NYU/MCGILL UNIVERSITY - SETS FIRST REAL-TIME MULTICHANNEL AUDIO INTERNET DEMO FOR 107TH AES CONVENTION

NEW YORK, NY: Audio Engineering Society Technical Council Chair Wieslaw Woszczyk (McGill Univ.) and a team of colleagues from the Technical Committee on Network Audio Systems has developed two essential real-time demonstrations as companions to the Advanced Networking Workshop [W-13] scheduled for Sunday, September 26, at 2:00PM at the Javits Center. Both identical live demonstrations will take place at New York University's Cantor Film Center located at 36 East 8th Street, in Greenwich Village at 5:30 and 7:30 PM.

The collaborative demos are the first trials of multichannel audio transmission over the internet. They will feature a performance by NYU dance students, who will perform to music provided remotely by a McGill University Swing Band playing live at McGill University's Redpath Hall in Montreal, Canada, under the direction of McGill Prof. Gordon Foote. The music will be acquired as a 5-channel audio signal and streamed to NYU across a high-performance network managed by the Canarie (Canada) and Internet 2 (USA) Corporations. Sound reproduction will be in the 300 seat cinema of Cantor Film Center using its 5-channel sound system. Busses will transport attendees from Javits to The Cantor Film Center at 5:00 (no busses at 7:00 PM).

"Both demonstrations will be identical, and each will feature two modes of multichanel transmission," Professor Woszczyk reveals. "Level 1 transmission of 48kHz, 16bit, AC-3 compressed (448kbs) audio will make use of existing encoding and decoding hardware provided by Dolby Labs. Level 2 transmission of 96kHz, 24bit, uncompressed (13Mbs) PCM audio will utilize encoding and decoding hardware currently in development by dCS, Ltd. (UK). The underlying software for the demos was developed at McGill University by a team comprised of several members of the AES Technical Committee on Network Audio Systems led by Professor Jeremy Cooperstock. The collaboration of two national networking groups (Canarie Inc. in Canada and Internet 2 Corp. in the USA was essential to creating this first international multichannel live audio transmission over the internet. . The significant investment of time and research by both NYU and McGill University clearly illustrate the importance of advanced networking and its collaborative nature," he concludes.

* The Advanced Networking Workshop (W13), chaired by Zack Settel of McGill University (Montreal) and Atau Tanaka, of NetFive Ltd., will concentrate on high-performance network engineering, administration, audio streaming, applications development, and live network-based musical performance.

Scheduled for September 24-27 at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, the 107th AES Convention is themed "Advancing the Art of Sound - Leading the World of Audio Into the 21st Century."