In UF_09, "Low Bandwidth Theater", Ctrl-Z, who double as your hosts of Unformatted when they're not rebooting their pc's, present a set of experimental music specially produced to test some theories about what kind of music will work in RealAudio compression format. If you're considering publishing musical programming in RealAudio format or if you're just wondering what in the Sam Hill we were trying to accomplish with this weird mix of grooves, repetitive loops, and fx-oriented singing, you'll want to grab a seat at the Low Bandwidth Theater. This page will help you to make sense out of what otherwise might seem, at times, absurdly minimilistic. On the other hand if your tastes run to what's charting you'd probably be best advised to skip the whole thing.
Hope This, as the title suggests, is a dull and pointless piece of music. But, like its title, it can serve a purpose. "Hope" is a mindlessly unvarying loop with two parts: (1) an underlying sine wave analog synth part played on a vintage Korg Monopoly controlled by an analog sequencer; and (2) a thin whine from an E-Mu UltrProteus. The sound does not change except for minor equalization modulations in the "Patient Mix". These modulations are virtually inaudible in high fidelity recordings but may be the cause of the little ringing pops audible during the Patient Mix. The low frequency sine wave from the Monopoly is very "fat", and did not translate well into RealAudio format. The reproduction of the thin whine from the Ultra Proteus is excellent.
SadaThe story of Sada is probably familiar to many of our Japanese listeners; its pretty gruesome though, so the rest of you will have to figure it out on your own. There are two main lessons to be learned for use of RealAudio...(1) Stay away from heavy kick drums; and (2) female vocalists (here Logana, of course) can work very well.
Visionary As we always say at IMS, "the future is tomorrow." Generally, "Low Bandwidth Theater" fanatically avoided polyphony; that is, we kept the pieces harmonically simple by avoiding use of chords. We considered calling it "Unchorded", but thought MTV might be offended. In "Visionary" we took this to the logical extreme and didn't use any bass, and only a few notes on a synth. This piece demonstrates that RealAudio can work admirably in this context, and also shows that extremely heavy-handed audio compression helps RealAudio data compression to work its magic.
Smartass This industrial/ambient loop is another analog sequence, this time hand modulated to increase the resonance and VCF envelope generator intensity. The results suggest that RealAudio handles loud signals best--there is a floor effect when amplitude falls below a critical level. The transients from the snare bashes in the middle don't seem to cause any problem.
Alley View We tried some vocal chords on this piece, and they worked fine, and the long plate reverb was preserved quite well. The boomy bass drum caused problems again.