Editors' Blogs

One of the areas in which I consider myself very lucky is that my work at the magazine exposes me to many different genres of music, and I'm able to help a wide variety of musicians get closer to the sounds they hear in their heads regardless of what those sounds entail. Occasionally I'm asked what sort of music I do for my own pleasure, when I'm off the clock, and some folks are surprised by the answer: while I have a long history of playing in rock and blues bands (God, has it really been 30 years?) on bass and lead vocals, my first love has always been electronic music, be it experimental stuff, movie soundtracks, or ambient chillout and electronica. I'm not a great keyboardist, but I get by, and the studio really is my musical instrument.

Luckily for me, I have a long history of networking with people who have great musical ideas and can offer strengths where I have weaknesses, and while I've released a few solo albums over the decades my real joy comes from collaboration. Also luckily for me, modern networking technology offers some interesting ways to collaborate with other musicians when we can't be together in the same place, and my latest album release showcases several of them.

Darrell Burgan, whom I've spoken of before, has been a friend and collaborator for years now. Two years ago, in the summer of 2007, he and I were testing networking and streaming technologies in preparation for my doing a live concert on Internet radio. (I know, I owe y'all a blog or three about that, and about the radio station I call home, StillStream -- I'll get to it, I promise.) In our tests, we did an impromptu live show together, me in Colorado and him in Texas, using the Internet to connect us.

One of the things one can do with audio streaming technology is to send a live performance to a collaborator, who can then bring the music into his mix and add to it before relaying it further. Note that this isn't realtime collaboration: the latency of the network between one player and the next can be quite large, at least a fraction of a second and often up to several seconds, so it's impossible to "play together". What you have instead is a player performing solo and sending his music to another player, who then turns the solo into a duet by embellishing what he hears. The delay means that the first player never hears what the final result sounds like (unless it's recorded), and the second player must play with great care so as not to step on the first player's performance. The level of listening and trust is considerable, and among many crashes and burns there is sometimes magic.

That night we created a piece of music that was magical, with Darrell listening and adding to my solo work. It would be over a year before we were able to do it again, this time in reverse order, and capture more magic in the process. The two improvisations felt incomplete, and after a little bit of discussion we elected to see if we could get closer to realtime performance together using a piece of software called NINJAM.

NINJAM is a set of freeware applications that allows a set of musicians to create a server that takes in audio over the Internet from two or more clients and redistributes it so that everyone can play together. There are clients for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux; it's not a pretty piece of software by any means, but it works like a charm. (Another company, eJamming, is offering a subscription service that offers a similar experience with very different underlying technology and overall feel. We hope to be able to talk a bit more about it in a future issue once we've done some tests.)

Now, realize that the latency inherent in the Internet is still there; you can't make it go away. What NINJAM does is to capture and buffer audio from all players and redistribute it so that the delay is consistent and musical. The players agree on a tempo (say 120 BPM) and a time delay in musical terms (say four beats), and NINJAM translates that into (in this case) a two-second delay. You're in sync with the other players, but you're playing along with, and reacting to, what they were playing two seconds ago. Sound weird? Oh, it is.

Now if your head isn't messed up badly enough by that, think about this: each person in a NINJAM session is hearing himself in real time and everyone else delayed by a few beats. If each player records the music played in a session and later emails the audio files around for comparison, they'll all be different, because in each one, someone different is out in front of everyone else! It's like the musical equivalent of cubism, or maybe Rashomon. Everyone's perception of what was played is skewed differently.

Needless to say, it takes buttloads of practice and a lot of patience to be able to perform this way, and very tightly orchestrated song forms are pretty much out of the question. But it's fun for jamming and generating song ideas, and if you're doing something like ambient music, you can actually get lucky and create usable pieces this way if everyone's careful. Darrell and I played for several hours in NINJAM last year, and out of the audio we generated, we were able to find several short stretches where everything clicked and the magic happened. Adding those to our previous recordings, we had the raw material for a record, which we hammered together by sharing files over the Internet (and one last late-night session in NINJAM, not playing together but using the software to collaborate on final mastering tweaks! Hmmm, yet another blog entry...).

We're both very pleased with the result, and while we think our next album will benefit from working face to face, we now know that "whatever it takes" doesn't have to lead to a substandard musical product. It just takes knowledge of the technology, a realization of what you can and cannot do, and a fair bit of patience and good cheer.

The album itself? Well, if you're curious, you can find it here. It's a free download from the Earth Mantra netlabel (you can also listen to it online via the embedded player), and is covered by a Creative Commons license: you can't sell it or alter it, but you can copy and distribute it freely... if only to joke with your friends about what a weirdo that Metlay guy is.

Traditionalists be warned, this is abstract "lying on your back in a darkened room with headphones" music, or maybe "way in the background while you're working" music. Not old-time rock and roll by any means, but in some sense it has more in common with the good old days than a lot of the music you hear on the radio now. It was performed live without any prerecorded tracks, backing material, overdubs, punches, or anything like that... and thanks to the technologies we've discussed, it was performed by two players a thousand miles apart. Pretty cool, huh?