My learning journey with Music Hackspace
HighHarmonics
This post is about my learning journey over the past 1 – 2 years – how I came to Music Hackspace and what it came to mean for me. I’m writing because I have gained so much from this platform. So I want to share and hopefully inspire others.
My engagement with Music Hackspace includes:
- Frequently attending Max Meetups and other online events
- Using 20+ individual courses
- Using my Going Deeper subscription to the fullest
- Following the Blog and other communications.
Plus, I have an ever growing list of more content that I want to get to!
But first, to give some context, a little bit about me.
I’m a composer, formally trained in the classical concert tradition. Now I’m doing music technology and create experimental electronic music. I build digital instruments in Max/MSP, and I do live coding in TidalCycles and Sardine. I also contribute where I can to open source projects, leveraging my experience in IT.
Several years ago I essentially restarted my musical life exclusively in the digital realm focusing on music created via DAWs with plugins. Initially, this brought me down a path towards music production – learning skills of editing, mixing, mastering, etc. This led to a focus towards deterministic music, extensive automation to control all the details, VSTs, and trying to create a perfect mix. While this was a great experience, at one point I realized I needed more creative flexibility and didn’t want to devote all my energy to mixing sonically polished products. I realized that I wanted (needed!) to create my own tools and make experimentation and improvisation a central part of my work.
So I turned to Max/MSP and started exploring!
And what an amazing journey it has been! After my first major project I quickly realized how powerful and extensive the Max platform is making it well suited for my objective of gaining creative flexibility. But I also understood that it would take a long time to master, and — most importantly — I needed some help!! While I’m a pretty good autodidact, this was a space where I needed guidance from experts and regular exposure to how other people use Max.
Finding Music Hackspace – the Instructors make the difference
Cycling ’74 has a page devoted to Resource for learning Max. That’s how I found Music Hackspace. While it wasn’t the only learning direction I pursued, I quickly found a home here. From my first engagement on, I found every course instructor, meetup presenter, organizer, etc. to be top notch. These are people who love music technology, love sharing what they know, and who know how to break it down for you. Plus they are musicians, composers, producers, engineers, etc who use these tools to build their own creative technology solutions. So they come from the same space I aspire to inhabit. That’s a big deal!
MHS Courses & learning structure
Most of the courses I have used follow a similar format. They have focused topics, learning agendas, short presentations/demos, example files, and learning exercises. The Max classes are really great at providing actual Max patch files to use in the course. Phelan Kane teaches many of these and he provides Max patches in pairs, where you have the opportunity to build the solution from a rough outline, then view the full patch to see how you did. It’s an ideal way to learn. (Ok, I admit that sometimes I cheat and skip right to the solution…)
I found this type of learning to be an excellent way to build skills and gain confidence. Plus it gave me a library of materials I still refer to when I’m working on Max patching.
I also have done a few sessions on modern orchestration techniques. Helen Noir is great! For the Violin class, she brought in a violinist who demonstrated playing techniques while Helen covered how to translate this with digital instruments. This combination was amazing. Even though I had a good background and composing experience in this area, I still learned a lot, including learning about recent developments in digital instruments with physical modeling, like using the Swam Instruments.
In addition to Phelan Kane and Helen Noir, other instructors / artists I’ve had include: Umut Eldem, Massimiliano Cerioni, Ted Moore, Anna Lakatos, Ned Rush. All of them excellent!
Subscription Plan – Going Deeper
After completing a few courses, I found out about the subscription plan. I thought about it for a while, and my left brain made a list of all the courses I wanted to use and own, comparing costs of doing that against the cost of a subscription. I would save money this way, but I hesitated, because I wasn’t sure if I would stick with it. What if I lost interest or just forgot about it? In the end, my right brain won out because I wanted to be free to engage with new content and live sessions and not have to think – hey, do I really want to do this course right now? Maybe I should get it later when I have more time…. yadda yadda yadda.
Going Deeper was great! (And I didn’t forget about it!) It felt like an investment in my creative and technical me – investment in $ and learning time. It made me feel free to explore anything new that came up without worrying about whether I should buy something that I might not use right away.
Max Meetups
The other thing I love about MHS is the monthly Max Meetups. These have been so good. Usually the format is to have an organizer who invites 2 – 3 presenters. It takes place in Zoom, so after the presentations there are breakout rooms for questions, informal discussion, etc. I’ve been participating in these now for a year and a half. The great thing is that I’ve been exposed to things I might never have found on my own. Or things that I didn’t understand very well, so I didn’t know enough to know it would interest me.
The other thing I love about meetups is that it has greatly expanded the realm of things I want to explore – things like spectral synthesis, sonification, visual music, various live coding platforms, the Bach/Cage Max library, many Max externals, etc. Plus these sessions always give me a tangible sense that I am participating with a global community of people making music, sound, and art with technology and Max in specific. It is a great community to feel part of.
Just to give one example – at the Oct (2022) meetup Sabina Covarrubias presented her work with visual music using Max. She also covered a topic: “Digital wellness for artists.” She talked about how to cultivate resilience and the importance of differentiating between different types of work and phases in a project: technical design, programming, interface / UI work, and creative/expressive work. She urges us all to make time & space for each. What a great message!
Another fantastic session was the meetup last spring on the book Generating Sound and Organizing Time. The two authors – Graham Wakefield and Gregory Taylor – each presented for an hour. These guys literally “wrote the book” on gen~ programming – which is the essential for anyone who wants to use gen~ in Max. Of course the session was a huge firehose – each of them had enough material prepared easily for a 3 hour session! Hopefully MHS will bring them back for more (hint, hint…).
So, what have I gained from all of this?
I’ve done a lot of technical learning and training in my life. And I’ve learned that it doesn’t amount to much if you don’t use it. But with all my Music Hackspace related time, I feel that everything I’ve done has been useful. And it has this great cumulative impact. Specific things I’ve learned about include
- Digital Synthesis techniques: (physical modeling, wavetable, subtractive, spectral, AI assisted)
- Generative composition techniques
- Digital Signal Processing: (audio signals, delay circuits, filters and effects processing, block diagrams, etc.)
- Max/MSP objects and patch design; gen~ fundamentals
- Basic sequencing in Max
- Digital scoring techniques
More importantly, I’ve gained an excellent foundation and greatly expanded the areas I’m interested in. Furthermore, I have more confidence in tackling these things.
But in the end, the proof’s in the pudding. So here is an example of a completed project that can be viewed on YouTube. It uses a digital instrument / Max patch that I created based on wavetable synthesis in gen~, but also uses various DSP techniques, delays, filters, VSTs etc. Embedded in this solution are many things I learned during my Music Hackspace journey.
Thanks for reading, and let me know what you think!
Music Hackspace competition winner announced!
Dom Aversano
Thank you to everyone who took the time to enter our competition to win a year’s free membership to the Music Hackspace. Your music recommendations were excellent, in fact so much so we’ve turned them into a platform-neutral playlist below.
You can see the winner drawn by random in Supercollider in the video below!
PLAYLIST
- Lili Boulanger / Vieille prière bouddhique
- Joshua Fried / SEiZE THE MEANS
- Martin Stimming/ Tanz Für Drei
- Bon Iver / 715 CREEKS
- DJ Shadow / Entroducing (album)
- Alessandro Cortini / LO SPECCHIO
- Ned Rush / Youtube Channel
- Klaus Schulze / Time Wind
- Morton Subotnick / Sidewinder
- Bernard Parmegiani / De Natura Sonorum
- Kaija Saariaho / Vers le blanc
Live coding – an interview with Lizzie Wilson (Digital Selves)
Dom Aversano
The live coding scene has been growing over the years. Despite this, for many the idea of watching someone create music in code might not have an immediate appeal, though live coders are now playing at top night clubs, experimental music venues, and festivals. As the world becomes more code literate it is likely to become more popular.
Curious to know more about these digital improvisers I sat down for a chat with Lizzie Wilson (Digital Selves) who is a leading musician in the field who learned the art of music coding in the lively scene in Leeds, but now lives in London.
Did you have a background in either music or programming before you got into live coding?
I grew up with traditional instruments playing piano and guitar, though I always found I had a bit of trouble with coordination. I also found it limiting to be tied down to expressing ideas musically through physicality. I always did that on the side and really enjoyed it. Then I studied mathematics at university. So not really coding, but obviously it underpins a lot of the ideas in coding.
I didn’t start coding until I found out about Algorave and live coding. It was through one of my good friends, Joanne Armitage. My friends would run little house parties and she would rock up with a laptop and start doing live coding, and I remember seeing it and thinking, Oh, that’s really cool, I’d love to do a bit of this.
Which city was this?
At the time I was based in Leeds, Yorkshire, because that’s where many people were based, and there was a lot happening in the city. This was around 2015/2016.
I didn’t know much about coding or how to code. So I started to learn a bit and pick stuff up, and it felt really intuitive and fast to learn. So it was a really exciting experience for me.
It’s quite rare to find coding intuitive or easy to learn.
Yeah, I had tried a few more traditional ways. I bought a MIDI keyboard and Ableton. While I really enjoyed that, there was something about live coding that made me spend a whole weekend not talking to anyone and just getting really into it. I think that’s, as you say, quite rare, but it’s exciting when it happens.
That’s great. Were you using Tidal Cycles?
Yeah, it was Tidal Cycles. So Joanne was using Supercollider, which is, you know, a really big program. When I first started I wanted to use Supercollider because that was all I knew about. So I tried to learn Supercollider, but there were a lot of audio concepts that I didn’t know about at that time and it was very coding intensive. It was quite a lot for someone who didn’t know much about either at the time, so I never really got into Supercollider.
Then I went to an algorave in Leeds and I saw Alex McLean performing using Tidal Cycles. I remember that performance really well. The weekend after I thought, you know, I’m going to download this and try it out. At that time Alex — who wrote the software — was running a lot of workshops and informal meetups in the area. So there was a chance to meet up with other people who were interested in it as well.
Was this a big thing in Leeds at that time?
Yes, definitely around Yorkshire. I’m sure there were people in London in the late 2000s that were starting off. In the early 2010s, there were a lot of people working, because people were employed by universities in Yorkshire, and it’s got this kind of academic adjacent vibe, with people organising conferences around live coding.
There was a lot happening in Yorkshire around that time, and there still is. Sheffield now tends to be the big place where things are based, but we’re starting to create communities down in London as well and across the UK. So yes, I think Yorkshire is definitely the informal home of it.
I’m curious about what you said earlier about the limitations of physicality. To invert that — what do you consider the liberating ideas that drew you to code and made it feel natural for you?
I think it being so tightly expressed in language. I like to write a lot anyway, so that makes it very intuitive for someone like me. I like to think through words. So I can type out exactly what I want a kick drum sample to do: play two times as fast, or four times as fast. Using words to make connections between what you want the sounds to do is what drew me to it, and I think working this way allows you to achieve a level of complexity quite quickly.
With a traditional digital audio workstation, you have to copy and paste a lot and decide, for instance, on the fourth time round I want to change this bar, and then you have to zoom into where the fourth set of notes is. There’s a lot of copy and pasting and manual editing. I found being able to express an idea in a really conjunct and satisfying way in code exciting. It allows you to achieve a level of complexity quite quickly that produces interesting music.
The live aspect of performance places you within a deeper tradition of improvisation, however, code is more frequently associated with meticulous engineering and planning. How does improvisation work with code?
I think that’s something really interesting. If you think about coding in general, it tends to be, say, you want to make a product, so you go away and you write some code and it does something. This way of coding is very different because you do something, you try it out, and then you ask, does this work? Yes or no. That’s kind of cool, and you see the process happening in real-time, rather than it just being a piece of code that is run and then produces a thing.
Part of the thrill of improvisation comes from the risk of making mistakes publicly, which makes it exciting for the audience and for the artists. How do you feel about improvising?
At first, I always found it quite scary, whereas now I find it enjoyable. That is not to say I am completely fine now, but you get through this process of learning to accept the error or learning to go where it takes you. So yeah, I find the level of unpredictability and never knowing what’s going to happen a really interesting part of it.
How much of an idea do you have of what you’re going to do before performing?
There are people who are a bit more purist and start completely from scratch. They do this thing called blank slate coding, where they have a completely blank screen and then over the performance they build it up. The more time you spend learning the language, the more you feel confident at accessing different ideas or concepts quicker, but I like to have a few ideas and then improvise around them. When I start performing I have some things written on the screen and then I can work with them.
It’s not like one way is more righteous than the other, and people are quite accepting of that. You don’t have to start completely from scratch to be considered coding, but there are different levels of blindness and improvisation that people focus on.
It seems like there are more women involved in live coding than in traditional electronic scenes. Is that your experience?
Yes, and there has been a conscious effort to do that. It’s been the work of a lot of other women before me who’ve tried hard to make sure that if we’re putting on a gig there are women involved in the lineup. This also raises questions like, how do we educate other women? How do we get them to feel comfortable? With women specifically, the idea of failure and of making mistakes can be difficult. There is some documentation on this, for instance, a paper by Dr Joanna Armitage, Spaces to Fail In, that I think is really interesting and can help with how to explore this domain.
It’s not just women though. I think there are other areas that we could improve on. Live coding is not a utopia, but I think people are trying to make it as open a space as possible. I think this reflects some of the other ideas of open-source software, like freedom and sharing.
What other live coders inspire you?
I would say, if I’m playing around the UK, I would always watch out for sets from +777000 (with Nunez on visuals), Michael-Jon Mizra, yaxu, heavy lifting, dundas, Alo Alik, eye measure, tyger blue plus visualists hellocatfood, Joana Chicau and Ulysses Popple, mahalia h-r
More internationally, I really like the work of Renick Bell, spednar, {arsonist}, lil data, nesso, hogobogobogo & gibby-dj
If someone goes to an algorave what can they expect? Is the audience mostly participants, or is there an audience for people who don’t code?
I think you always get a mixture of both. There are some people who are more interested in reading and understanding the code. Often they forget to dance because they’re just standing there and thinking, but there is dancing. There should be dancing! I feel like, if you’re making dance music, it’s nice when people actually dance to it!
It depends on the person as well. There are people who are a lot more experimental and make harsh noise that pushes the limits of what is danceable. Then there are people who like to make music that is very danceable, beat-driven, and arranged. If you go to an Algorave you wouldn’t expect to have one end of the spectrum or other, you will probably get a bit of both.
Over the past few years, we’ve done quite a few shows in London at Corsica Studios, which is a very traditional nightclub space, with a large dark room and a big sound system, as well as more experimental art venues like Iklectik, which is also in London. Then there’s the other end of the spectrum where people do things in a more academic setting. So it’s spread out through quite a lot of places.
My personal favourite is playing in clubs where people actually dance, because I think that’s more fun and exciting than say art galleries, where it’s always a bit sterile. It’s not as fun as being in a place where the space really invites you to let go a little bit and dance. That’s the nice thing about playing in clubs.
Bandcamp recently got bought by Songtradr who then proceeded to lay off 50% of the staff. Traditionally Bandcamp has been seen as an Oasis for independent recording musicians, amid what otherwise are generally considered a series of bad options. Do you have any thoughts on this, especially given that you have released music on Bandcamp?
When I’ve done releases before we haven’t released with Spotify. I’ve only done releases through Bandcamp because as you say, it felt like this safe space for artists, or an Oasis. It was the one platform where artists weren’t held to ransom for releasing their own music. It’s been a slow decline, having been acquired by Epic Games last year. When that happened I winced a little bit, because it was like, well, what’s going to happen now? It felt quite hard to trust that they were going to do anything good with it.
Obviously, it’s hard. I think the solution is for more people to run independent projects, co-ops, and small ventures. Then to find new niches and new ways for musicians to exist and coexist in music, get their releases out, and think of new solutions to support artists and labels. At times like this, it’s always a bit, you know, dampened by this constant flow of like, oh, we’ve got this platform that’s made for artists and now it’s gone, but people always find ways. Bandcamp came out of a need for a new kind of platform. So without it, maybe there’ll be something else that will come out of the new need.
I’m hopeful. I like to be hopeful.
Competition – Win one year’s free membership to Music Hackspace
Dom Aversano
We are giving away a year’s free membership – to enter, all you have to do is leave a comment on this page about at least one composer or musician who has greatly influenced your approach to computer music.
We want to know two things.
How has their music affected or influenced you?
An example of a piece of their music you like, and a short description of why.
Anyone who completes the above will be entered into the competition on an equal basis (you are welcome to list more than one person, but this will not improve your chances of winning) with the winner assigned at random and announced on Saturday 4th of November via the Music Hackspace newsletter.
To get the ball rolling, I will provide two examples.
Kaija Saariaho / Vers le blanc
I arrived somewhat late to Kaija Saariaho’s music, attending my first live performance of her music two years prior to her death this year, yet despite this, her music has greatly influenced me in the short time I have known it.
Although I have not heard the piece in full (since it has never been released) the simple 1982 electronic composition by Saariaho, Vers le blanc, captured my imagination.
The composition is a 15-minute glissando from one tone cluster (ABC) to another (DEF). Saariaho used electronic voices to produce this. The composition raises questions about what is perceptible. For instance, can the change in pitch be heard from moment to moment? Can it be sensed over longer time periods?
The piece made me question what can be considered music. Are they notes if they never fix on a pitch? can such a simple process over 15 minutes be artistically enjoyable to listen to? what would be the ideal circumstance to listen to such music? I experienced this music partly as an artistic object of study and meditation and partly as a philosophical provocation.
Burial / Come Down to Us
Burial’s idiosyncratic approach to technology gives rise to a unique sound. He famously stated in a 2006 interview that he used Soundforge to create his music, without the use of any multitrack sequencing or quantisation. This stripped-down use of technology gives the music an emotional directness and a more human feel.
I find his track Come Down to Us particularly inspiring. At 13 minutes long it uses a two-part binary form for the structure. The composition uses audio samples from a transgender person, and it was only after a few years of listening that it occurred to me that the form might describe the subject. At 7 minutes the entire mood and sound of the track changes from apprehensive to triumphant, potentially describing a person undergoing — or having undergone — a psychological or physical transition. Released in 2013, this was long before the divisive culture wars and undoubtedly intended simply as an artistic exploration.
Leave your comment below to enter the competition. Please refer to the guidelines above. The winner will be announced on Saturday 4th of November via the Music Hackspace newsletter.
Can AI help us make humane and imaginative music?
Dom Aversano
There is a spectrum upon which AI music software exists. On one end are programs which create entire compositions, and on the other are programs that help people create music. In this post I will focus on the latter part of the spectrum, and ask the question, can AI help us compose and produce music in humane and imaginative ways? I will explore this question through a few different AI music tools.
Tone Transfer / Google
For decades the dominance of keyboard interaction has constrained computer music. Keyboards elegantly arrange a large number of notes but limit the control of musical parameters beyond volume and duration. Furthermore, with the idiosyncratic arrangement of a keyboard’s notes, it is hard to work — or even think — outside of the 12-note chromatic scale. Even with the welcome addition of pitch modulation wheels and microtonal pressure-sensitive keyboards such as Roli’s fascinating Seaboard, keyboards still struggle to express the nuanced pitch and amplitude modulations quintessential to many musical cultures.
For this reason, Magenta’s Tone Transfer may represent a potentially revolutionary change in computer music interaction. It allows you to take a sound or melody from one instrument and transform it into a completely different-sounding instrument while preserving the subtleties and nuances of the original performance. A cello melody can be transformed into a trumpet melody, the sound of birdsong into fluttering flute sounds, or a sung melody converted into a number of traditional concert instruments. It feels like the antidote to autotune, a tool that captures the nuance, subtly, and humanity of the voice, while offering the potential to transform it into something quite different.
In practice, the technology falls short of its ambitions. I sang in a melody and transformed it into a flute sound, and while my singing ability is unlikely to threaten the reputation of Ella FitzGerald, the flute melody that emerged sounded like the flautist was drunk. However, given the pace at which machine learning is progressing, one can expect it to be much more sophisticated in the coming years, and I essentially regard this technology as an early prototype.
Google has admirably made the code open source and the musicians who helped train the machine learning algorithms are prominently credited for their work. You can listen to audio snippets of the machine learning process, and hear the instrument evolve in complexity after 1 hour, 3 hours, and 10 hours of learning.
It is not just Google developing this type of technology — groups like Harmonai and Neutone doing similar things and any one of them stands to transform computer music interaction, by anchoring us back into the most universal instrument, the human voice.
Mastering / LANDR
Although understanding how mastering works is relatively straightforward, understanding how a mastering engineer perceives music and uses their technology is far from simple since there is as much art as there is science to their craft. Therefore, is this a process that can be devolved to AI?
That is the assumption behind LANDR’s online mastering service which allows you to upload a finished track for mastering. Once it is processed, you are given the option to choose from three style settings (Warm, Balanced, Open) and three levels of loudness (Low, Medium, High), with a master/original toggle to compare the changes made.
I uploaded a recent composition to test it. The result was an improvement on the unmastered track, but the limited options to modify it gave the feeling of a one-size-fits-all approach, inadequate for those who intend to carefully shape their musical creations at every stage of production. However, this might not be an issue for people on lower-budget projects, or those who intend to simply and quickly improve their tracks for quick release.
In a desire to understand the AI technology I searched for more precise details, and while the company says that ‘AI isn’t just a buzzword for us’ I could only find a quote that does little to describe how the technology actually works.
Our legendary, patented mastering algorithm thoroughly analyzes tracks and customizes the processing to create results that sound incredible on any speaker.
While LANDR’s tool is useful for quick and cheap mastering, it feels constrained and artistically unrewarding if you want something more specific. The interface also feels like it limits the potential of the technology. Why not allow text prompts such as: “cut the low-end rumble, brighten the high end, and apply some subtle vintage reverb and limiting”.
Fastverb / Focusrite
Unlike mastering, reverb is an effect rather than a general skill or profession, making it potentially simpler to devolve aspects of it to AI. Focusrite’s Fastverb reverb effect uses AI to analyse your audio before prescribing certain settings for you based on this, which you can then go on to tweak. The company is vague about how their AI technology works, simply stating.
FAST Verb’s AI is trained on over half a million real samples, so you’ll never need to use presets again.
I use the plugin on a recent composition. The results were subtle but an improvement. I adjusted some of the settings and it sounded better. Overall, I had the impression of a tasteful reverb that would work with many styles of music.
Did the AI help significantly in arriving at the desired effect? It is hard to say. I would assume for someone with very limited experience using such tools, yes, but without someone confident with an effect, I doubt it saves much time at all.
I am aware however there is the potential for snobbery here. After all, if a podcaster can add a decent reverb to their show or a guitarist can add some presence to their recording easily, that’s no bad thing. They can if they want go on to learn more about these effects and fine-tune them themselves. For this reason purpose, it represents a useful tool.
Overview
LANDR’s Mastering service and Focusrite’s Fastverb are professional tools that I hope readers of this article will be tempted to try. However, while there is clearly automation at work, how the AI technology works is unclear. If the term AI is used to market tools, there should be clarification of what exactly it is — otherwise one might as well just write ‘digital magic’. By contrast, Google’s Tone Transfer have made their code open source, as well as describing in detail how they use machine learning, and the people involved in training the models.
I expect that the tools that attempt to speed up or improve existing processes, such as mastering and applying reverb, will have the effect of lowering the barrier to entry into audio engineering, but I have yet to see evidence it will improve it. In fact, it could degrade and homogenise audio engineering by encouraging people to work faster but with less skill and care.
By contrast, the machine learning algorithms that Googe, Harmonai, Neutone, and others are working on, could create meaningful change. They are not mature technologies, but there is the seed of something profound in them. The ability to completely transform the sounds of music while preserving the performance and the potential to bring the voice to the forefront of computer music could prove to be genuinely revolutionary.
What follows from the collapse of NFTs?
Dom Aversano
Almost a quarter of a century after Napster fired a torpedo into the record industry one might have expected stability to have returned, but the turmoil continues well into the new century without any signs of resolution.
The story is familiar. MP3 collections never felt like record collections, making them ripe to be superseded by full-catalogue music streaming. Streaming is unprofitable for the companies selling it and unsustainable for the musicians on it, so in a bid to save themselves, not music, the platforms are now transforming into rivers of algorithmically recommended muzak. Ironically, the oldest medium is in the healthiest state, vinyl, and while it is inspiring to know people still go out and buy records, it does not help solve the problem of digital music.
Given this context, it was always tempting to see NFTs — or non-fungible tokens — as the saviour of digital music. But with Sam Bankman-Fried now standing on trial and 95% of NFTs estimated to be worthless we should be asking, what went wrong?
It is beyond the scope of this article to explain what NFTs are — which has been done well elsewhere — but what can be said is the heavy nomenclature they carry can make it feel impenetrable and confusing: you have blockchain, minting, wallets, cryptocurrency, drops, Bitcoin, Metaverse, Web 3, smart contracts etc. The time required to make sense of this — much like an NFT — is a luxury few can afford, providing a wall of obscurantism that imbues the culture with an aura of mystique and intellectualism.
My experience took me down a winding path. Initially, I found NFTs interesting, as they seemed like an innovative method for digital ownership that could help fund the creation of new music and provide fans with a strong connection to their favourite artists, but as my research accumulated their appeal steadily diminished. A combination of too-good-to-be-true promises and scammy behaviour made it seem murky, if not at times actively sinister.
While I am not closed off to the possibility of something valuable emerging from this world (for instance, smart contracts seem genuinely interesting) based on the evidence, NFTs were always doomed to fail.
Here is why.
The torrent of terminology in this culture makes it easy to be blinded by the science and lose sight of the obvious — for instance, cryptocurrencies, despite the name, are not currencies. There is barely a thing on Earth you can buy with crypto. It is actually an asset untethered to economic activity, or simpler yet, an elaborate gambling token. Just as nobody wants to appear a philistine for not appreciating a certain art form, nobody wants to feel like a Luddite for not understanding a particular technology, but spend your evenings and weekends dispassionately breaking down the terminology and you’ll find little of substance remains.
Most people try to understand cryptocurrency in a purely technical sense and ignore the sociological of its emergence. Bitcoin arose shortly after the 2008 financial crisis when mistrust of banking was at an all-time high. At this time having a so-called currency circumventing banks was music to people’s ears, and the Hollywood superhero manner in which Bitcoin entered the world through a mysterious unknown figure called Satoshi Nakamoto only added to its anarcho-utopian appeal.
Blockchain sounds cooler than it is. Some blockchains create huge environmental damage, have very long transaction times, and are vulnerable to privacy breaches and theft. If you lose your password to your digital wallet or if it falls into someone else’s hands you may lose everything, without any recourse to institutional support or insurance. Most concerning of all, far from being a tool for honesty and transparency, cryptocurrency is regularly used by organised criminals as a tool for money laundering. For these reasons, blockchain has been referred to at various points as ‘a solution in search of a problem’.
Experts have much less faith in cryptocurrency than the public. An economist who famously predicted the 2007–08 subprime mortgage crisis, Nouriel Roubini, called crypto ‘a scam’ and a ‘Ponzi scheme’ that preys on young people, people on lower income, and minorities, and advises people to ‘stay away’, referring to those who run the industry as ‘crooks’ that ‘literally belong in jail’.
Even if none of the above really dents your belief in the validity of cryptocurrencies/NFTs/blockchains, there is a gaping flaw that is impossible to ignore.
NFTs have no intrinsic value.
I can put a photo of the Taj Mahal on a blockchain and link it to you, but that doesn’t mean you own a brick of it.
Writer and programmer Stephen Dhiel, who is a vociferous critic of cryptocurrencies, offered the following analogy about NFTs in a Twitter/X thread.
There is one comparable market to NFTs: The Star Naming Market (…) Back in the 90s some entrepreneurs found you could convince the public to buy “rights” to name yet-unnamed stars after their loved ones by selling entries in an unofficial register (…) You’d buy the “rights” to a name [sic] the star and they’d send you a piece of paper claiming that you were now the owner of said star. Nothing was actually done in this transaction, you simply paid someone to update a register about a ball of plasma millions of light years away. (…) NFTs are the evolution of this grift in a more convoluted form. Instead of allegedly buying a star, you’re allegedly buying a JPEG from an artist. Except you’re not buying the image, you’re buying a digitally signed URL to the image.
With NFTs now largely worthless, it’s hard to argue with Dhiel’s analysis. So where does this leave us?
Few genuinely innovative ideas remain, but a company called JKBX has proposed that people can buy royalty shares of their favourite musicians’ songs. The problem is, even if it worked, would it be healthy to have fans treating their favourite artists’ songs as investments? Would listening to All You Need is Love feel the same if you were waiting for your share of a royalty payment to come through? Is turning music into a weird stock market for royalties really the best thing we can dream up?
After nearly a quarter of a century of unsuccessfully trying to resurrect the 20th-century music recording industry for the 21st-century, perhaps it is time to ask, was this ever the right goal? MP3s, streaming, and NFTs, did not balance the boat, which still rocks about aimlessly on stormy seas.
Perhaps the original goal was never ambitious or imaginative enough, after all, why resurrect an old method of distributing music when you could create a new one? NFTs were attractive to people for many reasons, but a major one was they promised a new internet culture — Web 3, metaverse etc. — that could offer ordinary people economic dignity. That people found this appealing is grounds for hope, as it demonstrates there is an appetite for a radical departure from the stagnant and centralised world of the social media empires.
The question that remains is: can we imagine it and build it? And if not now, when? If music wishes to remain a relevant art form, it can’t afford another quarter-century of floundering.
Do you have thoughts on what you have read? If so, please leave your comments below.
Further information on cryptocurrency/NFTs/blockchain
The Missing Crypto Queen — Podcast by investigative journalist Jamie Bartlett
The Case Against Crypto — Essay by programmer Stephen Diehl
Crypto is dead — Debate between Yanis Varoufakis & Viktor Tábori
What do recent trends in generative art mean for music?
Dom Aversano
In his provocative and fascinating book, Noise, the French musicologist and economist Jacques Attali wrote the following about the prophetic power of music.
Music is prophecy. Its styles and economic organization are ahead of the rest of society because it explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities in a given code.
For a long time I considered this flattering statement about music to be true, but the more I learned about visual arts the more I saw that at various points in history it seemed to push ahead of music. Decades before Brian Eno used the term Generative Music the term Generative Art was being used, which does not mean there were no generative processes in music before then — there certainly were — but the terminology helped articulate a theoretical framework through which the art could be understood and developed.
In the last few years a big shift occurred in visual generative arts, somewhat obscured by the huge attention given to advances in machine learning and large language models, but worthy of examination for anyone interested in digital arts.
This innovation was fuelled by NFTs or non-fungible tokens (you can read more about them here). Putting aside the controversial ethical and technological aspects of cryptocurrency and NFTs — which I hope to cover in a future post — the economy it produced provided many generative artists with a living, during which the technical aspects of the art grew more sophisticated and publications like Right Click Save emerged to document the movement. This year the NFT economy fundamentally collapsed, making for an opportune moment to review what happened during its boom, and its relevance to musicians and composers.
In 2021 the generative artist and writer Tyler Hobbs wrote an important essay called The Rise of Long-Form Generative Art, which helps make sense of the recent changes to generative art. Within it, he describes two broad categories of generative art: short-form and long-form.
Generative art has traditionally favoured short-form, which he describes as follows.
First, there was almost always a “curation” step. The artist could generate as many outputs as they pleased and then filter those down to a small set of favorites. Only this curated set of output would be presented to the public.
The result of this is often small collections ranging from a single image to about a dozen. The artist is still largely in control, creating art in a manner that does not radically deviate from tradition.
In a jargon-dense paragraph Hobbs describes long-form art, with the last sentence being especially significant.
The artist creates a generative script (e.g. Fidenza) that is written to the Ethereum blockchain, making it permanent, immutable, and verifiable. Next, the artist specifies how many iterations will be available to be minted by the script. A typical choice is in the 500 to 1000 range. When a collector mints an iteration (i.e. they make a purchase), the script is run to generate a new output, and that output is wrapped in an NFT and transferred directly to the collector. Nobody, including the collector, the platform, or the artist, knows precisely what will be generated when the script is run, so the full range of outputs is a surprise to everyone.
This constitutes a fundamental change. The artist no longer directly creates the art but an algorithm to create art, renouncing control over what the algorithm produces from the moment it is published. It is a significant shift in the relationship between the artist, the artwork, and the audience, that calls into question the definition of art.
Within the same essay, Hobbs describes a concept for analysing long-form art that he calls “output space”.
Fundamentally, with long-form, collectors and viewers become much more familiar with the “output space” of the program. In other words, they have a clear idea of exactly what the program is capable of generating, and how likely it is to generate one output versus another. This was not the case with short-form works, where the output space was either very narrow (sometimes singular) or cherry-picked for the best highlights.
This concept of an algorithm’s spectrum of variation is valuable. After all, scale without meaningful variation is decorated repetition. Paradoxically — in a superficial sense at least — algorithms can simultaneously have infinite permutations and a great sense of predictability and monotony. The notion of output space is perhaps a more accurate way to evaluate generative works than their literal number of iterations or other quantifiable measures.
In reflecting on how the concept of long-form might exist in music, two works sprung to mind.
The first is Jem Finer’s Longplayer. The composition was created with the intention of being played for a millennium and is currently installed at Trinity Buoy Wharf in East London. For almost a year I worked part-time at the Longplayer and had the opportunity to listen to the installation for hours on end. It struck me as a novel and ambitious idea with an attractive sound, but I was not able to detect any noticeable variation or development from one hour, week, or month to the next. To use the language of generative art, its output space felt narrow — at least over a duration that is short in comparison to its intended length.
I should point out this might well miss the point of the composition, designed as it is to make one reflect on vast time scales and to invite intergenerational collaboration.
The second example is Brian Eno’s composition Reflections, released both as an app and a series of musical excerpts. Eno describes it using the metaphor of a river.
It’s always the same river, but it’s always changing.
Having discovered this piece relatively recently I have not listened sufficiently to have an opinion, although there are many glowing online reviews about its ability to transform and change mood, and people listening to it extensively.
The requirement of extensive listening highlights an important difference between music and visual art. It is much quicker to scan over a collection of 1,000 images than to spend, hours, weeks, or even months attentively listening to an algorithm unfold, which helps explain why long-form generative art is currently more popular than long-form generative music, though there may be another reason too.
You might ask why has long-form generative art become so popular recently as it is by no means a new concept. In 1949 the abstract artist Joseph Albers began a 25-year project working on an iconic and influential series called A Homage to Squares, comprising over 100 paintings that combine squares of different sizes and colours in a variety of ways. By contrast, you now have artists developing algorithms in a couple of months to create ten times more images than Albers’s series. Is this meaningful art, or a hi-tech example of the philosophical more is more?
While it might be cynical to reduce an art movement to a single economic factor, it would also be naive, to ignore it. A significant number of people were made wealthy in a very short time by the boom of NFTs, and the supply and demand relationship was transformed as digital art can be produced with dramatically less time and cost than traditional art. Huge demand could be met with huge supply with little more effort than adding a couple of zeros to the number of iterations.
The rates that certain pieces sold for at the height of the hype are astonishing. A single image in a collection of Cellular Automaton sold for 1,000,000 Tezos (£537,000). I do not know whether this was motivated by some murky financial practice or credulity on the part of the collector, but to have a single work in a collection of 1,000 — composed from an 80-year-old mathematical concept — selling for such a huge price indicates that money significantly shapes the culture. Despite the rot, some art that emerged from this movement is genuinely inspiring and thought-provoking.
Take Dreaming of Le Corbusier, by the Norwegian artist Andreas Rau. It is an impressive algorithm that generates a new ‘architectural’ abstract artwork each time you click on it. Some works have the appearance of having been designed deliberately, with the consistent quality of the compositions being remarkable.
There is also the work of Rich Poole which is featured in this piece. The series feels musical in its composition — reminiscent of a beautiful music sequencer, where colour, height, and length correspond to some musical parameters. The owners of the NFTs choose from iterations of an algorithm what work they would like, meaning the series is ‘collector-curated’.
What happens to generative art now that NFTs have collapsed? That is anyone’s guess. It is hard to envision the sudden emergence of an economy remotely comparable to the over-hyped NFT market. Yet there has been a shift and a new potential glanced at, not just by the artists involved, but by all of us.
The artworks featured in this article are shared with kind permission by the artist Rich Poole. You can view his entire series for Manu here.
How to design a music installation – an interview with Tim Murray-Browne (part 2)
Dom Aversano
How to design a music installation - an interview with Tim Murray-Browne (part 2)
In the first part of this interview, artist Tim Murray-Browne discussed his approach to creating interactive installations, and the importance of allowing space for the agency of the audience with a philosophy that blurs the traditional artist/audience dichotomy in favour of a larger-scale collaboration.
In the second part of this interview, we discuss how artificial intelligence and generative processes could influence music in the near future and the potential social and political implications of this, before returning to the practical matters of advice on how to build an interactive music installation and get it seen and heard.
I recently interviewed the composer and programmer Robert Thomas who envisions a future in which music behaves in a more responsive and indeterminate manner, more resemblant to software than the wax cylinder recording that helped define 20th-century music. In this scenario, fixed recording could become obsolete. Is this how you see the future?
I think the concept of the recorded song is here to stay. In the same way, I think the idea of the gig and concert is here to stay. There are other things being added on top and it may become less and less relevant as time goes on. Just in the way that buying singles has become less relevant even though we still listen to songs.
I think the most important thing is having a sense of personal connection and ownership. This comes back to agency, where I feel I’m expressing myself through the relationship with this music or belonging to a particular group or community. What I think a lot of musicians and people who make interactive music can get wrong is since they take such joy and pleasure in being creatively expressive, they think they can somehow give that joy to someone else without figuring out how to give them some kind of personal ownership of what they’re doing.
As musicians it’s tempting to think we can make a track and then create an interactive version, and that someone’s going to listen to that interactive version of my track and remix it live or change aspects of it, and have this personalised experience that it is going to be even better because they had creative agency over it.
I think there’s a problem with that because you’re asking people to do some of the creative work but without the sense of authorship or ownership. I may be wrong about this because in video games you definitely come as an audience and explore the game and develop skill and a personal style that gives you a really personal connection to it. But games and music are very different things. Games have measurable goals to progress through, and often with metrics. Music isn’t like that. Music is like an expanse of openness. There isn’t an aim to make the perfect music. You can’t say this music is 85% good.
How do you see the future?
I agree with Robert in some sense, but where I think we’re going to see the song decline in relevance has less to do with artists creating interactive versions of their work and more to do with people using AI to completely appropriate and remix existing musical works. When those tools become very quick and easy to use I think we will see the song transform into a meme space instead. I don’t see any way to avoid that. I think there will be resistance, but it is inevitable.
In the AI space, there are some artists who are seeing this coming and trying to make the most of it. So instead of trying to stop people from using AI to rip off their work, they’re trying to get a cut of it. Like say, okay you can use my voice but you’ll give me royalties. I’ve done all of this work to make this voice, it’s become like a kind of recognizable cultural asset and I know I’m going to lose control of it, but I want some royalties and to own the quality of this vocal timbre
Is there a risk in deskilling, or even populism, in a future where anyone can make profound changes to another person’s creative work? The original intention of copyright law was to protect artists’ work from falling out of their hands financially and aesthetically. The supposed democratisation of journalism has largely defunded and deskilled an important profession and created an economy for much less skilled influencers and provocateurs. Might not the same happen to music?
The question of democratisation is problematic. For instance, democracy is good, but there are consequences when you democratise the means of production, particularly in the arts where a big part of what we’re doing is essentially showing off. Once the means of production are democratised, then those who have invested in the skills previously needed lose that capacity to define themselves through them. Instead, everyone can do everything and for this short while, because we’re used to these things being scarce, it suddenly seems like we’ve all become richer. Then pretty soon, we find we’re all in a very crowded room trying to shout louder and louder. It’s like we were in a gig and we took away the stage and now we’re all expecting to have the same status that the musician on the stage had.
I can see your concerns with that, but when it comes to music transforming from being a produced thing to being very quickly made with AI tools by people who aren’t professional. If you’re a professional musician there will still be winners and losers, and those winners and losers will in part be those who are good at using the tools. There will be those with some kind of artistic vision. And there’ll be those who are good at social media and networking, and good at understanding how to make things go viral.
It’s not that different from how music is now. It takes more than musical talent to become a successful artist as a musician, you’ve got to build relationships with your fans, you have to do all of these other things which maybe you could get away with not doing so much in the past.
Let’s return to the original theme of what makes for a good installation. What advice would you give to someone in the same position now that you were in just over a decade ago when starting Cave of Sounds?
In 2012 when we started building Cave of Sounds Music Hackspace was a place for people to build things. This was fundamental for me. People there were making software and hardware and there was this sort of default attitude of ‘we built it, now we’re going to show somebody’. We’re going to get up in the front of the room and I’m going to talk to you about this thing, and maybe I’ll play some music on it.
I find the term installation problematic because it comes from this world of the art gallery and of having a space and doing something inside the space where it can’t necessarily just be reduced to a sculpture or something. Whereas, for me, it was just a useful word to describe a musical device where the audience is going to be actively interacting with it, rather than sitting down and watching a professional interact with it. So that shift from a musician on a stage to an audience participating in the work.
I don’t think it necessarily has to begin with a space. It needs a curiosity of interaction. Maybe I’m just projecting what I feel, but what I observed at Music Hackspace is people taking so much enjoyment in building things, and less time spent performing them. Some people really want to get up and perform as musicians. Some people really want to build stuff for the pleasure of building.
How do you get an installation out into the world?
How to get exhibited is still an ongoing mystery to me, but I will say that having past work that has succeeded means people are more likely to accept new work based on a diagram and description. Generally, having a video of a piece makes it much more likely for people to want to show it. The main place things are shown is in festivals, more than galleries or museums. Getting work into a festival is a question of practical logistics: How many people are going to experience it and how much space and resources does it demand? And then festivals tend to conform to bigger trends – sometimes a bit too much I think as then they end up all showing quite similar works. When we made Cave of Sounds, DIY hacker culture and its connection to grassroots activism was in the air. Today, the focus is the environment, decolonisation, and social justice. Tomorrow there will be other things.
Then, there’s a lot of graft, and a lot of that graft is much easier when you’re younger than when you’re older. I don’t think I could go through the Cave of Sounds process today like I did back then. I’m very happy I did it back then.
What specifically about the Cave of Sounds do you think made it work?
The first shocking success of Cave of Sounds is that when we built it we had like a team of eight, and I had a very small fee because I was doing this artist residency, but everyone else was a volunteer on that project or collaborating artists, but unpaid. And we worked together for eight months to bring it together.
A lot of people came to the first meeting but from the second meeting, the people who turned up from that point forward were the eight people making the work who stuck through to the end. I think there’s something remarkable about that. Something about the core idea of the work really resonated with those people, and I think we got really lucky with them. And there was a community that they were embedded in as well. But the fact that everyone might made it to the end, just like shows that there was something kind of magical in the nature of the work and the context of that combination of people.
So a work like Cave Sounds was possible because we had a lot of people who were very passionate, and we had a diversity of skills, but we also had like a bit of an institutional name behind us. We had a small budget as well, but the budget was very small, and most of the budget did not pay for the work. The budget covered some of the materials, really, but a significant amount of labour went into that piece, and it came from people working for passion.
Do you have a dream project or a desire for something you would like to do in the future?
For the past few years I’ve been exploring how to use AI to interpret the moving body so that I can create physical interaction without introducing any assumptions about what kind of movement the body can make. So if I’m making an instrument by mapping movement sensors to sound, I’m not thinking ‘OK this kind of hand movement should make that kind of sound’ but instead training an AI on many hours of sensor data where I’m just moving in my own natural way and asking it ‘What are the most significant movements here?’
I’m slightly obsessed with this process. It’s giving me a completely different feeling when I interact with the machine, like my actions are no longer mediated by the hand of an interaction designer. Of course, I’m still there as a designer, but it’s like I’m designing an open space for someone rather than boxes of tools. I think there’s something profoundly political about this shift, and I’m drawn to that because it reveals a way of applying AI to liberate people to be individually themselves, rather than using it to make existing systems even more efficient at being controlling and manipulative which seems to be the main AI risk I think we’re facing right now. I could go on more as well – moving from the symbolic to the embodied, from the rational to the intuitive. Computers before AI were like humans with only the left side of the brain. I think they make humans lose touch with their embodied nature. AI adds in the right side, and some of the most exciting shifts I think will be in how we interact with computers as much as what those computers can do autonomously.
So far, I’ve been exploring this with dancers, having them control sounds in real-time but still being able to dance as they dance rather than dancing like they’re trapped inside a land of invisible switches and trigger zones. And in my latest interactive installation Self Absorbed I’ve been using it to explore the latent space of other AI models, so people can morph through different images by moving their bodies. But the dream project is to expand this into a larger multi-person space, a combined virtual and physical realm that lets people influence their surroundings in all kinds of inexplicable ways by using the body. I want to make this and see how far people can feel a sense of connection with each other through full-body interfaces that are too complicated to understand rationally but are so rich and sensitive to the body that you can still find ways to express yourself.
Cave of Sounds was created by Tim Murray-Browne, Dom Aversano, Sus Garcia, Wallace Hobbes, Daniel Lopez, Tadeo Sendon, Panagiotis Tigas, and Kacper Ziemianin with support from Music Hackspace, Sound and Music, Esmée Fairbairne Foundation, Arts Council England and British Council.
To find out more about Tim Murray-Browne you can visit his website or follow him on Substack, Instagram, Mastodon, or X.
Creating soundtracks to transform the taste of wine
Dom Aversano
When I was asked to interview Soundpear I questioned if I was the right person for the job. The company specialises in composing music to enhance the flavour of wine at their tasting events in Greece, stating that they ‘meticulously design bespoke music to match the sensory profile of a paired product.’ I on the other hand am almost proudly philistine about wine, only drinking it at events and parties when it is put into my hand. I find the rituals and mystification of this ancient grape juice generally more off-putting than alluring, especially given how studies show doing as little as changing a cheap-looking label on a bottle for an expensive one or putting red dye into white wine is sufficient to change the opinions of even seasoned wine drinkers and sommeliers.
Yet, perhaps who better to do the interview than someone whose preferred notes are not the subtle hints of caramel, oak, or cherry, but the opening riff of John Coltrane’s Giant Steps.
Despite my scepticism, I was interested in talking to the company as the connection between music and taste is one that is rarely explored.
The three of us met on Zoom, each calling from a different European country. Asteris Zacharakis lives in Greece and is a researcher at the School of Music Studies at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, as well as an amateur winemaker, whereas Vasilis Paras is a music producer and multi-instrumentalist living outside of London. While the pair originally met playing in a band twenty years ago, their collaboration now involves Asteris hosting wine-tasting events in Greece, while Vasilis composes bespoke music for each variety of wine sampled.
Our conversation turns quickly to the science supporting the idea that the taste of wine can be enhanced by sound. Asteris has a passion for multimodal perception — a science that studies how our senses process in combination rather than in isolation. A famous example is the McGurk Effect, which shows that when a person sees a video of someone uttering a syllable (e.g., ga ga) but hears an overdub of a different-sounding syllable (e.g., ba ba) this sensory incongruence results in the perception of a third non-existing syllable (da da).
‘There is evidence that if you sit around a round table with no corners, it’s easier to come into agreement with your colleagues than if there are angles.’
Regarding how this could allow us to experience things differently, Asteris describes: ‘It’s been shown through research that by manipulating inputs from various senses we can obtain more complex and interesting experiences. This does not just work in the laboratory, it’s how our brains work.’
Soundpear treats the drinking of wine and listening to music as a unified experience, similar to how films unify moving images and music. I am curious how the science translates directly into Soundpear’s work since musicians and winemakers must have worked in this way for centuries — if only guided by intuition. Surely a person drinking wine on a beautiful hilltop village in the South of France while listening to a musician playing the violin is having a multimodal experience? Asteris is quick to clarify that far from being exclusive, multimodal perception occurs all the time, and is not dependent on some specialist scientific understanding.
‘Musicians become famous because they do something cognitively meaningful and potentially novel, but I doubt that in all but a few cases they’re informed by the science, and they don’t need to be. Take a painter and their art. If a neuroscientist goes and analyses what the painter is doing, they could come up with some rules of visual perception they believe the artist is taking advantage of. However, successful artists have an inherent understanding of the rules without having the scientific insight of a neuroscientist.’
Multimodal perception offers insights into how sound affects taste. For example, high notes can enhance the taste of sourness, while low notes enhance our sense of bitterness. Vasilis recounts how initially the duo had experimented with more complex recorded music but decided to strip things down and use simple electronic sounds.
‘We thought, why don’t we take this to the absolute basic level, like subtractive synthesis?”
“Let’s start with sine waves, and tweak them to see how people respond. What do they associate with sweetness? What do they associate with sourness, and how do these translate in the raw tone? Then people can generally agree certain sounds are sour. From that, we try to combine these techniques to create more complicated timbres that represent more complicated aromas, until we work our way up to a bottle of wine.’
Asteris joins in on this theme ‘For example, the literature suggests that we tend to associate a sweet taste or aroma with consonant timbres, whereas saltiness corresponds to more staccato music, and bitterness is associated with lower frequencies and rough textures. Based on this, we knew if we wanted to make the sonic representation of a cherry aroma it needed to be both sweet and sour. So we decided we should combine a dissonant component to add some sourness and at the same time a concordant component to account for the sweetness’.
They tested these sounds on each other but also experimented with participants. Asteris describes their process ‘From our library of sounds we pick some and perform experiments in an academic lab environment, to either confirm or disprove our hypotheses. Our sound-aroma correspondence assumptions are proven right in some cases, but in other cases where participants don’t agree with our assumed association, we discard it and say
“Okay, we thought that sound would be a good representative for this scent but apparently it’s not.”’
I ask if anyone can try out pairing their music with wine. Vasilis is hesitant about this, pointing out that while they have a publicly available playlist on YouTube, using it as intended would require listeners to seek out specific bottles of wine. When I ask if these could be interchangeable with other bottles he draws a comparison with film music, stating that while you could theoretically change one film score for another, it likely would clash.
At this point, I feel my initial resistance giving way. Suddenly the thought of basking in the Greek sun listening to music and drinking wine feels much more appealing — maybe being a wine philistine is overrated. What I find refreshing about the duo is they are not overplaying the science, but appear to actually be having fun combining their talents to explore a new field between taste and music. It is not the cynical banalisation of music that Spotify often promotes, using playlists with names like ‘Music for your morning coffee’. Rather than treating the experience as an afterthought Soundpear is designing its music specifically for it.
However, one question still lingers — I ask how much they believe their work can carry across cultures. Asteris accepts that neither the effect of the music nor the taste of the wine can be considered universal experiences and their appeal is largely an audience drawn from cultures considered Western. It is an honest answer, and not surprising given that rarely does either music or drink genuinely appeal to global audiences anyway, especially given that alcohol is illegal or taboo throughout much of the world.
So, what of the music?
Vasilis composes with a certain mellifluous euphoria reminiscent at times of Boards of Canada and the film composer Michael Giacchino’s soundtrack for Inside Out, though with a more minimalist timbral palette than either. The tone and mood seem appropriate for accompanying a feeling of tipsiness and disinhibition. I even detect a subtle narrative structure that I assume accompanies the opening of the bottle, the initial taste, and the aftertaste. It is not hard to imagine the music working in the context of a tasting session, and people enjoying themselves.
Soundpear appears to be attempting to broaden how we combine our senses with the goal of opening people up to new experiences, which regardless of whether you are interested in wine or not is undoubtedly interesting. It is an invitation to multidisciplinary collaboration since the principles applied to wine could just as easily be applied to coffee, architecture, or natural landscapes. The attention they bring to multimodal perception makes one question whether music could be used in new ways, and that can only be a good thing.
Music Hackspace will host a workshop with Soundpear on Friday 22nd September 6pm UK
The sound of wine: transform your wine-tasting experiences through music-wine pairing
Soundpear are planning a music-wine pairing event at the Winemakers of Northern Greece Association headquarters in Thessaloniki this October – so stay tuned for more details!
Welcoming writer Dom Aversano: exploring the interaction between technology, music, and globalisation.
Dom Aversano
I would like to briefly introduce myself as I will be creating a series of blog posts for Music Hackspace. I am a composer, percussionist, and writer with a particular interest in how globalisation and technology influence music. As I am convinced of the power of music to change us, I am naturally curious to know what are the forces that change music.
Over the last decade, I have had an increasing number of conversations with people who sense we are living in a time of great change and upheaval technologically, socio-politically, and artistically. I want to delve into this by examining new technologies, interviewing experts, and asking questions about music’s past, present, and its possible futures.
An evolving Music Hackspace
Throughout this decade the Music Hackspace has been an anchoring presence in my life, offering learning, inspiration, and outlets for the technological side of my music. I remember its early days in Hoxton, London when a handful of people ranging from hip live coders and DJs to synth builders and Theremin enthusiasts would meet in the basement of Troyganic Cafe. It was hard to imagine this morphing into a glamorous residency at the elegant Somerset House Gallery in Central London, but it did, and in style. Now in its current incarnation, it is wonderful to see it open up to a truly global audience, having moved music – though certainly not all – of its activity online during the pandemic.
My journey into coding
While some people come to Music Hackspace from a coding background moving towards music, my trajectory was the opposite. I studied music in a somewhat traditional manner before learning more about the technological possibilities of how to create it. I only truly learned Pure Data by working on The Cave of Sounds installation that the Music Hackspace helped fund and facilitate. It was a great opportunity in my life to learn not just from experts, but also from my peers, as the project involved solving hundreds – if not thousands – of small problems, to realise a bigger vision.
A core group of eight people led by Tim Murray-Browne, we created an installation that exceed our own expectations, as it ended up touring the world, and is even currently being exhibited in Milan, Italy right now. It was a lesson in the power of teamwork, and what can happen when you combine skills to build something from a place where imagination takes precedence over experience. Some people in the group had virtually no musical experience, and others – like myself – had virtually no coding experience.
The relation between technology and music
The relationship between technological development and musical progress is as old as time. Scales and chords are essentially algorithms. Cathedrals and churches reverb chambers. The piano is a revolutionary stringed percussion instrument with effect pedals. One can view church bell ringing and South Indian Carnatic music as early forms of generative music that combine algorithms and aesthetics to produce art. A question that might follow from this is, how is technology changing music now?
Needless to say, AI represents a huge shift, but even before ChatGPT and Midjourney burst onto the scene, things were moving fast. The volatile world of NFTs and Cryptocurrencies attempted to change how art was funded and distributed. The Metaverse offered an alternative reality for artists to share their work. Yet humans are hard to predict, and hype doesn’t necessarily translate into lasting change. Many people’s priorities and beliefs changed during the pandemic, and technology should align with our better natures if it is to help improve the world.
I look forward to exploring these technologies and topics in much greater detail and interviewing some of the world’s leading experts to find out what they think.
Until then, if you would like to read other articles I have written you go to take a look at my Substack page by clicking here, and you can also listen to some of my music on my Bandcamp page by clicking here. You can also book a session with me through Music Hackspace by heading over to here.