For the past 12 years, I've attended the Texas Interactive Music Conference and Barbecue, better known as Project Bar-B-Q. (For the last several years, I've been on the technical advisory board as well.) The event brings 50 computer audio insiders to a remote Texas ranch to brainstorm the future of music on computers. Unlike most conferences, though, this one has a tangible result: a collection of reports from the various workgroups outlining their predictions and guidelines.

The reports just hit the Web, and you can read them here:

www.projectbarbq.com/bbq07/bbq07r1.htm

I'll look more closely at some of the predictions over the next week, but let's start with a more general question: What would you like to hear out of computers five years from now? (Feel free to extend "computers" to devices like cell phones, game consoles, set-top boxes, and car audio systems.)

Project Bar-B-Q begins with a series of four speakers designed to get the attendees riled up about problems in computer audio. We then write the problems (there are usually more than 50!) on posters.

After some discussion, we clump the problems into four or five broader topics and then form workgroups of five to 15 people around them. Each workgroup gets a facilitator to ensure that it will stay on track and submit a preliminary written report by the end of the conference. Over the next few months, the groups work over e-mail to polish up their reports for public distribution.

My group tackled mobile audio. As facilitator, I challenged them to come up with bold predictions and guidelines for 2012. (Bar-B-Q looks five years ahead.) O'Reilly blogger Peter Drescher (in the gray T-shirt) was one of the cornerstones of the group, and got inspired to write "The Annoying Future of Cell Phone Headsets" and "earpods (can you iHear me now?)."


Our group's official report is called (deep breath) "iHear the Future: The Binaural Headset as Audio Contact Lenses and Our Inevitable Mixed-In Lifestyle of Personal Audio Networks." In short, we outlined what would need to happen for headsets to become so compelling that you'd want to wear them all your waking hours — and what that simultaneous isolation and connectedness would do to society.

It's a frighteningly appealing scenario: headphones that...

• Offer the audio equivalent of contact lenses (correcting sound) and x-ray specs (superhuman perception);
• Extend your communication abilities like cell phones and instant messaging;
• Augment your knowledge and memory by tapping into online databases and an ongoing recording of everything the mics have picked up that day.

I'm sure I'd pull these earPods off more often than I remove my contact lenses, but I'd also be itching to put them on.

More channels and more realism in audio, automatic muting/gating of audio when another action interferes (similar to certain semantic interfaces where UI colour changes depending on criticality of the action), more connectivity options, unlimited storage, removing background noise and providing a clean audio, better streaming with error correction capabilities, keyboard-less computers which listen and act to audio, the list goes on

http://www.vbashi.com/cms/

Great list! One of the interesting ideas I heard at an earlier Project Bar-B-Q concerned surround sound: Humans, the person said, are far more sensitive to location than resolution. He claimed we could identify something like a million audio-source positions. Thus, in the race for more realistic audio, it would make more sense to add speakers than bits or samples. Of course, his company was involved in surround sound, but the idea makes sense.

Hi David,

I'd like to have more transparency and less IT with my computer audio, please. All the things we have to put up with that is not tracking, mixing and mastering. Backups, updates, crashes, hardware incompatibilites, configurations, learning curves... This is why the "professionals" have studio assistants. It could be that when bandwidth is wide enough all our computing will be in the cloud, and music software will be the equivalent of a cable subscription - the ProTools channel, the Sound Forge channel...

Even so, I am spoiled. When I started mastering 10 years ago, it was one plug-in at a time. This did teach me in depth what everything actually does, but I sure do like my real time plug-in chain now. I guess the tech issues are our current way of paying dues.

...Steve>>>

Million-channel audio reminds me of a speaker concept I dreamed up several years ago, based on ribbon speaker technology. Basically, it would be a flexible foil or other very thin driver material that you would buy in a roll, like 100' long and maybe 4" wide. Fasten it to the wall at ear level and run it completely around the room. Add a sub and you're done. TOTAL surround sound. It'll happen someday.

I also correctly anticipated the recent trends in speaker cabinet materials. Back in the 70s I wondered why speakers are almost always made of wood, when there were certainly much better materials to use, both from an audio standpoint and a manufacturing one. Poured concrete, injection-molded composites, extruded, cast or machined metal, etc.

Of course, whoever said genius was 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration was absolutely correct. If I wasn't so lazy I could have made some serious jack I also "invented" the PDA back in the early 60s, and the hawaiian pizza in 1973.