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| ASU Symphonic Band Live! A Web Concert
Technical Network Diagram PDF Suite from "The Danserye" by Tielman Susato The live event can be viewed using either Quicktime 4 or Real Media formats. Please download the latest player.... An evening of fantastic symphonic band compositions, coupled with live interviews via the Internet with two of the featured composers is on tapforthose who attend the (Tuesday) November 23 Arizona State University Symphonic Band Concert. The concert is at 7:30 p.m. in Gammage Auditorium, which is located on the main ASU campus in Tempe at Mill Avenue and Gammage Parkway. The concert is free and open to the public. Doors open at 7 p.m. Gary W. Hill, ASU's new director of bands and professor of music, has been searching for new methods of reaching beyond the campus borders to bringthe experience of an ASU Band concert to anyone interested but unable to attend a concert on campus. These include family and friends of student musicians, School of Music alumni and band music enthusiasts. To that end, he has begun to collaborate with computer experts in the College of Fine Arts Computer Support Unit and the university's Information Technology Department's Instruction Support Unit. The November 23 concert is the first outcome of the partnership, a video streamed concert that is to be broadcast over the Internet, rather than over the airwaves. Hill has put together an eclectic selection of band works for the event, from the 16th-century Suite from "The Danserye" by Tielman Susato to "Postcards" from Edges, a 1998 composition by James Mobberley. The program will also include Paul Hindemith's Symphony in B-flat and Morton Gould's Derivations for Clarinet and Band. Two of ASU's most respected performing faculty members will share the stage with the ASU Symphonic Band. Tenor David Britton will sing Mahler's Um Mitternacht and clarinetist Robert Spring will perform Frank Ticheli's Blue Shade. Kenneth LaFave, classical music and dance writer for The Arizona Republic, will conduct the interviews following intermission. He will talk, via the Internet, with James Mobberly at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory of Music and Frank Ticheli at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. LaFave will talk with each of them and then invite questions from the audience. IS Project Focus and Scope Methodology The heart of our video system is the Trinity Digital Component Production Switcher, from Play Inc. This unit provides us with the capability to mix four simultaneous live video sources (we can expand this to a total of 8 sources if necessary), in addition to two internal graphics 'framestore' sources, and character generated graphic text material. We will use professional 3 chip color video cameras on three of the source inputs (two will cover the action on the stage and a third may be used for Q&A coverage in the audience). For video playback of opening sequence material and multimedia content that is presented during discussions and presentations we will use either a Media100 digital video system for random access to pre-digitized and/or edited material, or a professional/broadcast quality videotape recorder (either SVHS or Betacam). The choice between non-linear digital content or linear videotape for playback will be based on the quantity of material that will need to be accessed during the discussions and presentations. For audio support we are presently able to mix between 8 and 10 sources, which should be sufficient for several microphones, playback from the either the Media100 system or VTR, and feeds from any music sources or the Envision video conferencing units that may be utilized during discussions and presentations. We have two high quality VHF wireless microphone systems (either lapel or handheld) and a number and variety of other high quality handheld, lavalier, shotgun, and PZM mics. Recording of the event will likely be accomplished through two (or perhaps more) different media. The primary format will be on Digital-S (aka D-9) digital videotape. Our Digital-S VTR receives a pure D-1 digital video signal from the Trinity unit via an SDI link that yields a very clean and crisp image. This will give us a high quality Master Tape of the events. The webcast of the concert events consists of shooting/mixing-editing (as described above) drawing a 'produced' stream as output from the mixing deck, encoding on-the-fly at the ASU event site (using our encoding hardware/software), and then pushing a data stream, encoded in a QuickTime and Real formats, to our servers at ASU. The stream will be encoded for delivery over three bandwidths, 28.8kbps, 56kbps, and 1.56Mbps. The 1.56Mbps will only be viewable to vBNS/Abilene network participants or observers with extremely high bandwidth connections. From our servers, which reside on an isolated/dedicated local network, we will provide direct external access via our OC3 pop. This approach would eliminate potential access bottlenecks at the site, and would allow us to leverage our server and connectivity resources in Tempe. The live event can be viewed using either Quicktime 4 or Real Media formats. Please download the latest player.... Digital media production and distribution across the internet provided by the Arizona State University Information Technology Instruction Support Group. High-performance, high-bandwidth network connectivity enabled and supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation(97-29709).
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