Interview with Spencer Critchley, Part 2

by Alexander Brandon

Let's take linear music and sound, as its traditionally created. You have the artist, the engineers, and the composers separate, at least typically in most echelons of film and TV, and that can very well happen with the web. Brian Schmidt (head of XBox audio at Microsoft) has said many times there will always be a need for people that integrate this stuff instead of linear audio, actually making games react to something the player does is going to be either up to the people that write the music or someone different, yes?

Exactly. I think that’s quite right. Another way of thinking of this is that media keeps getting more and more structured. Analog media has almost no structure, and digital media can be structured in a very detailed way, because its made out of bits, and those bits are information you can tag the media in all kinds of different ways, whether its just markers in the timeline identifying the start of ‘scene 1’ or embedded computer code. As media becomes more and more structured it can be used in different ways, and people need to start to blur the distinction between entertainment programming and computer programming. Its an interesting pun that we use the word ‘program’ on TV and its also an application that runs on your computer, and I think those two things are actually merging. 

In the past, creating broadcast or filmed entertainment required you to master this considerable skill set, but that was involved in doing something that was locked in a linear fashion in time. Now there is the addition of this whole extra skill set that involves interactivity with the user. I think there will be people having to expand their skill set and in some cases you’ll see specialization as you do now... you pointed out there are people who specialize only in re recording mixers in the film industry, and other people specialize in recording music for the soundtrack, and others specialize in dialog editing, so I think at the high end you’ll see specialization like that, but also people who do a little of everything, like in the pop music business... you see people who write the song, perform the song, and produce the song, and they have a combination of artistic and technical skills.  One way you’ll see this happen is recording engineers will learn more and more about the programming side, since they’re already technically oriented people, and if you look at the way that music recording and film recording has evolved, it becomes more obvious of the need for that skill set evolution. 

At first there was resistance to adopting Pro Tools, for instance. Especially in the film business, because it took a while for Pro Tools to become so rock solid stable that you could trust the sync to be perfect and you could trust it not to crash in the middle of an extremely expensive session. The cost of having your Pro Tools system crash in the middle of a film session is so high, that it just wasn’t worth it, but Pro tools has become so stable and reliable now that everyone is adopting it, and so you have people who in the past would only work with magnetic tape or film stock have since become Pro Tools experts and that’s a matter of course, and that’s a whole new way of thinking about their work. I’m fairly sure you’ll see the same people starting to absorb Flash and concepts of interactivity and getting familiar with the idea of creating an instance of an embedded player, for example is a really common concept in web sound will become similar to creating a region in a Pro Tools track.

"those of us who are interested in this stuff for its own sake tend to get excited about stuff that’s advanced and subtle, and gives the user all kinds of abilities, but I think people should realize that most mainstream users don’t want to work that hard and will gravitate towards things that allows them more easy choices.."

Another point I would make is that a lot of us who are interested in this for its own sake get really excited about advanced uses of interactive audio where you’re doing things like remixing music and changing the effects sends or linking it to animations and possibly having generated compositions that create themselves in response to sophisticated things that are happening, but in a lot of mainstream uses of this, it won’t be that radical. We’ll find that people just want to listen to dialogue, music, and sound effects, and they don’t want to have to work too hard as they listen to it. Its just that that stuff will have to be able to flow with them as they browse through the content.

Its kind of like interactive TV. People have been exploring all kinds of uses of interactive TV. The system I worked on in 1995 at Silicon Graphics was a lot like the present day web, except it was all based on your television with fiber optic connections to your TV set.

Isn’t that what web TV was all about?

Web Tv was kind of a simplified outgrowth of that kind of work. If you think about the web it allows you to browse information, news, entertainment listing, lets you do email, live chats, etc.. The SGI system I worked on was doing all of that before the graphical web really hit. It was doing it with higher resolution and greater speed, greater fidelity. You were able to watch high resolution video on demand for example. Unfortunately it cost a FORTUNE to implement it, so it was an interesting experiment but it wasn’t commercially viable. My point is, just like interactive audio on the web people tried all sorts of advanced uses of it, and what we’ve been finding over the years is that people like to watch TV. And they like to watch TV because its been easy. They’ve been working all day and they don’t want to work more, interacting with their TV set and making a bunch of decisions about what should happen next. The average person has the attitude that that’s the job of writers and producers and actors that have made these decisions for me and come up with something entertaining that I can relax and watch. The kind of interactivity that the mainstream user likes is something that increases their easy choices. So if they’re watching ITV and… with terrorism, if they want to find out more about this Bin Laden guy, if its easy for them to do something that gives them more information, they find that sort of stuff valuable.

Maybe not even click or press a button, maybe just say “computer!”

Yeah, or talk. This touches on what I’m doing with BeVocal which turns the whole interface to the world of information, and entertainment. It makes your voice that interface and the phone is the device to make it as easy as possible and accessible anywhere you have a cell phone.

As I say, those of us who are interested in this stuff for its own sake tend to get excited about stuff that’s advanced and subtle, and gives the user all kinds of abilities, but I think people should realize that most mainstream users don’t want to work that hard and will gravitate towards things that allows them more easy choices, that amount to clicking on a hotspot on a screen that allows more information or the opportunity to buy something or something more straightforward like that.