Listen to Your Computer

Ask a typical college student what he or she thinks of upon hearing the word "radio." For many, the work conjures up images of a dark past when broadcasters couldn't send pictures through the ether, an age when torchsingers from Chicago and political party conventions in Cincinnati mesmerized listeners huddled around dusty RCA units in the parlor.

The idea of mass media is supposed to mean energy and innovation to twenty-somethings; it means cable and satellite television, programming on demand and the wonderful horizons of the boundless Internet. Amidst such an array of choices, then, radio can sometimes seem like the forgotten province of bombastic talk show hosts and mindless drivel (e.g.Kiss 108 FM).

It is ironic, then, that one of the most innovative and potentially-important uses of the Internet lies in its role in transmitting audio-only programming and broadcasts: a renewal of the old radio format on the World Wide Web.

Of course, the holy grail for new media pioneers in Silicon Valley and Silicon Alley has been the so-called idea of "convergence," the marriage between television and the Internet. Content providers see this as digital nirvana, a chance to draw in viewers by making their experience more interactive--increasing interest and viewership at the same time.

The problem is, video signals take up a heck of a lot of bandwidth, or network capacity. If your fast Harvard dorm room connection isn't even fast enough to support full-screen, full-motion videos for multiple users simultaneously, imagine how slow videos must appear to home users on their 28.8 Kb/s modems.

Some cable companies, like Media One, are rushing to upgrade their network backbones to support fast Internet connections in the name of convergence, but it will take decades to bring even urban areas up to speed. And early sales of "cable modems" have been worse than poor.

For the near future, then, streaming audio in the form of Internet broadcasts and on-line radio simulcasts are the wave of the future, breathing new life into an old medium while meeting the technical demands of the day.

In the early days of the Internet, transmission of sound came largely in the form of Windows. WAV or Macintosh .AU files. Both of these formats had terrific sound quality, but at a high price: since these files were often a megabyte or more in size, it could take minutes to download a 15-second sound bite.

RealAudio, introduced in mid-1995 by Progressive Networks, changed the dynamic of sound on the Internet. Unlike previous sound formats, which emphasized quality at all costs, RealAudio was designed to sacrifice some sound quality for the sake of expediency. Instead of Internet sound being restricted to short sound clips, multiple-hour programs and even live broadcasts now became possible, and you could download only as much as you wanted to listen to.

Initially, there were few providers of RealAudio files. ABC and NPR were early adopters, but there was little else to listen to. And the novelty of hearing Bob Edwards' smooth baritone garbled by RealAudio faded fast when you could hear the same programming better via a $10 radio.

Today, however, there are hundreds of Web sites presenting RealAudio programming. One of the most fascinating is the AudioNet site (www.audionet.com), which has links to everything from live sporting events to live Internet broadcasts of your favorite hometown radio station.

If you couldn't gather around the television last night to see Feaster and friends take on Arkansas in the NCAA tournament, for instance, you could have listened to the game on AudioNet at no cost; a simulcast of the University of Arkansas broadcast was available over the Internet. So are hundreds of events every day, along with live broadcasts from hundreds of radio stations nationwide.

In addition, Internet-only broadcasters like TheDJ (www.thedj.com) and NetRadio (www.netradio.net) provide hundreds of channels, from Reggae-only stations to "classic 1990s rock" (figure that one out). Without the costs of transmitters and licenses, these broadcasters can appeal at low costs to very narrow audiences that were previously underserved by traditional radio stations and their geographic constraints.

Radio, it seems, hasn't died; it just faded away for a bit. And for those of us who prefer radio's beauty in creating adventures in the mind's eye, its latest resurgence has come none too soon.

Kevin Davis is an independent computer consultant and student director of the Harvard Arts and Sciences Computer Service's (HASCS) Advanced Support Team. You can reach him at ksdavis@fas.harvard.edu.