World Beat, Version 1.0, Interactive CD-ROM for IBM PC and CompatiblesReview by: Gilbert L. BlountNotes, Second Series, Vol. 52, No. 2 (Dec., 1995), pp. 529-532Published by: Music Library AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/899077 .

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INTERACTIVE MULTIMEDIA AND SOFTWARE REVIEWS

EDITED BY CHARLOTTE CROCKETT

World Beat, version 1.0, interactive CD-ROM for IBM PC and com- patibles. Medio Multimedia, Inc. $59.95. Requires an IBM or compatible with a 386 processor, double-speed CD-ROM drive, and 4MB of RAM. Strongly recommended are a 486 processor or better, 8MB of RAM, and Windows 3.x (not Windows NT). MIDI interface, software sequencer, and multitimbral keyboard required to fully utilize the product's MIDI files.

World Beat is a nicely designed, user- friendly CD-ROM that focuses primarily on the popular and fusion musics found in recent decades in approximately seventy- five large and small countries around the world. The opening screen has as its center a spinning globe void of the names of any land surfaces or bodies of water. Placed vertically on the right side of the screen are five resource icons, to which is sometimes added a miniature globe at the top, which, when clicked, returns the user to the open- ing screen. In the lower left-hand corner of the screen is a function icon designed as four piano keys, which guide the user to the various help, print, and search options available on the disc. The README.TXT file under the "Help" key is useful, espe- cially for those with MIDI and computer experience.

The spinning globe is accompanied by a series of looped soundbytes, which may also be accessed individually from the "Music Studio" resource on the disc. The concept of an audiofile tour of the world's musical traditions is a good one, al- though the trained listener wishes for bet- ter audio quality and closer resemblance to the indigenous Western and non-Western traditions being emulated. The soundbytes should also be visually cued so that the user could learn more about which musical styles and regions were being represented during the tour. The globe may be stopped at the user's discretion or rotated in either direction by moving the slider beneath the

planet until a particular geographical re- gion is in view. If the user clicks in that region, a map is called listing the visual and musical excerpts representing that region on the CD.

If, for example, the user clicks on the African continent, the map lists approxi- mately thirty excerpts either by the name of the region, the musical instrument fea- tured, the name of the musical style, or a combination of these categories. Styles with audio excerpts are identified by speaker icons, those with still photos show a 35mm camera icon, and those with motion video display a video camera icon. Clicking on an excerpt name brings audiovisual informa- tion about the instrument or style to the screen. Textual data scrolls using a con- ventional scroll bar, and the user can obtain a pronunciation of the style, instrument, or region by clicking on a speaker icon shown to the left of the excerpt name. Hot words are embedded in the text in an underlined, light-green type face; with certain screen backgrounds the hot words cannot be read without delicate scrolling, e.g., Confucianism under "Music of Korea," and hula under "Hawaiian Slack-key guitar."

The resource icons on the right side of the screen include from top to bottom the Main Globe icon, the "Interactive Docu- mentary," the "Style List," the "Book," the "Discography," and the "Music Studio." Ac- cording to the onscreen description, the "Interactive Documentary" provides "a narrated tour of music from each region

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NOTES, December 1995

of the globe." Actually, there are only three narratives-one from Africa, another from Asia, and a third from Latin America. These are self-running narratives linking many of the video and audio clips that the user can also access individually. Transi- tions between sections within the narratives are abrupt, but the narratives are seductive and informative, albeit within a topical em- phasis on contemporary popular and fu- sion music types. The user can click on any of the fast-paced videos included in the narratives for further information on that subject, and the user can return directly to the in-progress location in the original nar- rative by clicking on the "Back" function key in the lower left-hand corner of the screen. Such narratives will probably be- come standard in instructional CD-ROMs; properly structured and voiced, they are informative as well as reassuring to the user.

The "Style List" brings to the screen a complete list of the excerpts on the CD. There are actually two style lists, one listing the excerpts alphabetically, and a second listing them by media type. The listings in this window came on screen in white type on a white background, and no individual item could be read unless it was first high- lighted. A cordial and informed technical support service at Medio was consulted about the problem, but the problem could not be resolved short of setting the monitor drivers to RGB with four-bit color.

The "Book" icon takes the user to "the full text of the book Musics of Many Cultures [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980] which provides in-depth material on many musical styles." The book, edited by Elizabeth May, contains twenty chapters written by various authors in contrasting styles. The first page of any of the twenty chapters may be accessed by clicking on the chapter heading in the Table of Contents. The user then has the option of scrolling forward or backward one page at a time, but because of the large typeface on screen, considerable scrolling is required. The user is not given the option of typing in a page number to return to a specific page, a fea- ture that is easy to implement in software. "Contents" and "Index" buttons have been added to the screen in this book mode, and the user has been given the option of

returning at any time to the "Table of Con- tents." The "Index" pages, underlined in light green, also function as hot words. Clicking on the page-forward arrow on the last page of the Index sends the user un- expectedly to the "Table of Contents." The page-back arrow is inactive at this point, and the user must click on the "Index" button once again to return to the begin- ning of the Index. One welcome feature in the "Book" resource is that the user, eager to audition an audio or video example mentioned in the text, can use the "Style List" to see if an excerpt exists on the CD and then play the excerpt without losing the original place in the "Book."

An OCR (optical character recognition) scanner was apparently used to create the "Book" resource; however, apparently no one on the Medio staff bothered to proof- read the result. The text is replete with errors, and none of the approximately 160 musical examples, 135 figures, diagrams, tables, maps, nor the three accompanying seven-inch recordings are included any- where in the World Beat database. A few examples from page 294, chosen at ran- dom, will suffice to illustrate: "subconscious compromise" in Musics of Many Cultures becomes "subcon compromise" on the disc; "Mongolian Tartaric" becomes "MonTar- taric," "significant role" becomes "sigrole," "musico-aesthetic" becomes "mu-aesthetic," "piyutim, one" becomes "piyuone," "non- sense, education" becomes "noneducation," "wedding dance-song" becomes "wed- dance-song," "syllable characteristic" be- comes "sylcharacteristic," "characteristic ex- pression" becomes "characterexpression," "vocal and" becomes "voand," "Orthodox- Reform preferences" becomes "Orthodox- Repreferences," "provided by" becomes "proby," "recitative-like styles" becomes "recitativestyles," "recorded example" be- comes "reexample," and "derived from" becomes "defrom." The references to mu- sical examples 16-3, 16-4, 16-5, and 16-6, are omitted from the CD, and no musical example appears for 16-7, even though it is referenced in the text. Page numbers in the CD are kept as close as possible to the originals, although page- splitting and consolidation are required along the way to do so. Some of these er- rors are not insignificant, and in many

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Interactive Multimedia and Software Reviews

instances the originals cannot be recon- structed by the reader from the World Beat reading. References to footnotes are not superscripted, and italics and diacritical marks are not respected in the CD. One wonders why the University of California Press was willing to grant a copyright li- cense to Medio without reserving some editorial oversight in the process.

The list of music categories encountered in the "Discography" pop-up menu is in- dicative of the information content of the CD-ROM outside of the scanned book: bluegrass, blues, Cajun, Celtic, children, country, easy listening, folk, gospel, jazz, miscellaneous, New Age, rap, reggae, rock 'n' roll, and world. There are 3,122 album titles listed in the "world" category, and very few of them represent the traditional musics from their respective cultures.

The "Discography" icon also brings up "the annotated All Music Guide with infor- mation on 20,000 albums and 10,000 artists and performers from around the world." This resource is not really very useful de- spite the World Beat claims to the contrary. The listings here are only somewhat alpha- betical, due in part to inconsistency in per- former, ensemble, and album names in the All Music Guide. Listings may be selected by music category, or alphabetically from the letters at the bottom of the "Discography" window. The analytics, when they exist at all, are more promotional than they are academically robust. And when the All Mu- sic Guide is already available and updatable on a variety of on-line services one wonders why the decision was made to include it as part of the World Beat database at all.

The final music resource icon activates World Beat's "Music Studio" where the user can access and edit MIDI files representing "many different musical styles from around the world." The MIDI files are standard MIDI Type 1 files, and they re- quire a user synthesizer or sound card that conforms to this MIDI specification, as most recent hardware does, in order to be most useful. Overall, the examples are mu- sically mundane and quantized, but the pop beginner capable of reading music can learn from them with some study and anal- ysis. These are the same sound files that accompany the spinning globe in the launch screen, and the quality of the syn-

thesizer sounds in these sequences does not measure up to 1990s standards. The jerky red scrolling cursor helps to orient the user visually, but it does not track the mu- sic accurately. The user can modify the tempo and start/stop the music using the "Tempo" slider, which also includes met- ronome markings that reflect user changes in speed. The volume of many of the en- semble instruments can be changed using volume sliders on the left side of the screen, although the sliders are not labeled and visual alignment is poor, so that the user cannot really tell which instrument's vol- ume is being altered except by experimen- tation. In some instances all track volumes anomalously revert to their initial defaults at the end of a four-bar sequence, even though the volume sliders continue to in- dicate the changes made by the user. In other instances the new volume settings are retained.

The concept of providing raw materials that the user can edit and otherwise modify in creative ways is a good one. One only wishes for more substantive raw materials in terms of both sound integrity and style authenticity. In the "Music Studio," the "Style" window takes the user to a notated musical example, instead of text and/or video. The overall volume level of the "Mu- sic Studio" examples can reduce without explanation to noticeably below that of the remainder of the CD. However, if the user returns first to the music tour examples that play with the launch screen and then to the "Music Studio," the volume level of the latter examples returns to normal lev- els. Some of the musical transcriptions are problematic rhythmically and/or melodi- cally based on the playback from the CD, and the hard left/right pan for all sounds in some of the excerpts is annoying.

The four function piano keys in the lower left corner of -he launch screen in- clude "Back," "Search," "Help," and "Op- tions." The "Back" key returns the user to the previously used screen. The "Search" key produces an index that is nonalpha- betic, for some unknown reason, and can- not be reconfigured by the user to be so. The index begins by listing countries in the following order: Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, Mongolia, China, India, Pakistan, Russia, etc. Although the range of geographic

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NOTES, December 1995

areas covered in the CD is laudable, a number of countries are not found, includ- ing Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Turkey, Cambodia, Chile, Syria, and many others. A search for Brazil turns up "Frevo." Egypt turns up "Al-Jeel," a type of Egyptian pop- ular dance music in the 1970's. Peru re- turns "Andean Festival," which turns out to be a kind of smallish carnival accom- panied by an out-of-tune band of West- ern brass instruments. The Performance Screen "Help" dialogue box claims the CD contains video, audio, or text descriptions of "over 150 musical styles from around the globe," but the user should be aware that the term "style" is being used carelessly here. The "Options" key displays printing options and a few user preference options available at each screen. The author claims that it also provides access to Medio Prod- uct Support information, but it does not.

The text outside of the scanned book is occasionally informative, but one also en- counters information that the unsuspecting user would not necessarily know is erro- neous. Khoomi singing is described as a "a centuries-old form of overtone singing in which the performer can articulate two or three contrasting tones at a time." Within the text accompanying the "Chopi Ma- rimba Ensemble," the author says there is more to African music than drums: "... there's a lot more: flutes, trumpets, harps, fiddles, lutes and other melodic instru- ments have been played on the African continent since the first people emerged there one or two million years ago." In the "Mbube" excerpt: "Large groups of about nine men sing in a predominately slow speed to create complex harmonies and amazing vocal textures." The excerpt is nothing more than 1960s Western church- choir-influenced, conservative, call-and- response singing found in various parts of South Africa. And finally, "[Gamelan] en- sembles often include a few stringed in- struments, bamboo flutes, and/or vocalists." Later in the same commentary: "There are two modern tuning systems used in game- lan music throughout Indonesia. One tun- ing system is composed of five tones (pelog), and one of seven tones (slendro)." The opposite, of course, is true.

Syntax and spelling in the text outside the Musics of Many Cultures book is gen-

erally good. "Mbira," however, is also spelled "mibira," "rhythm" can be "rhyths," "cumulative" may be "cummulative," and "its" and "it's" seem to be interchangeable to the author. Movie size defaults to quar- ter screen, and picture fidelity is generally good in this format. Eight-bit pixellation contraindicates wide use of the "Full screen" option provided. The graphics are colorful overall, and the user interface is friendly and intuitive. Access times are sat- isfactory in general, sometimes very fast, although sometimes as slow as eight to fif- teen seconds when accessing the CD-ROM drive for large blocks of data. Other bright lights in the CD include the Australian did- jeridu excerpt-the description is informa- tive, and the audio clip, played by the Aus- tralian virtuoso Alan Dargin, is possibly the most impressive on the CD.

Overall, Medio Multimedia, Inc. should be applauded for having the courage to publish in the CD-ROM medium. Tradi- tional music publishers with far greater fi- nancial resources continue to shy away from powerful contemporary instructional technologies like CD-ROM despite an- nouncements from IBM, Sony, Philips, and Toshiba concerning the next-generation, multi-layer, red- and blue-laser CD-ROM drives. These drives will not only play back a full-length, full-color motion picture, with high-quality audio and multiple lan- guage tracks, but will also allow the user to configure, store, and revise multiple giga- bytes of data on compact discs that will be erasable. Reportedly, the new read/write players will be priced only slightly higher than current CD-ROM drives, and they will be backwardly compatible-allowing them to play even current audio CDs. What Me- dio Multimedia lacked was not the courage to venture into the new instructional do- main, but the necessary content expertise to make the product academically viable. Perhaps if there is to be a version 2.0 of World Beat, the company will consider pool- ing its internal technical resources with high-level external scholarship to produce the kinds of academically robust CD-ROMs that colleges and universities want and need if they are to remain competitive in the twenty-first century.

GILBERT L. BLOUNT University of Southern California

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