You'd never guess it from watching kids pogo-stick at a Pearl Jam concert, or vibrate to the street beat that pours out of their Walkmans, but listening to music is an essentially passive experience. Performers make the sound, consumers devour it. For every pop generation from A to X, the big creative decision has been which record (cassette, CD) to put in the music machine. For radio listeners, even that decision is denied. Music is too easy: a hot soak in somebody else's bathtub.
Well, listen up, rockheads. You're about to become the hippest form of computer nerds. You'd better smarten up too, because there's work to do, and lots of creative play. More than 5 million of you in North America have CD-ROM or Philips CD-i players, and that number is expected to double by year's end and treble by 1996. Get ready to hook up those players to your computers and home entertainment centers, fork over $25 to $100 a disk and jam with your favorite artist. Passivity is passe; tubby time is over. Here comes Interactive Rock.
In fact, advance forces have already landed. Music visionaries and cybernuts are dreaming big to merge the latest in computer savvy with the primal pulse of rock. So strap on your mouse and groove along with these desktop rockers:
-- Todd Rundgren. In No World Order, the veteran singer and producer (Meat Loaf, Grand Funk Railroad) has created the first do-it-yourself album. Listeners with CD-i players can customize any of the 10 tracks to their tastes. They can change the tempo (between 86 and 132 beats a minute), the mix ("natural," "spacious," "sparse" or "karaoke"), the mood ("bright," "happy," "thoughtful," "sad" or "dark"), even the form ("creative," "standard" or "conservative"). They can hatch new sounds by sampling the 933 snatches of music in the data base. Did you ever want to play the chorus of a favorite song over and over? You can do it here. At a click, you can do almost anything.
-- Peter Gabriel. The Genesis grad, whose music videos (Sledgehammer, Steam) have been pixilated eye-poppers, offers options galore in his CD-ROM Xplora 1: Peter Gabriel's Secret World. First you put the singer's face together, which means choosing from a screenful of different mouths, noses, eyes and ears. "You'll know when you've got it," says Mr. Computer Potato Head while you give him a facial. This achieved, you must decide what to do next: Watch one of his music videos? Thumb through his old baby pictures? Choose various cuts by musicians from around the world and mix them together into your own jam session? Or "go backstage"; that requires a pass, which you earn while maneuvering through the disk. As Gabriel narrates, boxes of hypertext pop up alongside the images. If you click on Gabriel's passport, it shows his ! photograph morphing from infancy through adulthood into a skull. And if you dally in moving your mouse, he may chirp, "Click me!" Best advice: Don't be afraid, be a fighter -- and Gabriel's world is yours.