Real World Studios is a world-class recording studio in Wiltshire,
UK, founded by Peter Gabriel in 1987, and well-known in the music industry.
A successful commercial studio, Real World's
design, architecture and organization reflect its original
intent: to create an ideal environment for recording live traditional music
performances and, more generally, to foster creative collaboration between
artists and technologists from many cultures. Real World is in fact a
``community of enterprises'', with formal or informal relations between several
businesses situated in close proximity to the studio proper, including: WOMAD,
a non-profit group that organizes international world music festivals in
Europe, Canada, and Japan; Peter Gabriel, Ltd.,
Real World Records, a joint venture record
label/publishing company; Real World Design, an engineering company that
designs and prototypes audio hardware designs; a video editing company; and a
local computer music composer-in-residence.
For several years, studio engineers and musicians have struggled to organize
Real World's extensive and ever-expanding
holdings of sound material (including many unique
recordings of musicians from African, Asian, and other non-Western musical
traditions) into a library that can be more effectively accessed.
The studio is a technologically sophisticated environment;
while there is an immediate problem to be addressed,
artists and engineers have given considerable thought to
advanced technology issues involved in creating a library
system that will intelligently augment (rather than supplant)
the current reliance on informal, intuitive, memory-based retrieval strategies.