What’s happening?

This version of Under Milk Wood was recorded in surround sound and when first broadcast in 2003 it was available in this format to listeners at home who had the right equipment and software. When the play is repeated on Saturday 18 October at 2.30pm the surround sound version will be available as a live stream; the play will also be available “on demand” from about 5pm that day for the next 30 days. If you don’t have a surround sound system you can try our experimental “binaural" experience, which turns the surround sound stream into an immersive headphone listening experience.

How to Listen to Under Milk Wood in Surround Sound

 

If you have surround sound speakers

You will need a computer with a broadband internet connection, an HTML5 compatible browser (such as the latest version of Chrome) and sound card connected to your computer with at least six channels, which should in turn be connected to a “5.1” surround sound system.

 

If you have headphones

You will need a computer with a broadband internet connection, an HTML5 compatible browser (such as the latest version of Chrome), a sound card with a stereo headphone output and a pair of headphones.

 

Where to find the audio

You will find the player for both loudspeaker and binaural headphone version on this web page

You will also find a link to some “Frequently Asked Questions” which include a test player so you can check your loudspeaker system is working before the play starts. If you are using the binaural experience you shouldn’t need to check it in advance, you can switch to different versions of binaural sound during the play.

 

What new technology is being used?

You don’t have to understand any of this in order to enjoy the surround sound experience; it’s included for those who want to know a bit about the underlying technology.

There is a new standard for HTML, the language that operates the World Wide Web, called HTML5. It includes an Audio API (application programming interface) which for the first time allows a web browser to play surround sound without the need to download and install additional software. It also includes the Mediasource API, which enables us to use MPEG-DASH, a new standard for media delivery, to get the data to you. Not all web browsers fully support HTML5 (particularly the Mediasource API) yet; we have tested the experiment using Chrome under Windows 7 and Mac OSX, and Internet Explorer 11 under Windows 8.1, but it might work with other combinations of computer and browser. We made all of the BBC Proms 2014 available using this technology.

The web browser also has the capability to render the 5.1 surround sound stream into a binaural presentation for headphones. This can provide a headphone listening experience which sounds as if it coming from outside your head, with front to back localisation of sound. To make binaural sound work perfectly we would really like the web browser to render the sound in a way that is optimised for the shape and size of each listener’s head but this is not practical at present so we are offering a choice of three different versions for you to try. We have not previously tried a public experiment with a surround sound stream rendered into binaural sound in a web browser so we are really keen to know what you think of it. To find out more about binaural sound and how this experiment works you can visit the BBC R&D Blog.

 

How can we give feedback?

You can comment on this blog or on Twitter using the hashtag #BBCR4UMW.

 

What if it doesn’t work?

As this is very experimental I’m afraid we can’t give you individual help getting it working but check the FAQ to make sure the equipment and web browser you are using are compatible with the experiment. If you can’t make it work or just don’t like it please let us know; you can listen to the broadcast in stereo on the radio, TV or online as usual.

Rupert Brun

Rupert Brun is Head of Technology for BBC Radio

 

BBC R&D blog: Find out more about Under Milk Wood in surround sound

We will be hosting a one-day hack-style event, held on BBC premises, employing the talents of both internal and external experts. It will be a great opportunity to meet senior BBC staff and to learn a bit more about how the BBC and Radio 4 operate.

At the start of the day teams will be presented with three exciting digital challenges; how to encourage new audiences to discover R4’s digital offer, how to create greater advocacy amongst listeners and how to start building daily listening habits. Teams will choose which challenge they want to work on – and then present ideas to the BBC judging panel at the end of the day.  The winning idea will be chosen with the aim to implement it in the coming months.

The event takes place on Friday 12th July from 8:30 – 17:00.  This event is open to professionals and we anticipate high demand for the day. To secure your place please tell us how you would answer the following challenge in no more than 100 words:

How can we use digital communications to either encourage new audiences to discover R4’s digital offer, to create greater advocacy amongst existing listeners or to start building daily listening habits?

Please send your answers or any questions about the event to the Digital Lab natalie.charlton@bbc.co.uk. If you are planning to participate as a group we ask that you put together a team of no more than 4 people and inform us in advance of names and area of expertise. Closing date for entries is Friday 28th June.

And as with any event like this – here’s the small print: If selected to participate in the event you will be subject to BBC terms and conditions which will be provided upon your confirmation as an attendee. Each selected participant will be entitled to a nominal fee for their attendance details of which will be provided upon your confirmation as an attendee.

We hope to see you there!

Explore Radio 4

About the BBC

BBC Commissioning

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00mz53r

The Western world, with a few notable exceptions, poured billions of dollars into electronic pesticides to defeat the Y2K bug. Only to find that for the most part it could have been defeated by turning the systems off then on again. Shades of the hit C4 comedy The IT Crowd. In reality it's the solution put forward in Stephen Fry's Archive on Four next Saturday by Ross Anderson, Professor of Security Engineering at Cambridge University, a world authority. Here - exclusive to the blog - is the full interview Stephen conducted with Ross on the crisis that fizzled out and the prospects of a real future digital Armageddon:

So, why the silence when the bug didn't bite? The answer's in the programme. Politicians, experts and businessmen all profited in status or cash from the threat. In the media - to paraphrase the crime reporters - it bled so it led. In the USA, government brazenly claimed victory for its defeat. In reality, the enemy was almost totally imaginary. But it's useless blaming the great and the good. It was inevitable. We'd been told repeatedly that this brilliant new technology would change the world. Then we were told it could all stop on the stroke of one spookily special midnight. We were the newly addicted, suddenly faced with the prospect that our supply was fatally endangered. There was only one thing we could do. Panic. Then spend millions fixing it. Sorry, that's two things.

Nick Baker is Producer of In the Beginning was the Nerd.

• Stephen Fry's In the Beginning was the Nerd transmits in the Archive on 4 slot on Saturday 3 October at 2000.
• Ross Anderson's home page.
• 'Nerd' defined by Wikipedia. Likewise 'geek', a related term.
• Stephen Fry has a blog and he's on Twitter. And, since you asked, so is the Radio 4 blog.
• The picture, Socializing Young Nerds @ Foo Camp 08 is by Jane McGonigal. Used under licence.

At the end of July the Guardian held an internal hackday at their offices in King's Cross. They invited two engineers from BBC Radio's A&Mi department, Chris Lowis and David Rogers. We teamed up with Leigh Dodds & Ian Davis from Semantic Web specialists, Talis to produce an 'Interactive-MP-Media-Appearance-Timeline' by mashing up data from BBC Programmes and the Guardian's website.

Before the event Talis extracted data about MPs from the Guardian's Open Platform API and converted it into a Linked Datastore. This store contains data about every British MP, the Guardian articles in which they have appeared, a photo, related links and other data. Talis also provide a SPARQL endpoint to allow searching and extraction of the data from the store.

Coincidentally, the BBC programmes data is also available as a linked datastore. By crawling this data using the MP's name as the search key we were able to extract information about the TV and radio programmes in which a given MP had appeared. A second datastore was created from the combination of these two datasets, and by pulling in some related data from dbpedia. Using this new datastore we created a web application containing an embedded visualisation of the data.

Continue to read this post and leave comments on the BBC Internet blog, where it originally appeared.

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Ever been on an online discussion forum to inquire about some technical problem you're trying to sort out? Then it's quite likely that after a while you will have received a terse message from some smart-alec, which will end with the acronym RTM, followed by a number of exclamations marks. That apparently stands for Read The Manual! - and in fact the acronym usually includes the letter "f" placed before the "m" to supply added emphasis.

Well, sorry, I'm not going to read the manual, as I explained to the makers of a charming Radio 4 programme which you can hear this morning at 1100...

Read the rest of Rory's post and leave comments on the BBC Technology blog. Listen to the programme, which includes an interview with Rory, here.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006s609

It is 21 years this summer since I started working on In Business, thanks to a sudden crisis. The programme's previous presenter had been tempted to a more lucrative job in television, and the vital deadline of the Radio Times billing was looming. That was when we decided what ought to be in the programme, and who the presenter would be. And though the presenter has stuck, this is still a familiar deadline, I'm afraid.

In Business had started some time before, in the 1970s, at a time when business got short shrift from BBC News. The powers that be must have thought it too boring, too specialist, too incomprehensible for a general audience.

Economics coverage was mostly restricted to a canter round the monthly economic indicators and a routine daily mention of the ups and downs of share prices as indicated by the Financial Times Index.

Business was a distant world. Radio 4 had woken up to the fascinating intricacies of the financial markets in 1971, when a long postal workers strike badly affected the City of London. The deputy editor of the World Tonight, Vincent Duggleby, was alerted to this, commissioned a piece on it, and very soon after that the Financial World Tonight was born as a separate programme, with Vincent at the helm.

In Business came a bit later; the first series was commissioned by Radio 4 after BBC governors were badgered at a 'Meet the BBC' meeting to recognise that there was a lot more to business than the City. That has turned out to be true.

Nevertheless, despite the explosion of business broadcasting in the past 20 years led by the American networks and then taken up round the world, it is still those perpetual motion machines the financial markets that get the most attention, in minute detail.

Leaving In Business (and its sister programme Global Business on the World Service) ample room to pursue some of the longer term trends. In particular, that means addressing the endless story of change: high technology crashing into the established way of doing things in companies, industries, countries, over and over again.

It's strange but true that the new millennium in 2000 really did seem to usher in a whole new world of business activity, reasserting the significance of the dot-com bubble even after it burst so apparently definitively the same year.

And organisations are still busy learning how to cope with the new wired-up interconnected, interactive world... look at the confusion in the global media industry at the moment if you think the implications of the Internet are now out in the open.

But it may go deeper than mere business models, such as shifting retailing to the web, or not.

Some 10 years ago the great management thinker the late Peter Drucker told me that he did not think that the computer had yet begun to effect the way organisations were managed. At the time, it seemed to be a crazy remark, but thinking about it afterwards it made more and more sense.

Henry Ford transformed industry after industry with his adoption of the production line in Detroit 100 years ago. Theoretically, the interactive information generated by the computer network should be having just as much disruptive impact on business now as Ford had then.

But few pre-existing companies seem to have changed their shape, size or business model to reflect what they now know about the clients and customers.

The mass production corporation tells itself it is making things its customers want to buy, and giving them a choice. But big companies seem to erect walls around themselves to keep the customer at bay. They commission market research rather than themselves go out and ask questions, and they mainly want customers who want to buy the things they make, not the other way round.

Inside the company all is ordered and predicable, punctuated by meetings and lunches and access to the company car parking space. Outside, in the real world, there is fearful chaos.

Big companies seem scared of the individuality of the people in the market place. They long to bring order and branding and simplicity to the disorder of real life.

It is something you see vividly in India at the moment, where the country's 12-million roadside hawkers and tiny corner shops are fighting to prevent the spread of the big corporate supermarkets.

Company Man and Company Woman see chaos on the street and in the bazaars of India, when what I see is huge choice and enormous convenience... backed by a remarkably efficient supply chain getting produce from the wholesale markets to the streets. Choice and convenience now under threat.

Business people get business qualifications that give them the tools to bring what they think is order to the chaos of the real world, in the same way that the whiz kids in the financial markets thought they had packaged up sub prime risk so that it wasn't risky any more.

The 21st century post-Ford lesson that business may have to learn is that the real world is full of millions of individuals with individual needs who want their individuality respected and served. The network computer makes this sort of intimacy possible, if companies were to learn how to use it to craft the mass market products for a clamour of different preferences.

Providing goods and services in this way was not possible when I started doing In Business 21 years ago. Perhaps we ought to make a programme about it. Perhaps that's what we are doing.

Peter Day is presenter of In Business

• This week's In Business, Learning Curve, is about training in the Internet era and is on Radio 4 at 2030 tonight.
• I took some photographs in the offices of Radio Current Affairs in White City - the department that produces Moneybox, Analysis, More or Less and In Business.
• Peter Day remembers Peter Drucker on his death in 2005.
• The In Business archive is one of the most comprehensive at the BBC. You can listen to programmes going back to 2002.
• Peter Day's World of Business podcast combines In Business and his 52 weeks-per-year World Service programme Global Business.