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If you don’t think musicians suffer for their art, try this. For Peter
Gabriel, making the video for a single from his 1993 album Us entailed
being chewed by a snail. The greedy gastropod was crawling across Gabriel’s
face during a sequence to go with his song Digging in the Dirt. The snail
stopped for a bite to eat, and the snack was him.

If you have a powerful Apple computer, you can watch the sequence again
and again on Xplora, one of a new generation of CD-ROMs, which contains
the songs and videos from Us and much more.

You can, for instance, remix the song your own way. Or sit back and
listen to Gabriel explaining why he wrote each song, and the directors of
the video sequences describing what they were trying to do with the films.

The more artistic rock fan can trawl through specially commissioned
electronic ‘paintings’ that reflect the songs, zoom in on details, and hear
the artists explain themselves. And for the performer manque, there’s a
chance to ‘play’ the unusual instruments featured on the album by bringing
them up on screen and using the mouse to elicit sounds. You can also see
Gabriel performing, or tour his studio in Wiltshire . . . It sure beats
album sleeve notes.

With Xplora, Gabriel has quickly won the plaudits of his peers – including
the handful of top rock bands and musicians such as U2 and Prince who are
also experimenting with the medium of CD-ROM. The idea and execution came
from Steve Nelson, director of Brilliant Media, a company based in San Francisco.
‘We picked Peter because his interests go beyond just music, and he is known
for innovative videos. Interestingly, when we looked at the demographics
of who owned CD-ROM players, they matched those of Peter Gabriel fans.’

Yet Gabriel is no advocate of technology at any cost. ‘Technology that
tries to be future-looking but ignores everything but itself will fail,’
he says. ‘That has been the problem with so much virtual reality – it’s
like exploring a bad video game. What I wanted to do was integrate the human
element and the natural elements, like rock, air, grass, with the technology.’

While Gabriel and the others take in the possibilities of enhancing
music after it’s made, others are playing around with expanding the scope
of the instruments themselves. At MIT’s Media Lab in Boston, for example,
rather than mimicking instruments with synthesisers, Neil Gerschenfeld and
Tod Machover have been using computers to soup up conventional instruments.
Gerschenfeld likens an instrument to an analogue computer. ‘It integrates
equations of motion put in from limits set by the player.’ They started
with the cello.

The player fingers the strings and moves the bow; the cello integrates
those movements into sounds. In their Hypercello project, the pair worked
with the cellist Yo-yo Ma. ‘His approach was, ‘Can I do more?” recalls
Gerschenfeld. ‘He sees his Stradivarius as an output device for what he
wants to communicate.’

The researchers put sensors on the instrument, the bow and the player’s
hand, and linked them to a computer, which also recorded the sound being
made. After two years, they were able to define the equations that describe
how a cellist produces music. ‘It’s just five lines of maths to describe
bowing a string,’ says Gerschenfeld.

Then they persuaded Ma to play a stripped-down cello, which consisted
of no more than a fingerboard, strings, and a bow. As he played, position
sensors recorded his movements and fed them to the computer. Using the equations
stored in it, the computer translates the signals from the sensors into
the sounds that would have been heard if the instrument had had a soundbox.

This may seem like an unnecessarily complicated way of producing music
from a cello. The excitement begins, however, when Ma moves his bow without
touching the strings and the computer continues to produce music in response
to the bow’s movements. Entirely new sounds emerge – echoes and sustained
notes that even Ma couldn’t have achieved by himself.

So excited were Gerschenfeld and Machover that they also developed a
Hyperviolin, and then a Hyperglove so that someone conducting a quartet
or an orchestra could alter the overall sound, beyond that of the individual
players.

All this might sound like technology for its own sake – the sort of
thing Gabriel would dislike. In fact, he’s an enthusiast because such projects
mean that more people can unlock their own creativity. ‘With hyperinstruments,
you can get people moving to the juice faster,’ he says. ‘When you first
pick up a violin or a trumpet, you might be able to laugh your way through
the terrible noise you make, but anyone sharing the house might not. ‘ With
a hyperinstrument, you can program the computer to prevent you from making
a terrible noise. ‘With a hyperinstrument,’ says Gabriel, ‘more people can
become players.’

Add to that the possibilities of CD-ROM – or, in the future, interactive
links down phone lines – and he thinks that artists will become ‘experience
designers’ for their audience, who will take pieces of music or video and
manipulate them to create something personal.

But how sure is he that everyone wants to, or can, create their own
experience? ‘I don’t think we’ll know until we try it,’ he replies. ‘But
in the West we lack the idea, which exists in other cultures, that everybody
is an artist. We are born with imagination and curiosity and the means to
express ourselves.’