could start hearing again. The original CU-SeeMe chats I remember having were almost turn-based in the same way that chat rooms are turn-based, where you can't type over someone else's chat. It was basically a "push-to-talk" interface. You pushed to talk, and no one else could talk while you were pushed down.
The entire SunSITE crew took part in CU-SeeMe chats with people from around the world.
David McConville: All of us were were experimenting quite a bit with the MBONE and audio/video conferencing using CU-SeeMe. We ran a CU-SeeMe "reflector" at SunSITE thanks to Jon Magid's technical wizardry, meaning that people would log in from all over the world to videochat. I even got to see an IRA ceasefire that was blacked out by the British media through a web cam sticking out of a guy's window in Northern Ireland. It was all so new and strange and seemed to hold so much promise. Paul just let the entire crew experiment, which of course forced me to learn much more than I was learning in classes. Paul's amazing like that.
Suddenly able to exchange audio and video feeds with people from around the world, McConville and Matthews started thinking about other ways in which the CU-SeeMe software could be used. Matthews couldn't recall exactly who came up with the idea to use CU-SeeMe to rebroadcast a radio signal, but he credits McConville for being the one to develop the idea and run with it.
Doug Matthews: A lot of stuff that we did came up in "Wouldn't it be cool?" conversations that we had. Like putting the Negativland thing online. We're sitting there wondering, "if it's illegal to distribute, is it illegal to download?" I'm pretty sure that the idea for simulcasting the radio station was similar to that. I remember one of the two of us casually saying, "I wonder if we could drag a speaker up to this microphone?" But in terms of actually turning the idea into a production affair, it was 100% David. I was just involved in the brainstorming phase.
McConville was extremely interested in media and intellectual property, and he was excited by the opportunity to meld theory with practice.
David McConville: I was thinking of writing a paper about the legalities of re-transmitting radio online. I had to take media law classes in JOMC, which was not exactly my thing, so I figured I'd focus on all of the online innovation going on at the time. Folks had been experimenting with broadcasts on the MBONE, and we'd been working with CU-SeeMe to better understand the social and copyright implications of online audio/video distribution. There was a lack of understanding about the difference between streaming and downloading at the time, and I wanted to explore the distinction from an analysis of legal history. I was interested in media history, and I wondered if early radio history might repeat itself (i.e. the takeover of the ether by commercial interests via very anti-free-market regulations created by cronies of the corporate interests). I knew that we were in a position to do more than theorize, and that Paul and the SunSITE crew would be into the challenge. Since I was as much hands-on as I was theoretical, I figured we might as well rebroadcast a station 24/7 to find out for ourselves!
McConville started investigating what type of audio frequency range could be transmitted using CU-SeeMe. The software wasn't designed to stream anything, much less audio that was richer and fuller than a simple human voice. But that didn't stop the SunSITE crew from making plans to attempt to use CU-SeeMe to continuously rebroadcast a radio station.
Doug Matthews: The way we used CU-SeeMe was a total hack, it was not what that software was supposed to be used for. Basically what we did was we said, "Well, we've got this thing that can make sound go from Point A to Point B and because it's a chat-room-type environment, lots of people can listen to it and all we have to do is be the only one talking all the time." We totally bastardized the software, because there was no streaming software at that point. None of the stuff that actually did live streams came out until probably 1995.
As the nearby college radio station, WXYC was the obvious choice for the webcasting project. Matthews had started working there as a DJ in early 1994, and McConville himself had become an avid WXYC listener.
David McConville: WXYC was by far the best radio station I'd ever heard at the time. Aphex Twin, Faust, AND Yma Sumac - it made my time in Chapel Hill most bearable.
McConville chose WXYC to be the subject of his Internet rebroadcasting project, but it was the WXYC disc jockey who worked in the office next door who did the most to coordinate efforts between SunSITE and the radio station. Hired at WXYC in 1993, Mike Shoffner worked for OIT as a part-time systems administrator.
David McConville: I knew Shoffner through Doug, and we started throwing the idea around, working with Jon (Magid) and Paul (Jones) to figure out the logistics.
While McConville and the SunSITE crew started working out some of the technical issues, Shoffner began selling WXYC on the project. WXYC managers were intrigued by the idea of the webcast, but on the whole they expressed a much more cautious and hesitant attitude than that which was exhibited by the gung-ho experimenters at SunSITE. Several WXYC higher-ups expressed valid concerns about whether the simulcast would be violating any laws or FCC regulations. Since WXYC was in the middle of plans to petition the FCC for permission to move its transmission tower, there were worries that even the slightest violation might lead the FCC to either fine WXYC or consider the station's tower-modification application in a negative light.
Shoffner refused to let WXYC's caution stop the project, however. He realized that a remarkable opportunity was knocking on WXYC's door, and in a series of September 1994 emails to the WXYC powers-that-be, he passionately pleaded with his fellow DJs to do whatever they could to answer the knock. This excerpt from a September 15th message is indicative of the colorful nature of Shoffner's fervor-filled emails:
What is being jeopardized is our chance to DO THIS FIRST, IF ONLY FOR A SHORT TIME. FIRST. FIRST. US! Not NPR (affiliates), with all their goddam money/pretensiousness. Not MTV, with all of their corporate "alternative". UUUUUUUUUUUUSSSSSSS! This is the INTERNET, folks, and no matter how many times Floyd says "the internet sucks" on the air, IT IS THE BIG SHIT. And we are ONE SOUNDCARD ($100 - i'll buy it myself if needed) away from eternal salvation and the bountiful reward of our righteousness and long suffering.
In hopes of addressing and appeasing some of the concerns, Shoffner urged the station to find out the exact whats and whys surrounding possible legal issues with the webcast. Luckily, the WXYC staff at that time contained several current and former UNC Law students, two of whom - Jeff Robins and Jay Huber - started immediately applying their legal knowledge to the situation. In a September 16th, 1994 email to various people privy to the simulcast idea, Robins attempted to clarify the general framework of the legal questions that would need to be addressed in more detail:
As far as some of the legal issues that are concerning some of us, there seem to be two types:
1. Communications Law issues (i.e. those issues related to our FCC license and anything else related to the FCC Regulations)
2. Copyright Law issues (i.e. the ASCAP/BMI stuff, which deals with the dissemination of the 'intellectual property' of others, particularly musical artists, composers, and publishers)
For the most part, these are two separate areas. As we continue this dialogue and as some of us continue to do further thinking and/or research, it might be helpful not to confuse the two types.
Robins and the other XYCers all agreed that as far as Communications Law issues were concerned, WXYC was legally in the clear. The FCC had no legal jurisidction over the Internet, and the only worry was that the FCC might potentially look at the webcast as "behavior unbecoming a licensed radio station" when considering WXYC's eventual request for permission to move its transmission tower. WXYC did not have a history of run-ins with the FCC, however, and Robins pointed out that FCC’s approval of tower modifications was largely based on engineering specifications (tower location, wattage, signal direction, other radio stations, etc.) and not on a "radio station's behavior as citizen-of-the-airwaves". Only if another radio station decided to fight WXYC's application-for-modification would there be any real trouble during the FCC approval process.
The more difficult legal issue surrounding the internet simulcast had to do with copyright and intellectual property. Like all radio stations that play music, WXYC has licensing agreements with music publishing giants ASCAP and BMI. These agreements allow the station to broadcast copyright-protected music over the radio airwaves, but did WXYC have the right to transmit that same music out into cyberspace? In order to try and answer this key question, Jay Huber sought advice from Susan Olive, a noted Triangle attorney who specialized in copyright law. After consulting with Olive, Huber and Robins began searching the Federal Copyright Act for information that might apply to the unprecedented webcast scenario. Huber soon struck gold with Section 111(a)(5), a statute about secondary transmissions that indicated that the proposed Internet simulcast would be exempt from copyright law as long as it was not done for commercial advantage. Huber summed up the statute in this email from 9/21/1994:
1) Copyright: we are (jeff and i) quite confident that sec. 111(a)(5) of the copyright code allows a nonprofit entity (SUNSITE) who wants to retransmit the broadcast of a primary transmitter (WXYC) for a noncommercial purpose to be EXEMPT from the copyright laws. no infringement will follow from such a transmission. even if some infringement could be argued, that infringement would fall on SUNSITE, not us. however, SUNSITE is still on pretty solid ground. and, as has been previously mentioned, if ASCAP/BMI got pissed, they'd send at least three letters before doing anything serious.
again though, the copyright code seems to allow us to do this with no risk of infringing on ANYTHING.
further research this evening, relatively comprehensive research, found NOTHING to contradict the above statement.
proceed with all haste.
With all of the station's legal concerns adequately addressed, WXYC station manager Jame Lathren gave his official approval for the webcasting project. And Shoffner resumed his quest for the holy soundcard, which was needed for the Macintosh computer that would convert an analog radio signal into a digital bitstream capable of being transmitted via CU-SeeMe. In addition, the simulcast crew needed to figure out a way to actually get that analog radio signal from WXYC. For the current WXYC webcast, this analog/digital conversion takes place in the radio station itself – an analog signal comes straight out of the control room board and gets encoded into bytes by a nearby Linux machine. But in 1994, the radio station didn’t have computers capable of performing such operations; the analog/digital conversion would have to take place at SunSITE. So once again, the crew got creative.
Michael Shoffner: We had no AD converter and we had no tuner to pick up the signal to feed into the converter. So David specified and I bought an external card for the Mac to do the conversion. Then I begged a "yard sale" radio off of my kid sister and we put in right beside David's workspace, tuned in the station, and plugged it in.
This cheap radio tuned into 89.3 FM would soon become the input source for a webcast that could be heard around the world. But first, the SunSITE staff had to overcome several technical hurdles. Paul Jones wanted to make sure that the bandwidth used by the experiment would not impact the UNC network in a negative way. So a trial run was scheduled for late September 1994. Network load was monitored over a 24-hour period and no major issues were discovered. Plus, since SunSITE had its own T1 connection to the rest of the Internet, connections between SunSITE and off-campus hosts throughout the rest of the world would not need to be routed through the same pipes as other UNC traffic.
A separate technical issue arose because Jones thought that the rebroadcasting should be done from an underutilized machine that would be more capable of handling multiple connections at once. The CU-SeeMe software actually allowed clients to directly connect to each other (a model now referred to as “peer to peer”), and some of the early tests of audio quality and bandwidth usage had been performed with clients connecting directly to McConville’s Macintosh. But SunSITE had a Solaris server named president that had been used to put presidential library material online. And if a new CU-SeeMe reflector could be installed on this server, the WXYC signal could be multicast from president in a more robust and scalable fashion. Unfortunately, this caused a significant delay of the project.
Michael Shoffner: The major problem was that the "reflector" wouldn't compile under Solaris, which is where it needed to go in order to scale to the public. The "reflector" was the thing that broadcast one input signal out into multiple output signals. David had it running on his Mac. The fact that we had to get it running under Solaris just about killed the schedule.
SunSITE employees Chris Colomb and Jon Magid helped McConville out with the Solaris/reflector issues, and by early November, the problems were solved. The webcast was finally ready to go. After some additional testing on November 6th, the WXYC simulcast went live on November 7th, 1994.
Traditional media did not pick up on the simulcast story immediately, but news spread pretty quickly via the Internet. Over the next several weeks, responses came in from other parts of America (Nebraska, Arizona, Idaho…) and from countries all around the world (Norway, Poland, Mexico, Northern Ireland…). The sound quality was not at all ideal (some listeners reported that the already lo-fi signal was cutting out every so often), but the mere idea of making a radio station’s signal available to the rest of the world was nothing short of revolutionary. And both McConville and SunSITE director Paul Jones were well aware that the concept itself was way ahead of the technology.
Paul Jones: We knew what we had sucked but we were willing to try anyway…we’re talking low low bandwidth in those days.
David McConville: We were actually using a little $10 radio plugged into the back of a Mac for the off-air signal. It was pretty pathetic, but it worked. It was reassuring to think that we were somehow carrying on the gonzo traditions of Tesla and Marconi with a station as incredible as XYC.
Shoffner, who described his role as “cheerleader and catalyst”, was just relieved that SunSITE and WXYC had pulled off the feat before anyone else.
Michael Shoffner: The biggest fear I had the whole time was that we would get scooped. You had to assume that somebody else had thought of it because it's almost never do you think of something and execute before anybody else in the entire *world* does. So David and I were pretty much sweating the whole time - trying to get around the problems, light a fire under everybody else, etc.
As it turned out, other stations had thought of it. Bellingham, Washington’s KUGS (another 89.3 FM!) started webcasting their signal via CU-SeeMe a couple of weeks after WXYC’s official announce date. And Kansas University’s KJHK followed in early December, also using CU-SeeMe. And Georgia Tech’s college radio station WREK deserves extra credit for actually webcasting via their own self-written audio-encoding and webcasting software. WREK successfully beta-tested their internet simulcast in early November 1994, but they did not go into official release until early 1995.
Doug Matthews: This was definitely one of those independent discovery things where a lot of people all at once said, "Hey, wait a minute - I can make noise all the time!"
It’s true. In cyberspace, everyone can hear you stream.
Posted by Tim at 02:32 AM | Comments (2)