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Oscar Hernandez, Eric Klein, Puck Lowe, and Rose Khadabchi.
From Eugene, Oregon, I'm Jess Burns.
And this is Radio Station WBAI New York, the time is seven o'clock, time once again for
Off the Hook.
The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall.
I cut myself while shaving, now I can't move.
We couldn't get much worse, but if they could, they would, Bundy Lee Bond, for the best, expect
the worst.
I hope that's understood, Bundy Lee Bond.
And good evening to everybody, the program is Off the Hook, Emanuel Goldstein here with
you on this Wednesday evening, joined this week by Mike, and over on the other side of
the room is not Kevin.
Hello.
Down in Philadelphia is Bernie S.
No.
Greetings from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.
Oh, you're right.
Wilkes-Barre.
Wilkes-Barre, the city that's spelled weird.
Yes.
And your phone, I have to say, Bernie, I'm glad we hung in there because your phone sounds
so much better now.
I guess it was just a question of getting to know it, getting to use it more and more,
but I got to say, your phone has never sounded better.
Well, unfortunately, it's not my current PCS cell phone, it's a landline with a cheap general
electric plastic phone.
A landline?
What is that, a landline?
Is that a new company, Landline?
Yes.
It's a new wireless carrier called Landline.
Well, I suggest you use it all the time because you sound so much better now.
Sometimes the oldest technology is the best.
It really is.
There's no question about that.
Wow.
Okay, so we also have joining us in the studio Lexicon.
How are you doing?
Hello.
And is that Rob T. Firefly over there?
Yes.
Good evening.
How are you doing?
Working on Hope stuff, both of you guys.
And we have a special guest in the studio who we're going to introduce in just a moment
or two.
But first, let's...
You know what, Bernie?
You got wind noise now.
Oh, that's just me breathing heavy into the phone.
I'll have to adjust my breathing.
Yeah, try to contain yourself.
We have a couple of news stories, but we have also a bunch of announcements and hopefully
some listener phone calls.
Oh, and tonight is a special non-fundraising edition of the show.
Yes, we are encouraging you not to call.
So if you call the number, what happens?
I think it'll just ring.
I don't think there are any...
Anyway, check Tally Room and see if we left any volunteers in there from last week.
That happens sometimes because they lock the door and you can't get out from the inside.
So I don't have to say the number?
Don't, because...
I don't have to tell people how important WBA is?
It'll just give them false hope that they can get out of that room.
We don't have the key.
No, BEI, of course, is important.
We want to really thank the people who called in over the last four weeks.
Unprecedented.
We were on for four weeks in a row asking for money.
We made over $2,000 every single week.
In fact, one week we made over $4,000.
I think last week we made about $3,000.
So we did...
Last week I thought we made like $2,600.
Was it $2,600 exactly?
Did it keep going up?
I think it was very close.
Yeah, because they keep adding after we leave sometimes.
So when I see $2,600, that's cool and all that, but I just have the feeling it went
up a little bit more.
But yeah, we did...
By anybody's expectations, we did amazing.
And special thanks to all our listeners out there.
Now, I know we've gotten a bunch of emails from people who are concerned about various
things and let me just assure people that we're doing everything possible to make sure
that premiums get out to you.
The last fundraiser, pretty much all the premiums have gone out with the exception of books
and TV beguns.
We're still working on that.
That will be getting to everybody who pledged.
As far as hope tickets from this fundraiser, I know there's a worry about getting them
in time.
Don't worry.
You will get them in time.
We will get the names fairly soon.
You can speed up the process.
If you paid by credit card, obviously that goes faster.
And if you didn't pay by credit card, pay now and that way your name is on the list
of people who paid so that we can get you the tickets.
I was just going to say, you have to pay your pledge for you to get your ticket by hope.
Yeah.
Did we not make that clear?
I guess the pledge is important, but actually paying the pledge is something that we really
value.
So by all means, fulfill those pledges.
And other people who ordered things, I guess, should be getting it over the next weeks.
Yeah.
I mean, we're working as hard as we can.
And in the end, everybody always gets what they're looking for one way or another.
But the hope tickets, obviously, because they're time sensitive, the conference is July 18th
through 20th.
Obviously, we want to make sure people get those in time.
And there is time.
So don't panic yet.
Okay.
On the subject of hope, well, we have some...
I don't know if it's good news or distressing news.
I guess it's sort of a combination of both.
I think it's good news.
Well, it is for us.
It's bad news for some people, but not for us.
Not for some people that didn't move their asses fast enough.
But it turns out the hotel is sold out.
At least they're sold out at the special rate for the Hope Conference.
And the regular rate is about 100 bucks a night more.
So that's a significant chunk of change.
And if you didn't register for the hotel, well, you can't do that anymore.
You can still get a room, but not at that rate.
And what that means is that a lot of people have been registering and that this is turning
out to be something really big, probably because of all the things that we're doing,
one of which we're going to be talking about tonight.
There are alternatives that we're looking into.
Mike, you want to give a hint as to what those might be?
Other hotels in the area?
Is that vague enough?
That's pretty vague.
And right now, we're looking to get other hotels to give us a deal for special rates
on rooms.
The problem is...
I don't know if you've looked at this, but hotel rooms in New York City have gone through
the roof.
I mean, the rates are insane.
And apparently, they're in demand.
Apparently, people are okay with that because they just keep buying them.
And as long as that happens, it's very hard to get really low rates, but we're trying.
And we're also asking for people who are local to New York, maybe there are solutions that
you can think of.
Maybe you can share your place with somebody from out of town.
There's all sorts of things.
We suggest going to the Hope Forums, and I think, Alexis, is there a section there for
people to discuss this kind of thing?
Yeah, there are a couple of sections for travel and getting information about the city.
It's also on the wiki.
The forum is talk.hope.net, and the wiki is wiki.hope.net.
Okay.
And hopefully, everybody will find a place somewhere.
Of course, a lot of people wind up crashing in the downstairs area in the midst of all
the activity.
Is it obvious that wiki is spelled W-I-K-I, or do we have to say that?
Well...
I didn't know at all.
Yeah.
All right.
I don't know how many ways you can spell it, but, you know, we can make it spelled any
way you want, and it'll still go there.
All right.
Okay.
So, talk.hope.net, wiki.hope.net, more information on that, and, of course, www.hope.net for
the latest information.
Any exciting news that happened this last week or in the weeks that we haven't really
been talking about news that much?
There's been a lot of exciting news.
So, there's this big story coming out of Germany now.
Deutsche Telekom, the incumbent telephone provider, has been spying on its employees.
They've been tapping their phones, which I guess is easy for them because they're
the phone company.
This is the same company that owns T-Mobile.
Yeah.
All right.
Deutsche Telekom.
They have this nice purple color in their name.
And they were spying on their employees.
They were spying on their board members.
They were accused of tracking journalists' mobile phone signals, and it just keeps going
on and on, this scandal.
And just today, I guess, it was revealed that some of the spies who work for Deutsche Telekom
also work for Deutsche Bahn, which is the German railway company, spying on its employees.
And it just is kind of amazing.
What exactly are they looking for when they're spying on these people?
They're trying to figure out, I guess, who was leaking information to the press.
As to who's spying on whom.
Yeah.
It's very circular.
The detective agency is called Network Deutschland.
And they just, I guess, go through everyone's telephone records trying to figure out who
called who.
Okay.
Well, why not?
Well, speaking of spies, I have an interesting story here.
This actually just was revealed pretty recently.
Researchers secretly tracked locations of 100,000 people outside the United States.
That's all they can tell us, is that it's somewhere not in the United States.
And they did this through their cell phone use.
And they reached some conclusions.
One of the conclusions was that most people rarely stray more than a few miles from home.
They just sort of stay put.
Now, the first of its kind study by Northeastern University, so it's an American university
doing this, raises privacy and ethical questions for its monitoring methods, which would be
illegal here in the United States, supposedly.
It also yielded somewhat surprising results that reveal how little people move around
in their daily lives.
Nearly three-quarters of those studied mainly stayed within a 20-mile wide circle for half
a year.
Can we say that that's true of us?
Do we stay within 20 miles of our homes?
No.
For half a year?
For half a year?
No.
Probably not.
I try to get as far away as possible.
And that suits a lot of people.
The scientists would not disclose where the study was done, only describing the location
as an industrialized nation.
So maybe it's the same story you just read.
Might be the same exact people spying on cell phone users as well.
One of the other things about the story, the kind of head of the company that's been doing
this spying is a former Stasi agent, so apparently he's well-trained.
Yeah, well, of course they get the best of training as far as that goes.
Now what they did was they used cell phone towers to track individuals' locations whenever
they made or received phone calls and sent or received text messages over the six-month
period.
In a second set of records, researchers took another 206 cell phones that had tracking
devices in them and got records for their locations every two hours over a week's time
period.
The study was based on cell phone records from a private company whose name also was
not disclosed.
Well, if we knew the name of the company, we'd probably know what country they operate
in.
Yeah, probably.
Probably.
But wow, that's something.
You know, you can be the subject of a monitoring experiment without ever knowing that that's
the case.
I mean, the people who were the subjects, they don't know, and they're not being told.
They don't even know it's their country.
Emmanuel?
Yes.
Wasn't this Northwestern University that conducted this study?
Northeastern University.
Northeastern University.
Is that a U.S. university?
Yes.
They're in Boston.
But they conducted the study outside the borders of the U.S. to avoid violating U.S. law.
Is that right?
That's what I read this as because, as we said, this would be illegal in the United
States.
But apparently, well, okay, let's find the countries that it's not illegal in.
What countries allow this kind of thing?
Do most of them?
Industrialized nations?
I would think not.
Most countries have stronger privacy protections than the United States.
So it shouldn't be hard to find the country where this is.
Of course, if they don't tell anybody, then they might just get away with it because nobody
knows what they did.
Maybe it's a country that's only 20 miles wide.
Did they think of that?
You mean like Liechtenstein or something?
Yeah.
All right.
Well, anything's possible.
If you know who was responsible for this, please let us know, and we'll let the world
know because that's what we do.
Emmanuel?
Yes.
Go ahead, Bernie.
Well, it's a good story.
It's a whole week-long of cell phone spying stories.
This one is actually a good story, or at least good news, semi-good news, out of Italy, where
the counterterrorism division of their government did some cell phone traffic analysis just
looking at cell phone records, who called whom and when, around the time that some Islamic
extremist, Islamic leader in Italy was apparently kidnapped through one of these CIA extraordinary
renditions, and the Italian intelligence agency that does counterterrorism, they were able
to piece together, just using simple traffic analysis, a very detailed picture of some
22, I believe, CIA agents who participated in this extraordinary rendition, which was
illegal under Italian law.
In fact, the Italian government had this extremist under surveillance themselves and were conducting
their own investigation of him when the CIA allegedly swooped in and just kidnapped the
guy and took him to one of these secret prisons somewhere to be interrogated using ostensibly
non-torturous techniques.
We have 22 U.S. CIA agents who are now indicted under Italian law, and there's a trial going
on right now in Milan of these, actually 26 CIA agents and related U.S. government agents,
and none of them showed up for the trial because they would be thrown in jail if they
crossed into Italy's borders.
But it's really interesting.
There's a really good article in the LA Times about this.
If you just look on the LA Times website and just search for Milan and cell phone and CIA,
you can read this article written by Tracy Wilkinson, and it's really amazing how much
information the Italian government was able to piece together using, not by listening
to any calls, but just simply doing traffic analysis, which I found interesting because
that's exactly what the NSA does to American citizens without a warrant now.
They massively vacuum clean, in a vacuum cleaner approach, suck down all this data about who
calls whom and when and how often, and you can really build an amazing picture of what's
going on in people with interpersonal relationships, and you can build organizational structures
by analyzing these traffic patterns.
Interesting stuff.
It was interesting how this trial turns out, too, with all these CIA agents being held
on trial in absentia.
Fascinating stuff, definitely.
And also, one other story I'd like to focus on for a moment, which actually happened a
little bit, a couple of weeks ago.
Advanced 3G cellular service in the world's most tightly controlled and secretive country
has turned another chapter with the start of network trials.
Yes, cellular carrier Arescom said recently it has completed the first 3G call on a WCDMA,
that's Wideband Code Division Multiple Access, trial network in North Korea, and is working
towards a commercial launch there later this year.
Now Arescom is based in Egypt.
They said in January that a 25-year exclusive license to offer 3G cellular service in the
country had been awarded to Chio Technology, a joint venture in which Arescom holds a
75% stake, and Korea Post and Telecommunications holds the remaining 25%.
A full commercial service is scheduled to begin in the second half of the year.
North Korea is, of course, the world's only communist dynasty that keeps tight control
of its people.
Almost all citizens are forbidden from leaving the country, and there are controls on internal
movements of people into the capital city of Pyongyang.
I was there.
I saw it.
Populations in the country have prompted hundreds of thousands over the last decade to risk
their lives and flee to neighboring China.
Not quite sure what this has to do with the phone system.
Almost total government control of the population means phone calls are restricted and subject
to routine monitoring, according to humanitarian aid groups that monitor North Korea.
Now a GSM cell phone network was previously launched in the country, but access was restricted
in 2004, and it's now thought to be used by a handful of elite in the country.
I thought that was pretty fascinating that they're actually launching it.
We don't have 3G in this country, do we?
We do.
Do we?
How do we connect to that?
The technology can actually be 3G or third-generation cellular technology.
I can refer to what's called EVDO or WCDMA, which you just mentioned is available in North
Korea, and HSPDA or HSDPA, I forget which is the acronym for the GSM version of this.
It's ironic that North Korea now is building a network or is now actually testing an installed
network using a wireless telephone technology that's superior to what most Americans use
now.
Most Americans are not using wideband CDMA or the GSM equivalent, which basically allows
very high-speed data to be sent in and out of your cell phone, and a lot of other interesting
features.
I just find it amusing that North Korea now has a network that's superior to what most
Americans are using.
I just wonder if very many North Korean citizens will actually have access to this, or if this
is just something meant for the government elite and various other VIPs in that country.
It's probably just for their version of their Politburo and other important VIP people.
When I was there, we had to relinquish our cell phones as soon as we got to the country.
I was able to keep my cell phone on by accident in the airplane, certainly didn't mean to
do that.
When we landed, I saw that it was in fact receiving a signal from a North Korean network.
I just got a number of the network, I think it was 02 or something like that.
I did try to sign on just to see what would happen, and it was refused, so I wasn't able
to actually make a phone call, but it was there.
Of course, in addition to political control over who can use this network, there's also
a question of just who can afford to use the network, so similar to the situation in Cuba,
which I guess has recently announced that anyone who can afford one is now allowed to
buy a cell phone, but at 50 cents a minute, not many Cubans can afford it.
And President Bush announced that Americans will soon be allowed to send cell phones to
Cubans.
This is a very poorly thought out program.
I don't understand it myself, but apparently he hopes this move will push the communist
regime to increase freedom of expression for Cuban citizens.
Bush says, and let me just stress that this is Bush saying this, Cubans are now allowed
to purchase mobile phones, DVD players, and computers, and they have been told that they
will be able to purchase toasters and other basic appliances in 2010.
Oh, come on, what is this?
They can't purchase toasters?
Is this for real?
Does Bush really believe this?
Is this any semblance of reality here?
Anyway, Bush continued on, because he does that too.
If the Cuban regime is serious about improving life for the Cuban people by implementing
toasters and other such modern amenities, it will take steps necessary to make these
changes meaningful.
And if the Cuban people can be trusted with mobile phones, they should be trusted to speak
freely in public.
Wow.
So basically, now we can send cell phones to Cuba.
I'm not quite sure how that works.
It's not clear what they will do with them.
I mean, if you just stick your Verizon phone in the mail and wait the six weeks that it
takes for mail to get to Cuba, it won't really do anything once it gets there.
It won't work.
Yeah, of course, Mike, you and I went to Cuba a few years ago.
And we made some phone calls there.
Well, we made phone calls, but what worked and what didn't, do you remember?
You had a phone with a foreign SIM card in it, a European SIM card, and I think we could
use that at a very expensive rate.
But we couldn't use the American one because they didn't have a contract with them or something
like that.
Right.
So the Cuban cell phone network is mostly GSM these days, but they are not allowed to
enter into roaming agreements with U.S. carriers, of course, that would be a violation of the
U.S. law.
Emmanuel?
Yes, go ahead, Bernie.
I actually called the White House when I heard this story the day it broke.
You're the person that calls the White House when you hear news stories.
Well, yeah, because I was really interested in this.
I know some people in Cuba, and I was interested in sending them a cell phone, but I didn't
want to waste my time and their time and my money sending a U.S. carrier cell phone to
Cuba if it wasn't going to work.
And as you found out, it will not work unless the U.S. cell phone carrier has a roaming
agreement with the Cuban cell phone carrier.
And there's only one.
It's controlled by the...
It's a Cuba cell.
Is that who it is, MLC?
You can call me Mike, but the Telco is called the Texa, or Texa is the Cuban telecom, and
they own something which is like a division of theirs, which I think is indeed Cuba cell.
What's interesting is that Bush's pronouncement is absolutely meaningless unless he is also
requiring U.S. carriers to establish roaming agreements with the sole U.S. cellular telephone
carrier.
Well, Bernie, couldn't the phone just be sent and then replaced with a SIM that does have
a contract?
No, that's the other thing, because virtually every cell phone you buy from a U.S. carrier
is subsidized by that carrier.
And even after you've met your contractual agreement to use it for two years or whatever,
the handsets invariably remain locked from a software standpoint.
Well, yes, but they can be unlocked, and I'm sure there are people in Cuba that know how
to unlock cell phones.
Well, perhaps, but that's pushing it a lot.
I mean, if you have a family member in Cuba, or a friend or whatever, and you send a cell
phone there that's locked to a U.S. carrier electronically and integrally locked to, say,
T-Mobile or to AT&T, which are both GSM carriers in the U.S., odds are the person you send
to in Cuba isn't going to know how to unlock the cell phone, which involves some electronic
tricks and so forth.
Sometimes it's as simple as knowing how to punch in a certain code into the handset.
Other times you need to connect it to a computer or special hardware to unlock it.
The whole thing, as Mike pointed out, is very poorly thought out, or maybe it was very well
thought out, and the Bush administration knew that this was simply political rhetoric that
would come of nothing, because they full well knew that as long as they didn't lift
the embargo against U.S. cell phone carriers establishing Rome agreements with the sole
government-maintained, government-operated Cuban cell phone carrier, that none of these
U.S. cell phones would even work there.
So unless you send an unlocked GSM phone to Cuba, it will not work there.
Even if you send an unlocked GSM phone to Cuba, which is actually not as hard as you're
making it out if you have the foresight to do so, it's very expensive to operate that
unlocked GSM phone in Cuba.
It was certainly well beyond the means of most ordinary Cubans.
Unless they have a carrier there that's affordable.
They have none there that's affordable, even by U.S. standards, let alone by Cuban standards.
But maybe that's part of the plan, that they're going to start operating a carrier that average
people could use.
Oh, that would be nice.
Let me just finish up on this.
The CDMA phone I brought, did that work down there?
I don't think so.
I don't think so either.
It might have picked up a signal from the States or something.
It's pretty far from the States.
It is pretty far.
It's like 80 miles, but who knows?
But yeah, the GSM phone from Europe did work, but not the American one.
Okay, so that's pretty much our roundup of the various phone networks and progress in
the world.
Fascinating.
And we're always willing to share information.
Okay, now getting back to the upcoming HOPE conference.
We have all sorts of special things planned, as we've talked about in the last few weeks
and will continue to talk about.
Full details will be posted at www.hope.net.
Now tonight in the studio, we have a special guest.
Musician Peter Kern is with us, and Peter is a specialist in digital music.
And I guess, Peter, let me just introduce you, and maybe you could tell us something
about what digital music is all about, why we should be excited, and how this relates
to HOPE.
Absolutely.
Go right ahead.
Well, I'm both a musician and a visualist, and we run two sites.
One's called createdigitalmusic.com, and the other's createdigitalmotion.com.
And they are blogs and communities of people who are not only interested in making music
and making visuals, but in finding new tools and building new tools to be expressive with.
So we have people building their own electronics and writing their own software and hacking
the stuff that they have.
And I think we're sort of part of a whole movement of people who are changing the relationship
that they have with the technology they use to make their music and art.
So for this event, we get to take some of those people who we usually see only on YouTube
and bring them into the Hotel Pennsylvania and get to experience their performances live.
When you say that they're using technology, is it unusual technology to make music with?
Is it something we're just not used to seeing?
Well, a number of them, it's pretty unusual.
On the music side, we have people working with the electromagnetic signals from plants.
You've got a duo working with house plants.
Really?
Wait, music from house plants?
Yeah.
Now, this is one piece that I haven't seen in person yet, but I'm told that they are
reading the electromagnetic signals that come out of plants.
Of course, all of us have electromagnetic fields associated with our bodies, but in
this case, they're using plants.
Are these people coming to the conference?
They're coming to the conference.
Oh, my God.
This is amazing.
Wow.
House plants.
I don't know if you ever heard of the Vienna Vegetable Orchestra.
That's right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But we played them on this show.
In fact, I saw them live in Vienna.
And that was...
I know it's kind of controversial.
Some people ran screaming out of the room, but I thought it was pretty damn cool.
But it was musically controversial.
No, that...
Well, I guess...
It wasn't vegetable rights people.
No, it wasn't that at all.
It was basically people saying, I can't believe you're playing this on the radio and covering
their ears.
But I thought it was incredible.
I thought the sound that they were able to get out of carrots and celery and things like
that was...
But that was completely analog.
This is digital music.
This is digital.
Digital.
Yeah.
Digital house plants.
Digital house plants.
Well, it goes from analog.
It starts out as analog.
It starts out with the plants, and then it gets...
They get attached sensors to the plants, and then take readings from the sensors, and then
that gets fed into custom software, and somehow that becomes music and visuals.
Wow.
This is incredible.
Now, we're planning a digital music event for Friday night, July 18th, at the conference.
Is that right?
That's right.
Alexi, do you have any more details on how that's going to be run, how long it's going
to be, when it starts?
Yeah.
After the seminars wrap up on Friday night...
They never wrap up on Friday night.
Well, yeah.
They keep going until after midnight.
So you guys are going to be doing this...
Well, we'll just start playing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then we'll just keep turning up the volume until it stops.
Well, you're on the second floor, I believe.
Right?
Is this on the second floor?
Yeah.
We're on the mezzanine level.
I'm down on the second floor.
And the talks are on the 18th floor, so you're going to have to turn it up pretty loud to
get to them.
Right.
But I have no doubt you will.
We're going to start at about 11 o'clock at night, and I think you have six artists?
More than that now.
More than that now.
And you might get even more than that after the show tonight, when we give out the email
address.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's possible.
We're very much welcoming other artists to come and participate.
This is all part of our Radio Statler project, which is the radio station at the conference.
We're going to do a basically three-day-long live show from the mezzanine level in the
conference, middle of the expo floor.
We're broadcasting from there over the internet to hopefully thousands of people, and we're
just going to give a voice that's alternative to the people on the stage to make sure that
everybody who has something to say at the conference gets that opportunity.
Kind of like a running documentary of what's going on.
Pretty much, yeah.
All right.
That sounds like a lot of fun as well.
Now, Peter, I know we have a track queued up here that's an example of some of the digital
music that we'll be presenting.
You want to give us an intro on what this is?
Yeah, the first track is one of mine.
So it's not vegetable produced.
What kind of things are you playing?
In this case, my music is computer-based, and I like to use different controllers.
I actually don't know what I'll be using yet in July, but I'm working with different controllers,
and we're still trying to get the data out of a Wii balance board.
In fact, we've got some other people with Wii remote controllers too.
But I'm a keyboardist by training, so I tend to start from that and add more exotic controllers
from there.
And the Wii, that's not saying small.
You're saying the Nintendo Wii, right?
The Nintendo Wii, yeah.
That's the kind you play tennis with or something, right?
You make all these fake movements with your hands.
Absolutely.
It's a sort of exciting moment for the music community, because digital musicians have
been doing this kind of stuff for a while.
What's inside the Wii remote is accelerometer and tilt sensors, infrared sensors, and that's
all stuff that musicians were pretty familiar with as ways of creating more expressive controllers.
So instead of having a few buttons to press, that you could actually make gestures and
move around.
So you could play the drums with the Wii controller.
Absolutely.
Like you're actually playing the drums.
So you can make other gestures and move them around.
And for people who DJ and scratch with the Wii controllers.
And there was already kind of a tradition of this among musicians.
But what Nintendo did was make it mainstream.
And they also made it really cheap to pick one of these things up.
And they made it a standard Bluetooth device, which means you just plug in any computer
and you can talk to the Wii remote.
So it's kind of exciting for musicians that a big company like Nintendo was acknowledging
some of the stuff that we've been doing in the music community and bringing it to larger
audiences and not just music audiences.
So what controller were you using when you made the piece we're about to hear?
Well, this is mostly me playing on keyboards and messing around with software.
But I'm always coming up with different interfaces for re-digesting musical materials that I
make so that it can turn into a live performance.
All right.
Let's listen to a bit of this.
Is there a title to this track?
Not this one.
OK.
So no title on this track.
Send suggestions to Peter at createdigitalmusic.com.
And this is Peter Kern on everything.
Is anybody else doing anything here?
It's all me.
Yeah.
Well, no.
That's not entirely true.
The New York Concert of Vials gets sampled in this.
So there's some...
New York Concert of Vials.
Renaissance and Baroque string instruments get sampled and brought into the 21st century
digital domain in here.
OK.
Let's listen to a bit.
All right.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Baby, love me like this.
Baby, love me like this.
Okay.
This is the time when you stand up and you scream and tell me
that I'm playing the wrong track.
We were just listening to this and I'm saying,
wow, this sounds really a lot like Kraftwerk.
This is something that was in there by accident.
I'm sorry.
It is Kraftwerk, yeah.
I know it's Kraftwerk.
I had one question about it.
And I'm sure Kraftwerk was very interested that you were
playing off their pieces.
Well, that's right.
Now we'll find out if Kraftwerk is listening.
All right.
I got to cross out all the comments I was about to make
about this.
If I'm really secretly Kraftwerk.
Was that off the Pocket Calculator album?
It doesn't matter, Bernie, does it?
Because it's not what we intended to play.
What we intend to play right now is the real sound of Peter
Curran here on WBAI.
So what we were saying before applies
to what you're going to hear, not what you did here.
Yeah.
It's all digital.
It's all ones and zeros.
So they're all the same.
OK.
Here we go.
I'm sorry.
This time it wasn't up.
So I have to stop it and start it again.
Because I don't want to start in the middle.
I'm sorry.
So just take a moment while the CD player cues up.
Here we go.
OK.
OK.
OK.
OK.
OK.
OK.
OK.
OK.
OK.
OK.
Wow.
You know, you really should give that a title,
because that's pretty cool.
I was going to originally speak over it.
But there were just so many things going on there,
I kind of wanted to just listen to it all.
Well, that's encouraging.
Thanks.
Yeah, no, it's part of a larger set.
So that's part of why it doesn't have a title.
Very nice.
Peter Curran there playing, what kinds of things
were you playing?
I guess it's safe to say I was playing computer.
And when I play live, lately I've
Lately, I've been doing a lot of music and visuals
simultaneously live.
Some of the other folks we have playing are doing it in duos,
where the musician is coupled up with a visualist as a live.
You can do this live?
I can, yeah.
Because it sounds like a lot of different pieces being
overlaid onto each other.
But you can actually control all kinds of different percussion
and synthesizer sounds.
Yeah, absolutely.
And it enters a different kind of area
in that instead of just playing an instrument,
you play a meta instrument where you
can manipulate aspects of a composition,
aspects of a piece of music in real time.
So some of this stuff may be prepared in advance
in some way, kind of like samples.
But you can manipulate the larger musical piece.
Have you played live before?
I have.
And this will not be my first musical debut.
What kind of audience comes to performances like this?
You know, it depends.
And also it depends, we have this conversation a lot
on what city people are in, what country people are in.
But here, you know, we get all kinds of people.
And New York's a really cool scene in that way,
in that the audiences for music are very eclectic.
And particularly if you do it on a Tuesday night or something,
you can get people who are happy to come out and experience
lots of different kinds of music.
So that's absolutely the vision of this event.
I always have to try to convince people
to play shorter sets than they might be used to,
because we do sort of a variety show format.
Where here we've got people doing everything
from kind of 8-bit game-influenced rock
to 8-bit music a couple of hopes ago.
Oh, excellent.
And there weren't very many people in the audience.
I don't think we promoted it quite as well
as we're promoting this.
But it was fascinating to see people playing.
What kind of machines were they playing?
It was a Game Boy.
Yeah, a Game Boy.
They're actually making music.
I'm gesturing like a Game Boy like the audience can see me.
But yeah.
Well, it's fascinating.
We have any 8-bit presentations planned?
We do.
And we've got a guy named Derek Bell, who has actually
blended the 8-bit stuff with them.
Wait, now I think I'm talking about two different things
at once.
No, we've got a guy named Joey from Philadelphia,
who plays a guitar, but he plays it through an 8-bit pedal
and then uses a foot pedal to play a Game Boy.
So instead of actually picking up a Game Boy,
he uses his feet, just like a guitarist would
with a foot controller normally, and triggers
these vintage game systems and stuff
he's programmed into those.
We've got people doing visuals as well.
A guy, Don Miller, has a Nintendo Entertainment System
and a Commodore 64, which he's written software for.
Also a guy named Paris has written
software for doing visuals live with a game machine.
And so these guys are repurposing this game hardware
and using it for visuals as well as music.
So we've got that.
We've got a guy playing a sort of what
he calls the Mutant Trumpet, which is an acoustic trumpet
that he combines with software that he's written to make it
into an electronic instrument.
So we really cover quite a range.
It's all part of Digital Music Night,
the first night of the Hope Conference in New York City
on July 18.
Lex, this is something that I know
you've been involved in for quite some time.
Where did the idea come from?
Well, actually, one of our friends, Openfly,
suggested that Peter does really cool stuff
and that we should get him involved after we decide
to do a radio station.
And then it turned to this whole concert thing
where we're going to do a whole night of music
from Peter's inspirations and all his friends coming in.
This is what happens.
You come up with one idea, and then it
mushrooms into another idea.
And before you know it, you have all sorts of things going on.
Absolutely.
That's kind of how the RFID project got started
and this got started.
And the Knock Knock is going to be cool.
I don't think I've ever seen so many projects
for one of our conferences all running at the same time.
But we certainly have.
And that's one of the reasons why the hotel sold out,
all these people are fascinated by this.
And we have a whole lot of really interesting speakers
as well.
And it's not over yet.
We're going to have a bunch more announcements
of fun things coming up.
But insofar as Digital Music Night,
you guys might want to start earlier than 11.
It sounds like you have already an impressive lineup.
And who knows, is it still open for people
who might want to get involved?
Yeah.
Yeah, we might be able to fit a couple of people in.
We can also double up and do two nights of it
if we really get that much interest in it.
You can email us at projects at hope.net to get involved
in that.
And I'll pass that on to Peter.
And he can figure out what's going on.
And yeah, we're going to do a lot of fun stuff during Hope.
So definitely something not to be missed.
No, definitely, definitely not.
And Lexicon?
Go ahead, Bernie.
I just want to ask, this whole performance,
obviously it'll be advantageous to be there
for this live performance and to actually witness it.
But it'll also be streamed live over the internet.
Is that right?
Yes, that's right.
Over the radio statler.
So that's for our listeners overseas who can't make it,
for those overseas listeners who can't make it for whatever
reason or elsewhere, otherwise unable to make it to Hope.
That's something you can listen to from wherever you are.
They have planes that go over the seas.
They do, but some people are a little upset about having
to be fingerprinted and photographed upon.
You know, you've got to get over it because, friends,
this is the future.
And we're going to be fingerprinted and scanned
and have all our vitals taken at every possible opportunity.
You've got Deutsche Telekom spying on us.
We can't let it interfere with our fun.
And we'll have good stories to tell
about what you said to the person fingerprinting you
or something like that.
Or maybe you got his fingerprint, too.
I don't know.
But you can't let it bother you so much
that you stop doing things.
Or it could be really expensive for some people, too,
to come overseas.
But we try to cater to everybody in the world.
Keep in mind, the US dollar is at its lowest point ever,
I think.
So it's practically free for you to come over here
and spend in US dollars.
I don't really understand economics.
But apparently, that's what I'm being told
by my European friends, is that they
like to come to the States a lot because the US
dollar is so valueless.
Hooray.
At least they stopped with saying only the US
dollar was valueless.
It sounds bad when I say it like that.
But you've got to look for the lemonade and the lemons
or whatever.
OK, so Digital Music Night, we're
going to have one more piece.
We're going to play as the outro a little bit later
on in the program.
But I'm reading the release, which
is going to be going out tonight as far as announcing
this whole Digital Music Night.
You've got a robotic drummer.
You've got computer-generated vocals
that sing your spam folder to you.
That's my other trick at the moment, yeah.
How exactly does that work?
Well, the singing I owe to Yamaha
has a product they call Vocaloid,
which up until recently was only available in Japan.
So it does kind of sing with a Japanese accent.
It's not so good in English.
But it-
How does it handle Nigerian all caps spam?
That's what I'd like to know.
I give it a little help.
I wrote a little program that goes into my Gmail account
and pulls out spam headers.
And it's able to parse them into lyrics.
So my software makes music with them.
So I try to make it kind of pleasing and calming,
things that our spam folders usually aren't.
And then I'm able to pull the text out of the headers
and pick the ones I like and feed it
into this robotic software vocalist.
And she can sing them for us through her sort
of thick robotic and thick Japanese accent.
Now, in addition to the mutant trumpet
you mentioned earlier, packets of data
are visualized as three-dimensional eye candy.
That's right.
Our friend Vade, AKA Anton, who you also sometimes
see on createdigitalmotion.com, is
working with the Mac software Quartz composer
to take packets of data and turn them
into sort of 3D animated art.
I don't think it's done yet.
So I haven't seen it.
But I'm sure it will be awesome.
And if Vade is listening, I'm sure this
will provide added incentive for him to make it awesome.
Yeah, most definitely.
And these are just some of the ideas
and some of the projects that are organized right now.
We definitely want other people to contribute to the radio
project, not just for Digital Music Night.
But we're looking for people to produce shows
and to help other people produce shows.
If you have any radio experience,
we'd love to have you help out and help other people
do their programs during the weekend.
So if you're interested in that, give us
an email at projectsathope.net.
What if you have no radio experience?
Can you still help out?
Well, yeah.
Yeah, we definitely need people just to do little things.
And we will train you, really.
So you'll come out of playing on Radio Statler
with a lot more knowledge and experience in radio.
I mean, you guys are going 24 hours, right?
Yeah, we're doing 24 hours the whole three
days of the conference.
So there are a lot of slots to fill.
Absolutely.
So definitely a lot of help is needed.
And I know there are people out there
that want to get involved.
There are a lot of other hacker radio programs
that broadcast on the internet.
And maybe small community stations, by all means,
come to the conference, be a part of this, and kind of unite.
And it'll be archived.
You'll be able to hear it for all time.
And it'll be a fascinating kind of snapshot
of what happened that weekend.
Yeah, it's radio.hope.net.
If you want to check out our little website,
we're going to add some of the program information
to the site as we get the programs kind of scheduled
as we're going along.
And that's also where you'll be able to listen
to the station during the HOPE Conference,
is radio.hope.net.
OK, we're speaking with Lexicon and Peter Kern
about Radio Statler, the radio project for the HOPE Conference
and the Digital Music Night, scheduled
for the first evening of the HOPE Conference,
where all kinds of fascinating sounds
will be presented live in a stage performance
in the downstairs area.
And we certainly hope that you're
able to attend that and any other ideas for other projects.
I guess you can still email projects at hope.net,
even though we're rapidly filling up.
We also want to open up the phone lines
for a couple of minutes, so we don't have very much time left.
But we'd like to hear from people,
since we haven't been able to take calls in a while.
212-209-2900 is our phone number.
So please give us a call if you want to say a word or two,
ask a question about perhaps digital music or something
like that.
We promise not to ask you for your credit card number.
No, we're trying to get out of that mode
where we're asking for money.
We did it four weeks in a row, and now we're
back to a normal show.
Although, this isn't really all that normal, is it?
Peter, how did you get involved in digital music?
Was it as a young child?
Well, yeah, I guess so.
I mean, I've been involved in music
as long as I can remember.
So when I was a little baby, I was playing the piano.
Really?
But that's not really digital.
But that's not really digital.
Then there was a computer in the house.
And I think, like a lot of other people of my generation.
That's how it begins.
That's how it begins.
And you say, well, I can get these great sounds out
of the piano.
What if I could get great sounds out of this Casio keyboard
and out of this computer?
And that's how it starts.
And so at the age of three, you were programming at Casio.
But not at the age of three.
That's later.
That was a little later.
But I think that's also the reason why people are
repurposing all these older computers.
We see people rescuing Apple IIs and rescuing Commodore 64s
and programming those instead of throwing them out.
Yeah, that's a cool thing.
You guys are playing with Commodore 64s
and really, really old machines and making
them do really cool things today.
The Commodore 64 is actually a highly sought-after computer.
Oh, I know.
I know.
It's incredible.
I don't think anything today would be around, what is it,
25 years after it first came out?
Probably not.
But we're going to try to change that, I suppose.
All right, let's see if we can take a phone call over here.
Good evening.
You're on Off The Hook.
Yes, thank you for taking my call.
I have a quick question.
I have a Acer Aspira.
And I've had it for about almost a year now.
And I noticed that as of late, whenever I boot it up,
it's like a humming sound.
I think you're asking a question for the personal computer
people.
Yes.
OK, well, we're not them.
They're on at 8 o'clock.
So you want to call back at that point and ask them that question.
And please, people, listen to the radio.
I guess I can't talk to them if they're not
listening to the radio.
But I guess people just call without listening.
Good evening.
You're on Off The Hook.
And hopefully, you're listening to us.
Maybe not, or maybe so.
Some of our biggest fans are dial tones.
Yeah, we also inspire a lot of dial tones.
It would be me.
Yes, good evening.
You're on the air.
I can't believe it.
This is a funny question.
And I don't know if you can answer it.
I like to play, and I only like the sound
of a certain piano that has a lot of resonance,
where the note is very long.
How, besides spending tons of money,
could I get that type of quality without having a very fine piano,
if you know the answer?
Can they do that with any digital equipment?
Sure.
Really long dissonance, not dissonance,
the sonance, the long sound.
Sample and hold.
Do you know what she's referring to, Peter?
I think she's, I assume you're asking how you can get good piano sounds.
Yeah, because it depends on how you, how skillful you are.
And if you play on the right piano, it has a very long note, quite long.
Well, I think what you want is, software is probably
what you're looking for.
Well, what kind of software?
Well, a friend of mine named Gary Garridan
has a new product out that he worked on with Steinway to sample their pianos.
It's the first authorized Steinway piano software.
And how can one hear that?
Can I hear it without purchasing it?
I think you can.
I think if you look up Garridan, it's G-A-R-R-I-T-A-N.
I've never done an endorsement for Gary before, but there's a first.
G-A-R-R-I-T-A-N.
G-A-R-R-I-T-A-N.
So search for that on the internet, and maybe there'll
be some kind of audio representation of that.
Absolutely.
Thank you.
All right, thanks for the question, very interesting.
Yeah, I guess we're reaching the point.
I mean, why have an expensive piano, then,
if you can simply emulate it on a computer?
Well, the piano is a totally different experience, though.
I still love when I'm able to get on a real piano
and feel the experience of playing piano.
A Wii piano doesn't match.
Not the same, yeah.
OK, well, that's good to know.
That's heartening.
Good evening, you're on Off the Hook.
Hi.
Yes, no tones, please.
Yes, go ahead.
OK, it's not about music.
Go ahead.
Is that OK?
OK, my niece is in Australia for six months.
And I figured I'll send her a Skype phone, the Wi-Fi Skype
phone from Netgear.
And over here, I'll use a pull-up USB plug-in Skype
phone, so we could communicate on the cheap.
OK.
Does that make sense?
Not Kevin, I think you're the best qualified to answer this.
Yes, that would make sense.
OK, so Skype has worked very well country to country.
Oh, yeah.
And the phones work well.
I mean, it depends on your connectivity.
It depends on the bandwidth that you have access to.
But once you fix any issues involving that, yeah, people
are doing this all the time.
I've been trying to set up the pull-up USB phone here.
I got it from buy.com.
And it's $20.
And I figured, OK, it's cheap, it's worth trying.
And I'm having problems with the sound.
It will cut off the sound of the speakers.
And I'm not sure if it's bad software.
It's the latest software that they have.
Where would I go for help with that?
That sounds like a hardware issue.
You should probably contact a manufacturer.
OK, I'll be full of.
Yeah.
All right, listen, thanks for that question.
Let's see if we can get one more phone call in.
And good evening.
No, you're not on the air.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook.
Go ahead.
Yes, hi.
I just had a quick question.
I don't know if maybe you guys wouldn't want to share the
information.
But I was interested about the cell phone discussion you guys
were doing earlier.
And I was wondering what you guys use in terms of a maker
model of a cell phone.
Maker model of a cell phone.
First of all, Bernie, are you still breathing into the phone?
Because it's very loud.
Oh, I'm sorry.
All right, stop that.
You're just getting me hot and heavy.
We use a variety of carriers.
I think every wireless carrier out there, except maybe
NexTel.
Yeah, we don't use NexTel.
And we don't like to talk about why we don't.
That's perfectly fine.
But that's everything else.
Yeah, I think we have Sprint represented, Verizon, T-Mobile,
AT&T.
What else is there?
We're missing Boost.
Boost?
All right, tell us something about Boost.
Because people have been talking to me about that
lately.
I don't know.
It's all about where you're at.
Yeah.
They're not a carrier.
Yeah, they're sort of like resellers.
They're a reseller.
I believe AT&T is the network.
I could be mistaken.
I know they're GSM.
But they're probably either T-Mobile or AT&T resellers.
OK, well, this has all been very fascinating.
Thanks for those questions.
And thanks for the one question about music, which was
actually a very good question.
So Peter, we're going to go out now with this other piece.
Now, you want to tell us something about that?
This is Ben Neal.
And this is a collaboration between him and DJ Spooky.
And Ben's instrument is this mutant trumpet.
The mutant trumpet.
Oh, we get to hear the mutant trumpet.
All right.
I think there's some mutant trumpet in there.
But he also does other electronic stuff.
What is a mutant trumpet?
If you have to ask that, that means you don't know.
I don't know.
It's basically the combination of a trumpet and software,
where the software is able to extend the sound
and capabilities of the trumpet.
All right.
Thus making it mutant.
I'm actually starting it now so that we don't miss any of
it, because it will no doubt be faded down when the personal
computer people muscle their way into the studio.
But Peter, I want to thank you very much for coming by.
And again, giving out the information for the HULP
conference.
Oh, listen to that.
We're going to have a digital music night on July 18, Friday
July 18, the first night of the conference, starting
sometime in the evening.
And you have how many performers so far?
A lot.
A lot, OK.
But they won't play too long.
We'll take them off before you get bored.
OK.
Yeah, you won't get bored.
That's a guarantee.
And people who want to get involved, email
projects at HULP.net.
And maybe even more people will be involved.
Maybe there'll be more digital music.
And also, there are 2,600 meetings coming up this
Friday in various cities all around the world.
Check www.2600.com slash meetings for details.
And again, www.hope.net for the latest on the conference.
This is Emmanuel for Off The Hook.
Have a good night.