35% off Dell's Most Popular LaptopsThe technology, patented by California and Florida-based start-up eJamming, was among several new collaborative tools demonstrated by Intel CEO Paul Otellini on stage at his CES keynote, with a little help from pop group Smashmouth.
I cornered eJamming chairman and president Alan Glueckman at the Showstoppers event later in the day to discuss how the technology works.
"We literally connect musicians in real-time, synchronizing audio streams from multiple locations so they can play together," Glueckman says. "You might have a musician in China, another in Australia, one in Brazil and one in United States that can all jam together in real-time. Not only can they play together, they can write and create together or teach each other."
A screenshot of musicians collaborating online with eJamming
(Credit: eJamming)The magic behind the scenes, Glueckman says, is a compression technology that "thins the audio data so it can be shoved through broadband pipes but still sound pleasing to a musicians ear."
Geographically-dispersed musicians can also turn eJamming into a virtual recording studio, he said.
"The really cool thing is that their performances can be recorded locally in full fidelity," he said. "Then you later can exchange a time-stamped full-fidelity track based on these local versions. [Mixed together] you get a better-than-CD-quality recording of the jam session."
Traditionally, even when multiple musicians are recording together in the same room (multi-tracking), there are often problems with latency if the system recording the tracks doesn't have enough memory or compute power. The thought of pushing such huge files in real-time over the Internet sounds like a pipe dream at the speed of most connections.
But Glueckman insists that eJamming's compression technology, coupled with software that synchronizes audio streams in real-time, means that musicians can hear each other performing in high quality audio (at least as rich as MP3) across the Internet.
It does, of course, require some decent recording gear at each end, works better with MIDI-interface sounds than actual stereo audio tracks, and requires very high broadband speeds to ensure the latency issue doesn't plague the process.
But with both home recording technology and broadband connectivity continually dropping in price, it might not be long before the technology is available to even the most humble of home studios.
Glueckman says eJamming eventually intends to bring the magic of live performance to fans dispersed across the web. At the end of the quarter, his company will launch 'jamcast' - an opportunity for acts to stream a live performance to any computer, mobile internet device or smart phone connected to the web.
"The excitement of live performance is liberated from the venue," Glueckman said.
A jamcast, he said, would be particularly fruitful for those acts that have developed relatively small fan bases that are distributed globally using social networking sites like Myspace or e-commerce sites like iTunes. A broadcast of their performance might be far more viable than a tour.
At present, eJamming's revenue model is charging a (roughly eight to ten dollar) monthly subscription to use eJamming's technology.
With Jamcast, both the musicians and eJamming will be able to share the revenue gained from from paid subscribers to a performance.
Today's Internet, he said, is a "go-to" Internet.
"The Internet reacts to our requests rather than anticipating them," he told the conference at the Venetian Hotel and Casino.
In the future, he predicts Internet services will be more proactive, predictive and context aware.
"The Internet is going to come to us," he said, "bringing us the information we need at any given time."
He expects this to have a radical affect on the wider technology industry.
When computing came to the desktop in the eighties and nineties, "computing became personal," he said, and "innovation, collaboration and standards drove growth beyond what anyone could imagine."
"I believe that the Internet is following the same path today."
Intel CEO Paul Otellini addresses CES
(Credit: Brett Winterford)Otellini said he expects the mobile Internet device, armed with mobile broadband and location-aware technologies such as GPS, to be the one that makes best use of this "personal" Internet.
Demonstrating a number of future applications on a mobile internet device, Otellini opened a window into a future where location-based services can aid users real-time in an intuitive way. In one demonstration, the device's camera could recognise objects on a street or translate a restaurant menu, serving up an "augmented reality". While the demos were staged at CES (replicated back-stage on a more powerful computer than the mobile device in his hand), Otellini says the continual shrinking of transistors could see such services come to the mobile device in the not too distant future.
There are four major obstacles to delivering such an experience today, he said. The first is silicon. The mobile internet device, the "next big thing" in computing, he said, will need a more compute-powerful, more power-efficient processor. The second obstacle is the lack of a ubiquitous wireless broadband infrastructure to deliver these services in a wider range of locations. Third, Internet services lack context, he said, that ability to know what we need at a given point in time. And finally, he expects that computing will need to come up with more natural, human interfaces to engage with.
In terms of silicon, Otellini believes Intel to be well on the way to making the dream a reality. The company continues to find ways to shrink transistors. To illustrate, Otellini showed how a 1971 Intel chip (the Intel 4004) featured 2250 transistors and was 10 microns in size. Today's chips, Otellini said, contain a whopping 820 million transistors. That many transistors in 1971 would have required a wafer nine feet by six feet, which would consume the energy of 200 U.S. households. "Instead its the size of a thumbnail," he said.
Otellini said Intel went close to missing its mark on Moore's Law in recent years as it struggled to find new ways to shrink transistors without leaking current. But Intel's engineers saved the day, discovering "a new recipe" with which to produce the next generation of processes - a High K Metal Gate process based on the element Hafnium.
This breakthrough, Otellini said, means that the next generation of Intel chips can deliver 38 per cent more performance on the same power usage, or cut power in half with the same performance as the current generation of chips. The mobile Internet device, he said, while slightly chunky today, will "shrink half and half again" in size in the next 12 months as a result.
From a wireless perspective, Otellini predicted that the WiMAX standard, technology in which Intel Capital has invested in significantly, will win out over other competing standards to deliver the necessary ubiquitous access to the Internet for mobile devices. WiMAX is particularly strong in delivering online video, he said.
"In the next five to ten years , we at Intel believe WiMAX will bring about the change necessary," he said.
The third obstacle is context. Otellini said we need to move from searching for information on a network towards a network that finds you the information you need proactively. These services will require that users give the network an indication of their location, their preferences, and other information of a private nature.
"The impetus is on us as an industry to provide security and privacy users need," he said.
The final hurdle is interfaces. Otellini used the example of the motion and gesture sensing technology of Nintendo Wii, which has revolutionised gaming by offering more human ways of interacting with the computer, as an example of what's to come.
"Its popularity lies with the interface and not the graphics," he said. "You expect to engage and interact with the Wii. In gaming, we have moved from the keyboard to mouse to joystick to wands - with each step, a more natural engagement."
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