Orchestral Maneuvers

Toshiba employees are best known for making notebook computers, copiers, semiconductors and other electronics. But some of them also make beautiful music.

The Toshiba Philharmonic Orchestra, made up of 100 amateur musicians who work for Toshiba Corp. of Japan, started its first tour of the United States by playing at the Irvine Barclay Theatre last Monday night.

Irvine was an appropriate first stop, since that is the hometown of the company’s giant notebook computer plant. But thanks to the Internet, the audience for the orchestra’s first U.S. performance included classical music fans from as far as Australia, Sweden and back home in Japan.

Using special software, the performance was “cybercast” live from Toshiba’s home page at https://www.toshiba.com. Internet Exchange International Inc., a Corona del Mar company that developed the Web site, handled the broadcast, and even loaded photographs of the performance onto the Web.

All 756 seats at the Barclay theater were sold out Monday night, and that attendance figure might have been eclipsed by the number of fans tuning in via the Net.

Mark Ressa, chief executive of Internet Exchange, said that between 620 and 700 users were logged on at any moment during the performance. Since many probably logged on for short durations, it’s possible that actual Internet attendance exceeded 700, or maybe even 1,000.

The concert attracted Net surfers from the three countries listed above, plus Taiwan, Finland and Canada, even though sound quality over the Net isn’t much better than that of an AM radio, Ressa said.

When sound technology improves, computer users may use the Internet to tune in to concerts around the world, routing the sound through the speakers of their stereo systems. Computer users may not have that long a wait, Ressa said.

“If it’s more than six months from now, I’ll be surprised,” he said. “In the next concert, we would like to broadcast live video.”

The four-stop tour for the Toshiba Philharmonic concludes today with a final performance at Carnegie Hall in New York.

* Greg Miller covers high technology for The Times. He can be reached at (714) 966-7830 and at [email protected].