The popular artist, songwriter, and musician Todd Rundgren should need no introduction here. His new album is an Enhanced CD with all new material. It was produced by ION, and we have two of ION's cool technology people here with us, Roger Jones and Bill Schulze, along with Todd, who gives great interview. Let's join the interview, which started off-camera with a discussion of playing animation on the Web via Macromedia's Shockwave technology.
Marc Canter: And so here's the difference between the two [versions of Shockwave]. With the Mac, they've got a compression thing. So, the file's half the size, okay? But it only works as (what's called) a Helper App, so the window sits on top. And that enables it to work with NetScape 1.1 and NetScape 2.0.
Todd Rundgren: That is wrong.
Canter: Windows side. It only works with the NetScape 2.0 now. They don't have the Helper App version and it only works with ".dir" files. It doesn't work with any compression yet. But of course, that's what they want to demo because that's the one that works in-line on the screen.
Rundgren: And area on the NetScape window.
Canter: Right. Just like it would be an [Adobe] Acrobat thing or whatever...
Rundgren: Yeah.
Canter: Okay, that's called in-line. So, of course, we'd want that on the Mac, but they had to make some trade-offs. So they did no compression in Windows, but it is inline; you've got compression on the Mac, but you don't get inline. [Laughter]
Rundgren: Do you want me to put that in the play-icky in the... just set that down.
Canter: Cool... This is the actual Todd Rundgren actually putting his actual disc in. We don't need those stinking caddies. So this is your new disc?
Rundgren: New disc.
Canter: Cool. It's been a few years since you first started talking about that. Have any of the tenants of interactivity changed since there was scalability and reusability, and, extensibility.
Rundgren: Well, certainly reusability of the term interactivity, right? Everyone has been attaching it to [he laughs,] to almost everything.
Canter: Absolutely. The more terms --
Rundgren: But, it's one of these relative things. You know, it's smelly, like everyone has a smell but it's usually just a day-to-day kind of smell that nobody notices. And then, of course, you get smelly and then everyone notices. So, interactivity is kind of the same thing. Everyone's interacting all the time in some sense or another, but elevating it to the level of a service or a product, that's kind of a new concept. And so everyone wants to be able to say that their product is interactive whether or not they've really elevated the ante at all.
Canter: On the web, interactivity is like: type in some words in the text field and hit the carriage return. That's interactivity.
Rundgren: Well, as long as you get something back. Oh, or if the text disappears from the screen after you hit the carriage return. Well, yeah, you could say that's interactive.
Canter: And it's not carriage return really, it's the submit button...
Rundgren: Submit. Yeah. [Laughter] With all the implications of that -- Submit to the information super highway!
Interactivity on the net, I guess, is embodied in the URL concept in that a location is no longer simply a static repository or something like that. These things have become currency. "Give me your URL. I want to stick my URL on your page and you put your URL in --
Canter: Some address in the metaverse --
Rundgren: Yeah.
Canter: And you plant your stake in the ground, it's cool. So where's Todd.com?
Rundgren: Well, it's coming, but we've set up sort of a temporary site when we did this TR/I Expo back in June. We set up a site that was mostly supposed to advertise that, and it was co-sponsored by CompuServe and the House of Blues, and we used that same company that does the House of Blues web site which is underground.net. But we're moving from there to another location. So we haven't really...
Canter: -- Do you know what the URL would be? Do you have Todd.com?
Rundgren: Well, I think that it's cleared, you never can tell, but we have wakingdreams.com which will be, I think it's [already] cleared. But it's just that we haven't yet gotten the actual receipt --
Canter: -- the domain name --
Rundgren: The domain name, we've got that. We've got TRI, and I think we also have Grokware as a...
Canter: Okay, so explain to me the difference between Nutopia and Waking Dream.
Rundgren: Well, Nutopia doesn't actually exist any more. Nutopia went into a, [he laughs,] a state of permanent hibernation. Because that was a company, that was a partnership between me and NuTech, and our charter was specifically to exploit Nutech products and, in particular, Lightwave 3D. So we did a lot 3D animation and rendering stuff. But eventually that whole medium became very popular and competitive. And also the kind of work became pretty pedestrian, and so I kind of lost interest in it, was not into the competitive aspects of it, and decided that I wanted to get back into music a little bit for a while. That's why I've been so devoted to this interactive music thing.
Canter: Right. And the thing that seems most stark to me as someone who's been around is that this is really different than No World Order. I mean this is really a real growth beyond that. And so let's talk a little bit about how do see it's different. How is that growth? Going on tour with that album, and how did that all change? Well, The Individualistis not an interactive music disc per se, by my definition of interactive music. You can't --
Canter: The songs are linear songs.
Rundgren: Yeah, they're just plain linear songs. You can have some non-linear control when you're in this sort of lyric environment. You click on part of the lyrics and it'll jump to that part of the music, but it doesn't attempt to do it seamlessly or anything or present it as if it was a performance. And interactive music to me essentially is a different way of presenting the music but still keeping intact all of those performance aspects that people expect.
Canter: So, you want to fire that up? [Todd is dealing with his computer.]
Canter: So there are two sort of things on The Individualist. There are these synchronized music animation things, and the algorithmic graphical stuff that's really kind of cool.
Rundgren: We tried to put a variety of things on there. When we first started out with this project, we thought we were going to base it mostly around QuickTime VR, and as we moved through the developmental stages, we discovered that QuickTime VR was not going to be adequate to what we were doing. So not only did we change the approach because of that previously unbeknownst aspect of QuickTime VR, but also because we had never really explored [Macromedia] Director before and seeing what we could do with it. And it turned out to be a little more flexible than we thought. And so we started exploiting some of Director's more conventional aspects, at least in ways that are stylistically a little different than the way most people use it. So there are some things that are, let's say, linear. And then there are some things that you can take control of. For instance, we have our little interactive game there for "Cast the First Stone" [a song]. You can actually navigate around the space and throw stones at the various personalities. And in some cases in our own Dave VR, the replacement for QuickTime VR you can take interactive control of that and explore the environments that are in that, so --
Canter: It's a subset of the overall Dave engine, right? You can do a lot of things with the Dave engine.
Rundgren: Yeah. Dave VR essentially was our solution to a problem that we encountered in QuickTime VR, which was [as follows]: Since they keep the data compressed, the further you move the camera, the longer it takes to draw a frame, because it decompresses it in slivers as it moves around. So if you move at a relatively slow pace, you get a good update frame.
Canter: If you want to do something fast --
Rundgren: If you want to do something fast, then you have to essentially do something else. So, Dave Levine, our resident programmer savant, in about three days essentially had imitated QuickTime VR, and then he spent the next three months adding features that don't exist in QuickTime VR. And then, also overlaying a Doomengine over top of it as well, so we've got this multilayered virtual environment creation engine that is high performance and cross platform and essentially allowed us to make a little bit of data look like it lasts a long time.
Canter: Right. And then there are these linear Redbook tracks. These are songs that then have very tight synchronization. Again, you extended Director to do that, right?
Rundgren: Well, what we're doing is we're reading time code off of the CD while it's playing. Previously when people tried to synchronize with a disc, they usually would hope to, y'know, [he chuckles,] get the sound and the picture kicked off at the same time and just hope that they would stay in synch. The problem is that different machines run at different speeds. So, we had to develop a system that would read time code off the disk, but also keep the performance regardless of the speed of the target machine in synch with that as well. Which meant that some cases things had to be slowed down in order to stay in synch if the machine was actually a high-powered machine.
Canter: And that's what they call the Enhanced CD Toolkit, right?
Rundgren: That is an ION product, [he chuckles,] the Enhanced CD Toolkit.
Canter: Are we here in ION land?
Rundgren: I wonder.
Canter: Well, gee, the air is really kind of heavy. There must be a lot of ions here.
Rundgren: There's plenty of ions. The ion level can go up really high if you don't keep your eye on it, so --
Canter: Oh I get it. So now this disc is really more than just a liner note disc, but they do also have lyrics and some of the more traditional marketing and company kind of --
Rundgren: Well, in the sense that we can make them a little bit more contemporary rather than just simply showing you the lyrics. The lyrics actually will follow along with the music. So, again, we've taken advantage of the synchronization aspects of the ION Toolkit.
Canter: But there's none of that gratuitous stuff like, where's the album shots of the band? Or where's the the girlfriend or the cat...
Rundgren: Well, I have a philosophical aversion to that kind of stuff. First of all that's the kind of thing that you used to give away for nothing.
Canter: Right.
Rundgren: And even though in this particular instance we are giving away the extra content for nothing. [Laughter.] I personally don't have a lot of interest in that cult of personality thing. The contents of your pockets don't go into a scanner, y'know, or something like that. If the artist doesn't really have anything to say with the extra space, well they might as well make it all music you know. Fill the entire disk up with music if that's what you take seriously.
But if you take other aspects of your expressive life seriously and you want to, let's say, add another vector to one of the songs, a visual aspect or something like that, then, sure, take advantage of that extra space and give people what you would have given them anyway, but in a much more deliverable medium.
Canter: Right. I'm struck with some of the architecture of the CD Toolkit because I happen to remember some old OS code that you wrote with Steve Capps a while back. And you were one of the first people that talked about an enhanced kind of Lego board that you plug little modules into. And of course, this is what everyone's trying to do whether it's Metatools or MFactory or Taligent, or [Kaleida's] ScriptX, or all these people who are trying to develop these little peg boards. Get them in there as a Trojan horse and then sell razor blades the rest of your life, okay?
Rundgren: I think that the component software concept actually took hold through [Adobe] Photoshop-- Photoshop plug-ins.
Canter: Kai's Power Tools.
Rundgren: Kai's Power Tools essentially become Photoshop. [He laughs.] Kai's Power Tools become the tail wagging the dog in some cases, because you derive all your power from these components that were added to the program.
Canter: Right. Something that Macromedia never understood, by the way. [Laughter.] It's unbelievable.
Rundgren: That's something I haven't understood except in terms of XObjects...
Canter: Because of Hypercard XCMDs. So they had to have the equivalent.
Rundgren: Yeah, so HyperCard was the same thing. But the component software concepts that I had, that were contemporaneous I guess with HyperCard, involved no scripting at all -- involved simply graphical objects that novice users could connect together into new functional elements. And, oddly enough, programming is sort of moving that way now.
Canter: Right. We all know that now to be called OLE and OpenDoc, right? I mean you were just 10 years ahead of yourself.
Rundgren: There are a couple of other programs that emulated fairly well, like a program called Max that I've used a lot to do music programming. And essentially that's boxes and wires, but still you know, it's predominantly a graphical thing. You don't do a whole lot of script writing, you just connect up functional elements.
Canter: Yeah, well, it's really two issues you're dealing with. You're dealing with authoring or programming for non-programmers, and there's the extensibility thing, which gets again back to really one of the main tenets of interactivity -- the scalability, the usability, the extensibility. To me, also, the point of scalability is that it moves across different platforms, because, you know, in the film business, you got your theatrical rights, your cable rights, your videotape rights. But in the interactive world there's no equivalent. I mean you're making a CD-ROM.
Rundgren: Well, if you can consider to a certain degree the various platforms to be different enough in the cross section of the audience and the way things are marketed. In the same way that Macintoshes and PCs have very polarized philosophical camps behind them. And we often find that we do developmental on the Macintosh and many aspects of what we do have to be dumbed down in order to work on the PC.
Canter: Lowest common denominator.
Rundgren: Essentially yeah. You go for the lowest common denominator and the differences are still in some cases significant enough that the aesthetic is lowered slightly to accommodate that. So the scalability -- we still have a lot of wiggling room to scale within. For The Individualist, when everything else, [including] the OS, is loaded in [to memory] and Director, [or] the part of Director that comes with the projector, is loaded in, and all of that other stuff, we only have about three megabytes of memory left. So whatever happens while the Redbook audio is playing has got to be in that memory. And that's not a significant difference from platform to platform. To say eight megs is about --
Canter: It seems like the real difference here is that, excuse the expression, the head-fuck, is when we get to multi-people, I mean it's multiuser. That's what the web's about, the networking. You know, I did this thing called Maze Warsyears ago and I'm looking at Maze Wars, I'm looking at "Cast the First Stone" and it's like it could be multiuser. It could all be running around and they could throwing quarter notes and eighth notes at each other or phrases or licks or rhythms or --
Rundgren: Well, we didn't actually develop that part of the engine, that 3D world, the Doomworld. We didn't start development yet principally for this product. We wanted to develop it because Dave has gotten an interest in multiplayer games now.
Canter: As he did way back when in these very offices!
Rundgren: Yes, somewhere in these very offices, somewhere in this neighborhood Dave came up with what was probably one of the first multiplayer games outside of, let's say, Pong, or something like that. It was called Ball Blazer, and it essentially had two points. You had two perspective grids and cars that you ran around and pushed a little ball into a goal, it's like that. And Dave now is kind of longing for this multiplayer environment by utilizing the connectivity that comes with the Internet, for instance. And so we're thinking of developing a game that is one thing if you just play it at home, single user, or like with two controllers or whatever and at a single location. Or if you play it across the network, it's different, but if you play it through a service that we set up on the Internet, you'll have all these other capabilities that you wouldn't get if you were just playing by yourself.
Canter: Exactly. Absolutely. There's a bunch of people doing that and there are multiplay APIs [application programmatic interface hooks] that are developed so we can all work together. And then the really exciting thing is that when it goes beyond the bandwidth of the Net currently, it's real-time across the Net. And that is like all this other stuff including video, which we've seen each other playing and --
Rundgren: Well, I don't hold out a lot of hope for real-time net activities like that in the near future because the bandwidth just gets sucked up so fast. As soon as somebody announces hey, we can play television over this well, a thousand people are gonna try it, [he laughs,] start pumping video across the backbone --
Canter: Simultaneously!
Rundgren: -- and then suddenly, boom, down it comes again.
Canter: The M-Bone!
Rundgren: So you know, unless there's some kind of power sharing structure, [he laughs,] so that people can, so that individuals can take advantage of that bandwidth without falling all over each other --
Canter: Let's go back to another thing. So this is your second product that falls into the category of what we would call CD-ROM or the interactive world. But as we said earlier, there's a real difference between No World Orderand this [disc], The Individualist. Now what were the sort of lessons, or did you like study watching people using the product? As we say, user testing, or the lessons you learned from navigation and user interface and that sort of stuff, compared between the two products?
Rundgren: Well, the products are so different in a certain way that there's the lessons that we learned, for instance, from No World Order, we got those lessons a while ago. No World Orderhas been out for a couple of years, and we sort of learned our lessons from that and started making whatever alterations in our approach to that kind of product. That's happened already.
As far as this particular one, our objectives were different in that, first of all, the Redbook audio is the driving factor of everything else. Rather than some elaborate sort of interactive structure that the user creates and that which affects the way the music is played. So in that sense we didn't have to give the user the structure necessarily to define that. All we had to do was give them something a little bit more simple, like build a playlist of the songs and then play the songs. So in that sense, The Individualistwas a stylistic exercise; it really was mostly about the content, less about elaborate forms of user interaction.
Canter: Well because of that...
Rundgren: In other words, it had to be very simple, direct and satisfying.
Canter: It becomes much more transparent. You don't worry about or think about it as much because it's just simpler. The expectations or the ambition of the user interface is less and it actually hits a level of transparency. Whereas I think excuse the expression, no problems of No World Orderwas like what the hell is this and you're spending all your time worrying about the interface, you never did get onto this interactive structure stuff or --
Rundgren: Yeah, well, we learned a, a lot of lessons about how people responded to it and, and the principle thing that I discovered was that don't assume anything about your audience.
Canter: Right.
Rundgren: There are some people who had that experience. Some people have said, "Well, I don't really, I can't tell what this is doing, you know. I don't quite understand the concept." There were other people who said, "Um, well, that's great but why can't I do this? And why can't I do that? And why can't I do that? Why don't I have more control over things?" "Why can't I go down and build that whole list? Why can't I you know, define the way the various filters work?" And things like that.
Canter: Well, the same people that asked me about MediaBand. They'd say, "Well, can I record this? Can I playback that?" And it's clear that there's gonna be a hundred and one iterations of how to figure this all out, right? And so what do you think about shall we say the other people of your, God forbid the word, category? I mean, known in the music business before, trying to shall we say, make the transition. Not to say that you're trying to make the transition, but these other people trying to make the transition, moving forward. Peter Gabriel now has said that he doesn't like that disc. David Bowie disavows knowledge of that ION product. And, we're all trying to move forward. So, how do you think they're all going to pick up on Thomas Dolby's got some interesting stuff. Graham Nash has got some interesting stuff. What do you think about all the other...
Rundgren: Well, I think the lessons that they have learned is that this sort of biographical content, this content that's not of you but about you --
Canter: Exactly.
Rundgren: is not what people buy. They don't buy that kind of stuff. Those are the things that --
Canter: You get that in a magazine for free.
Rundgren: Well, those are the things you usually get for free. The things that they do and when they do their MTV special or --
Canter: Entertainment Tonight--
Rundgren: Entertainment Tonight, or the Disney Channel, or what is Homecoming, all those other kind of things.
Canter: Whether it's in Rolling Stoneor it's in Spin--
Rundgren: That your publicist sets up, so that you can get exposed to the public.
Canter: You don't pay for that.
Rundgren: Yeah. But unfortunately this became too closely associated. They look like CDs, CD-ROMs taste like CDs. But they don't leave the same satisfying full feeling afterward, you know. Because the people got into you because of your music, but then once they're there they don't get so much of that emotional intensity that you put into the music. Suddenly it's you as the --
Canter: Talking about it --
Rundgren: Yeah. Or, the instructor. Suddenly you're no longer that sort of lonely artist kind of thing. Now you're like a teacher or, or a tour guide or something.
Canter: Right, but that argument would also say that the repackaging of the best hits is great because wow, I get all the Michael Jackson songs on one disc and let's go buy the Janet Jackson one too. But if you look at this Bob Dylan disc [ Highway 61 Interactive from Graphix Zone], it's horrible! I mean, why would I want to click on the coffee cup to start "Blowin' in the Wind"? I'll click on a cloud maybe or some wind but what does a coffee cup have to do with "Blowin' in the Wind"?
Rundgren: Well, unfortunately that decision was made for you about what you would click on to get it. And again, it gets back to this sort of argument about what do people really want? A lot of people who get involved in interactivity have bought into the argument that there is a great desire already there on the part of the audience to do more. And for the most part, the audience is not aware of what's possible. So they don't have that great desire to do more. And all of these clever kind of game structures, as much as they satisfy the 14-, 15-year old male's desire for some challenge,don't reveal to the audience at large what it is that they haven't alreadygotten out of the artist. And so in that sense, it's almost better to give them a real simple direct structure, and then present them with something. Allow them to get in and out of it easily. Allow them perhaps to change the order in which they experience the things, but if you don't accommodate people's natural proclivities towards passivity, you know, then it's hard to have a successful interactive title.
Canter: Right. I'm fascinated by what Trent Reznor [of Nine Inch Nails] is gonna do. What is Mike Dee gonna do when finally, the bubble goes off and they hook up with Mark Romanick [[?? sp?] and Propoganda, or some hot Director guy, and they're just really down in the trenches. And they're linking into the midi files, and they break through. I got to believe there's gonna be some cool new stuff coming.
Rundgren: Well, I spoke to Trent a couple of months ago, and he said a couple of people have prepared demos of various kinds of Nine Inch Nails things that they might do on CD-ROM. He said none of it actually turned him on. And my suspicion is that most of it probably had that other agenda, which is you forget about style and you start just simply worrying about mimetic responses --
Canter: Right --
Rundgren: Making sure that people are clicking always and moving always and things like that.
Canter: The only thing I've seen that I liked is a QuickTime VR demo. It's the Beastie Boys one. But because it's only four walls of a very small studio, all the files can be in memory at the same time. Which means that you can scratch it. And by scratching you can trigger all these Beastie Boys songs and you can perform the Beastie Boys songs. And that wasn't how it was intended to be used, it's by a company named Turntable, but it's really cool stuff, but again that's not how it was designed or intended at all.
Rundgren: Well, but if it works then people will start copying it, yeah. It's still so early in this. There aren't that many titles out. This has only been a phenomenon for about a year and a half, two years this whole CD-ROM thing.
Canter: Have you seen the thing Eve? Seen Eveyet?
Rundgren: No I haven't.
Canter: It's the new Peter Gabriel one. So you move your mouse around and Sinead O'Conner starts popping up [Todd laughs,] singing weird shit. It's like he figured it out, that it wasn't about walking around his studio.
Rundgren: Okay.
Canter: Now Starwave is doing it. And Starwave, instead of [Gabriel] -- he [Gabriel] paid for the first disc, the Explora thing, out of his own pocket. But now Starwave's paying him. That's Paul Allen money right?
Rundgren: Yeah.
Canter: But he actually copped some attitude and said, "Well, they were going to show it in May at the Mac Music thing." He said, "No it's not ready to show yet." First time there is integrity coming into this fucking business. No I actually don't want to show it, it's not good enough. Like wow!
Rundgren: Well he's getting the idea. And the more you take it personally, probably the better off the end content will be. And I think that Peter Gabriel is probably learned a lot since the first, well he's done two of them. He had a second one out too, didn't he?
Canter: No, no. This is the second one.
Rundgren: This is the second one.
Canter: It was announced a year, that's what it is. It's been in production for a year and a half.
Rundgren: Oh, this is the one that got announced...
Canter: Yeah, a year and a half ago, Starwave is pumping out the money. They've got a Clint Eastwood and a Richard Nixon disc too. [Todd laughs] So you can see where they're coming from. By the way, they do have what's hot is the ESPN board.
Rundgren: Uh-huh.
Canter: And you can get every single sports score in real-time on the web. And so that's their money maker, right? So they got something with Sting. They just bought a bunch of names, that's their attitude.
Rundgren: What time is it?
[A woman:] It's about ten to seven.
Rundgren: Ten to seven.
Canter: We got to cruise. Okay if you want to.
© Marc Canter