The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum

Sun servers prove best at handling demanding multimedia networking needs of Cleveland's dazzling museum

By Erica Liederman

Special to Sun Catalyst

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, located on the shores of Lake Erie in Cleveland, Ohio, debuted its collection of rock and roll music and memorabilia in September, 1995. The museum is the world's largest and most inclusive collection of recordings and exhibits relating to the history and genealogy of rock and roll. Its mission is to preserve, celebrate, and assist in the interpretation of the music that has been the backbone of American popular culture for over four decades.

Designing the environment, interior space, and delivery system for a set of exhibits meant to capture the ever-evolving spirit of rock and roll (with the emphasis on 'ever-evolving') was no mean feat, involving a marriage of the talents of architects, exhibit designers, museum curators, engineers, construction companies and civic authorities. Moreover, it required the implementation of entirely new computer networking techniques to deliver multimedia applications to the kiosks and interactive video displays that are the centerpiece of the museum's dynamic and innovative exhibits.

The Mothers of Invention

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum was the brainchild of several members of the music industry who, in 1983, created the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation to honor the men and women who have made major and abiding contributions to the art of rock and roll. Through the foundations efforts, $92 million was raised, and on June 7, 1993, ground was broken for the museum's construction.

The building itself was designed by the architect I.M. Pei, who is noted for his signature geometric glass-and-steel forms and cantilevered spaces. The museum consists of a 162-foot tower supporting a triangular glass tent that extends (at its base) onto a 65,000 square-foot plaza. The building's six floors house more than 50,000 square feet of exhibition areas, administrative offices, libraries, archives, and public amenities.

The Burdick Group of San Francisco designed the building's interior, the exhibits, and the interactive audio and video kiosks. All of the video and audio at the museum's 25 interactive kiosks is stored on a Sun Microsystem's SPARCserver 20 that also houses StarWorks, Starlight Network's multimedia networking application software. The network system was designed and installed by CIBER Network Services of San Francisco.

Rocking Around the Clock

Creative and technical design of museum's interior began back in October of 1994. Steve Kinstler, Account Manager of CIBER Network Services became involved in the project as a result of CIBER's relationship with the Burdick Group. In 1991, CIBER upgraded Burdick's computer network from Local Talk to Ethernet, and was hired to maintain their Macintosh network. Bruce Burdick, one of the principals of The Burdick Group, whose expertise had been focused primarily on interior design, had begun negotiating the design of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum with the Museum's Board of Directors. "One day," said Kinstler "he called me and said 'Let's do The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame....'"

Kinstler and Burdick visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. to get some ideas about how an interactive, kiosk-based museum might work. The networked computer system that delivers the multimedia displays at the Holocaust museum is PC based. Using a NetFrame server with PCs as clients, visitors select an item from kiosk screen, and wait for several minutes while the data is loaded. Said Kinstler: "It took too long." And for rock and rollers, whose attention span is "very brief" according to Kinstler - who spent considerable time monitoring kiosk use during the first few days the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum was open - 'too long' would just not do. Kinstler decided to try a Macintosh solution. CIBER set up a system to display video across an Ethernet network with Macintosh clients. They tested their design in October, 1994.

"It worked partially," recalled Kinstler. "Files got to clients in two seconds. The quality wasn't bad. We strung twenty-five kiosks together and ran it as an interactive system. The problem was, the Ethernet network made the images jerky. Novell [Netware] doesn't have the redundancy and fault tolerance." In April of 1995, they came up with another prototype. This time they used a Token Ring network with a Netware SFT3 redundant server. But performance still fell short of the mark. The problem this time wasn't the server or the network software. It was the Macintosh. Kinstler recalls, "The server did fine, the wire [network] did fine. But the Mac just couldn't reassemble the packets on that end. It kept dropping packets and losing packets..." resulting in very poor image and audio quality.

Kinstler found the solution to the problem in StarWorks video networking software from Starlight Networks.

"One of the advantages of StarWorks was that the software doesn't care what client it has. The server can be an Intel or RISC system, and clients can be any combination of Mac, PC or Unix."

For the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, CIBER initially decided on HP netservers with ten 100BaseT switches and Macintosh clients. Then Sun Microsystems heard about the project from Starlight Networks, who is one of their vendor partners, and donated two SPARCserver 20 workstations to the project. With the addition of two hubs and ten high-performance switches, CIBER now had a system with sufficient redundancy: if a server went down, or a hub went down the show still went on. The configuration that was finally put in place consisted of Macintosh Quadra 840AV clients networked in a star topology using 10BaseT through a Lannet hub to 100BaseT on the Sun server. The server currently stores 20 gigabytes of data, which will grow as new songs and video footage are added to the exhibits.

Said Kinstler: "Bandwidth is a major issue for network delivery of multimedia.... StarWorks software provided the high degree of reliability we needed to deliver high-quality full-frame video from the Sun server to all of the kiosks immediately upon request."

The crucial test of the system came last September, on Labor Day weekend when the Museum opened its doors to the public.

The crowds were huge: between 9,000 and 10,000 people per day came to Museum during that first weekend. Kinstler was on site, monitoring workstation and network use and de-bugging on the fly.

"During the first two days," recalls Kinstler, "the hardware was great and the software was buggy. Initially we had between twelve and fifteen incidents an hour - audio dropping, network spikes, a workstation down." But by the time Labor Day Monday rolled around, there were no incidents at all.

Of the Museum's system, Jim Long, President of Starlight Networks said: "The Sun/Starlight server and multimedia network allow the museum to provide a degree of interactivity and flexibility in its exhibits that it wouldn't otherwise have. The museum's kiosk system is a highly visible example of how multimedia is being shared over networks for a wide variety of applications."

Hail, Hail, Rock and Roll

There are many reasons that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum is unique among museums. For one thing, it is the only museum in the world where most of the visitors already own the art. Moreover, most visitors are - or consider themselves - experts on the subjects of the exhibits. For this reason, when the Burdick Group designed the installation, they very deliberately made the exhibits accessible on many levels which allowed visitors to decide for themselves how much depth they wanted.

Content was divided into four areas: the historical perspective, which includes influences of performers on one another; the social perspective, which includes the music's effect on fashion, politics and daily life; the performers' perspective; and the fans' perspective. But the divisions are deliberately soft edged so that rather than having a hall devoted to one theme, and an enclosed room devoted to another, a total environment is created.

"It's a different experience from your usual museum," said Bruce Lightbody who managed the Rock and Roll project for the Burdick Group. "For one thing, it's noisy. People stand there at the kiosks with the earphones on rocking and singing away. People are laughing and running between exhibits..." Except inside the Hall of Fame itself, which occupies the sixth floor of the building, there is no one walking around speaking in a reverential whisper. There are four main interactive exhibits located on the ground and second floors of the Museum.

The "Rock and Roll Music" exhibit contains a database of 500 songs that shaped rock and roll.

"The Beat Goes On" demonstrates how various groups were influenced by other artists. In this exhibit, the visitor selects a music style from a list of nine styles - such as Folk Rock, Rockabilly or British Invasion - by touching the selection on the screen. If he or she chooses British Invasion, the second screen offers a choice of performers, among them groups such as The Rolling Stones, The Animals and The Beatles. If The Beatles is selected, a third screen appears showing the members of the band, and two of the band's major influences, in this case Little Richard and Carl Perkins. Touching the monitor on the image of the artist causes a song composed by that artist to be played. "Come See About Me" is a database of performers, and contains interviews, information and history of each of the performers. The visitor chooses an era, from the 1930s to the 1990s and touches the screen to view a list of performers active during that era. Successive screens allow him or her to listen to songs and watch video clips of interviews with the artists.

"Dedicated to the One that I Love" offers audio air checks of disk jockeys of the past in every major American city.

The Hall of Fame itself, located on the sixth floor of the building is reached by climbing a spiral staircase from the fifth floor. The room is smaller (40'x40') than the other exhibit areas, and contains no interactive kiosks. Instead, sixty LCD screens display images and concert film footage of the Hall of Fame inductees. These continuously running displays are not interactive. Each is powered by a dumb PC playing a programmable disk. The Hall of Fame itself is the one section of the Museum that visitors experience as museum-like. It's quiet; the room is dark; the displays are behind glass walls.

Dancing in the Street

Interactive multimedia exhibits are redefining the concept of 'museum.' Dennis Barrie, director of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum said "We want to both entertain and educate our visitors through a participatory multimedia experience that captures rock's energy and excitement. We have an opportunity to invent a brand new kind of museum."

And what do the critics say? The Washington Post's Richard Harrington wrote: "It's already a museum of substance, not just style, as well as a fun tourist attraction with a historic purpose." Los Angeles Times pop music critic Robert Hilburn wrote: "This is a world-class showcase, whose colorful exhibits combine a lively entertainment value with a faithful aura of scholarship."

And the artists themselves? In an interview on ABC TV's "Nightline," Aretha Franklin commented: "When you get inside, you immediately feel a sense of greatness and warmth....

"Anyone that happens to be a music lover, this is a must...."