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Rundgren is a successful and influential musical artist, composer, and producer. In the 1960's, he achieved fame with the rock group Nazz, and continued to find musical success both as a solo artist and with the group Utopia. As a producer, he has worked with prominent artists including Meat Loaf, XTC, The New York Dolls, Patti Smith, and others. For the past five years, has been concentrating on incorporating interactive technologies into making music. As an interactive artist, he sometimes uses the pen name TR-i (for Rundgren interactive). His 1993 album No World Order was accompanied by the release of an interactive CD-ROM. He is currently releasing his latest album, The Individualist in CD Plus format. Internet Music World's Oren Rosenthal conducted this telephone interview with while he was in California doing post production work on The Individualist. IMW: Let's talk about the Internet. Your work is on the cutting edge, and for now you're releasing them on CD-ROM. I assume this is only a temporary condition. TR-i: Everything is temporary. All titles on CD-ROM have to be considered temporary at this point. In the long run CD-ROM will not have either the capacity or the bandwidth to compete with the so called information superhighway. The problem with CD-ROM is that we're always going to be limited to how much you can compress on them, while the musical domains that you can explore will be limited to the CD-ROM. whereas, if we're delivering sound out of the server, the domain is as big as our server space is. IMW: Regarding your Interactive remixes, how could that work on the Internet right now? TR-i: Right now, not at all, we don't yet have a way to deliver quality sound on the Internet. It might be okay to listen to NPR on Real Audio™, but not for high quality audio. IMW: What about a situation in which tracks can be recorded on CD-ROM and accessed by commands coming over the Internet? TR-i: That's a possibility, in which we can send out information about the sounds. I'm working in that direction, but there are no solutions yet. It is a good way of getting around technological and licensing problems. If it's stuff you already have, you can utilize the CDs you've already bought in the CD-ROM drive. IMW: When the Internet becomes capable of a higher bandwidth than what we see with Real Audio™, what would be your next step? TR-i: My next step would be to deliver the Interactive music experience over the Internet wherever possible. We are slated for delivery in an interactive television environment, and you can consider the Internet to be a technology that is evolving into the same area that interactive television will be in. In other words they're just trying to increase the bandwidth so that you can hook up your television and get real time pictures and stereo sound out of the Internet. What's the difference between that and Interactive television? All these things are conceptually merging. By the time "average Joe" begins to understand what the Internet is, somebody like AT&T is already going to be delivering it through his cable lines, so it's going to look like television to everybody else. We think we're all hot snot because we barely understand what the Internet's about. By the time anybody gets a grip on it, it will have merged into Interactive television. Information services and Interactive television will become one big thing. IMW: I'd like to ask you some questions about the work you're doing with interactive music. Why should you make music interactive? TR-i: Because of changes in the way music is delivered today. Now there is a tendency not to sit down and turn off all other input and concentrate on the "album experience" as intended by the artist. In reality, there's scanning, looking for bits they like, skip track buttons or shuffle buttons. Listeners want a more ideal listening experience. IMW: Would I be able to choose a particular Led Zeppelin track, decide that I don't like the harmonium, and replace it with a track of me playing the kazoo? TR-i: Interactive music in its ideal form requires the full participation of the artist. My catalog is a complete open book. I'm breaking mixes down to logical submixes. In my interactive format you don't become a recording engineer. You simply specify the listening experience you want. Technology builds it on the fly. IMW: I'm a little bit disappointed. I thought I'd be able to add my kazoo tracks and mix it in, like an enhancement of what was done on Peter Gabriel's interactive version of "Digging In The Dirt" TR-i: You're disappointed because that's what you think you'd want to do . Listeners don't want to get involved in the nuts and bolts of music making. In reality you don't want to do that, I can guarantee you. Let me ask you, how many hours did you spend with Peter Gabriel's remix? IMW: About 5 minutes . TR-i: Exactly! See, you shouldn't be disappointed. This is the process of enlightenment. It's certainly feasible to do that, but nobody really wants to do that. It's a whole lot of trouble to go to for essentially the response you gave me. Listeners say "Fine I can do this, but it doesn't allow me to more easily get to my agenda" which would be, let's say I just wanna hear the chorus. I really like the chorus but I hate the verse. On "Digging In The Dirt" you still have to listen to the whole thing from beginning to end. In my interactive system, you're allowed to take things in and out of it. You've moved into a different realm. You've moved out of mixing it into editing it. and that's where things are more effectively delivered. IMW: You were quoted in the Hollywood Reporter as saying that artists that don't want their music to be interacted with were essentially Luddites. Does that mean that you think that artists aren't entitled to control over their work once it's released? TR-i: It's not a question of entitlement, it's a question of an attitude not based on reality. If the artist insists on an arbitrary experience, he or she is taking away choices. It leads to artistic irrelevance. People don't simply buy your program. In a live performance I can present the music the way I want it, but on a record there's no guarantee. IMW: What if I, as a musician, got together with another musician in a different location and decided we wanted to jam over the Internet with some Utopia drum tracks. Do you see any potential in that? TR-i: I see the possibility of you and your friend being fooled into thinking that you're jamming. Latency is the essential problem with long distance collaboration in real time TV. The problem of latency reduction is something that's always been there. I see it as being one of those things in which you can approach zero but never get there. It'll be difficult to approach it in the near future because demand on the Internet is increasing. Even as the "backbone" increases its bandwidth transmission-wise, more people are going to be using it for that purpose and thereby slowing it down. Even over the telephone it's a problem. We don't notice those milliseconds right now in conversation, but if you and I were attempting to sing along on a song together you'd soon notice that it's impossible for us to really get in synch. IMW: So I take it you're not too keen on Natalie Cole singing with her late father or the Beatles reuniting to sing on a John Lennon track. TR-i: No, I'm keen on that. From the standpoint of it being possible and under certain circumstances when it's desirable. In certain other circumstances it's undesirable. When Nat King Cole died he had no inkling of the possibilities. Nobody asked him if he wanted to be unearthed to sing with his daughter. That's another issue. Digging people up and putting them in commercials - we can do it but should we do it? That's another question! Some people, people like me, and I'm not even sure if I would want this, might say, "Yeah, sure, dig me up and stick me any place you want", but I think that most artists would want to see those possibilities diminished radically as soon as they're not around to see what the end result is like. Even somebody like me who would allow all of my material to be made available to people for various purposes, I don't necessarily want to see it vandalized. There may be some instances where I'm willing to see it vandalized, but I'm not opening my catalog simply to have it vandalized. IMW: When your new album, The Individualist comes out in its interactive CD Plus format, do you think DJs might become excited about that, and you'll here many versions of your songs coming over the radio? TR-i: It would be ideal if the DJs of today would lead this revolution, but I think that most of them see it as a threat. For a computer program to craft an ideal listening experience for the listener in a certain sense puts the DJ out of business. But the way that our system is built, you don't start with nothing, you start from a certain reference point and impose your own changes on it. So we need DJs; we need people to go out and evaluate the world of music and start stringing together interesting new juxtapositions and experiences for people, which they can then further tailor to their own tastes. For instance, on No World Order [his previous album] I'm not the only producer who came up with a version of the record, there were 4 other producers who came up with versions of the album , which people can use as a starting place for further customization. IMW: What would be the most exciting innovation for audio engineers to keep an eye on? Perhaps one that you're using now, or see yourself using frequently. What will be de rigeur in a short period of time? TR-i: If there are enough artists who utilize it to make art, CD Plus is a contender for "New Technology of the Year". It allows artists to fully service their existing base of the normal CD buying audience, but they have the ability to expand their agenda onto the computer screen with the extra area. If they do it in a good way, in a way that is not simply marketing or publicity oriented, but has the same agenda that you had when you make the music, and if you use the extra space to expand the expressive dimension of what you're saying. Not if you just put up pictures of yourself or biographical information that you'd normally give out for free to publicize yourself anyway, but if there is actual real value in what is put in that extra space, then CD Plus can be of real value for musicians. IMW: What about videos? TR-i: That's what CD Plus is for. Some people still utilize the video for creative and expressive aspects, and it can become a product on its own. IMW: Do you have any particular message for audio engineers, producers, people at AES? TR-i: The interactive music message is that you don't have to pay much attention to what the interactive possibilities will eventually be, but I think that everyone would eventually save themselves a lot of time if when they're mixing their albums, if they'd did all their alternative mixes at the same time, and expand the definition of what an alternative mix is, in other words visualize all the different ways people would want to hear a particular track, and mix it all those ways when you do it, with various combinations of instruments in and out. Don't think so much in terms of venues like dance mixes, even though you should probably produce those. You also want to give people insights in to the actual structure of the music by the inclusion and deletion of various combinations of instruments. They'd save themselves a lot of time by doing that when they do their mixes, and save those for later. Someday people may be interested in hearing what's happening down there in the rhythm section without the strings and horns on top of it. IMW: Might some of these mixes sound more or less dated in the future? TR-i: At some point you may want to offer listeners different combinations of instruments. I'm always interested in alternative vocal takes. Traditionally when thinking about releasing a record, you're trying to come up with some "final take". A singer will do two passes on it, and each will have a certain emotional flavor, and ultimately you have to choose one, but in an interactive listening environment, both of those versions can coexist. Imagine going back and having the ability to listen interactively to something like the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper sessions. There are different versions of all those songs. Beatlemaniacs and audiophiles have different versions of "Strawberry Fields Forever" before they did all the weird tape manipulation and stuff on it. It would be interesting, for instance to hear the different vocal takes that they decided weren't appropriate for the final product. And that is the real value of interactivity; it will accommodate all kinds of different approaches to the music that limitations of the past forced people to edit out, but historically and musically have great value.

Billboard Music Video Conference
-- Multimedia and Music Video:
The Real Deal

Following are some of Todd's remarks during the panel session: