Aram Squalls

If Terry Riley and Kutiman had a baby

Bassist and composer Darren Solomon very cleverly married Terry Riley's "In C" with Kutiman's Through-You, and added interactivity, producing a hypnotic, finite-yet-infinite YouTube mash-up site called "In B Flat."

It's delectably simple, yet wonderfully compelling. Kind of like a sonic chocolate-chip cookie.

Nirvana gets Rick Rolled

Yes, yes, I know, Rick Rolling was soooooo 2008. But this new video mash-up by DJ Morgoth was just too good not to post. The video mix isn't much to look at, but the musical juxtaposition really works.

Previously:
Obama + Rick Astley = lulz
Memetic hybridization -- or, Hitler gets Rick Rolled

RIP: A Remix Manifesto -- tonight at UnionDocs

Whatever you think you're doing tonight, cancel those plans. Because Brett Gaylor's massively acclaimed documentary, RIP: A Remix Manifesto will be screening at UnionDocs in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. And if that weren't incentive enough, you can hear me and Fred Benenson from Creative Commons talk about the social significance of remix at a panel immediately following. Serious fun. Begins at 7:30pm.

The more things change, the more they stay corrupt

ClearChannel may be laying off 12% of its workforce, but that doesn't mean the age of the dinosaurs has ended. A new report from the Future of Music Coalition shows that, more than two years after the anti-payola accords between the major broadcast networks and the FCC, aesthetic diversity on commercial music radio hasn't increased one iota.

I co-authored a conference paper about six years back demonstrating that payola is structurally necessary to the radio broadcast ecology (never managed to get it published), so I can't really say I'm surprised. Still, this provides great fodder against those who argue for deregulation. Internet or no, the airwaves are still one of our most important resources, and we need to make sure they're used to the greatest public benefit, not for playing us 24/7 Miley Cyrus.

New Biggish Idea: Pandora for Politics

I spent Saturday at Columbia University, attending a mini-conference devoted to the subject of the disintegrating news industry and the future of the American public sphere. Despite never once getting called upon in 6 hours of hand-raising, and having to listen to some less-than-informed comparisons between the news industry and the music industry, it was a pretty interesting event, and I met some very smart and cool people.

One of the interesting ideas that came out of the conference was generated by me and Jack Balkin, in response to a talk by Bruno Latour about the negative effect of "attention deficit" on civic participation. In its essence, the idea is this:

THE PROBLEM:

• It's difficult for even a civically-engaged person to develop confident opinions about a broad range of political issues, mostly due to our limited attention and resources.
• This difficulty is exacerbated by (a) the dwindling resources of the professional journalism industry, and (b) the increasing [perceived] partisanship of the mainstream media, which reduce both salient information and the vital bond of trust between information-seekers and providers
• The result is increasing homogenization/polarizing of platforms, and civic disengagement

A SOLUTION:

• A recommendation engine for political facts/opinions/news that captures and reflects the underlying value systems that drive civic engagement by individuals, and delivers customized political information to those who seek it

The reason I cited Pandora specifically at the conference (when I finally stopped waiting to get called on and just started talking) is that I believe its tag-based database infrastructure, which charts the relationships between the intrinsic qualities of songs, rather than between their audiences, provides a promising alternative to more traditional collaborative-filtering recommendation techniques. Whether applied to music or politics, collaborative filtering tends to have an "echo chamber" effect, reinforcing the "tyranny of the majority" and supporting traditional generic categorizations. In politics, its effect would be to provide obvious recommendations that already match the reductionist platforms of the two major parties for most users. A Pandora-style architecture, on the other hand, would have the plasticity and nuance to deliver counter-intuitive news and information. Just as the music site now offers recommendations that fall outside of people's established generic preferences, a political version might offer Republican points-of-view to Democrats (or vice-versa) much more frequently, and accurately to the needs of individual users.

The problem with adopting the Pandora model whole-cloth would be its reliance on experts; its database is populated by a team of highly-specialized music analysts, who apply their expertise to the coding process. Clearly, to put a political recommendation engine in the hands of such "experts" would be problematic for several reasons -- the most important of which would be that they would provide the same reductionist coding as a collaborative-filtering engine, being steeped in the dominant Manichaean political framework. Much more useful (not to mention more robust, less expensive, more timely, etc) would be to crowdsource the database generation using a process similar to Wikipedia's.

So, in short, the political engine would use:

• Wikipedia-style data generation and management
• Pandora-style database architecture and processing
• Newsreader-style, queryable front-end..? (not so sure about this part yet)

The other benefit of this system would be that the degree of complexity introduced by processual firewall between data generation and database analysis would limit the potential for hacking, google-bombing, SEO, or whatever you want to call "tipping the electronic scales." In other words, if well-designed, it would be very difficult for a third party to pre-determine the opinion and data retrieved by any given individual -- just as Pandora is more or less immune to record label promotional efforts (they could, of course, accept payola and hack their own database, but founder Tim Westergren is vociferously against such meddling, even if it would save his business from going under).

Clearly, there's even more to it than this (the idea kind of sprung wholly-grown like Athena), but these are the rudiments. I've discussed it with a few smart people in the past 2 days, and everyone thinks I should try and build it... Comments? Suggestions?

In defense of Songsmith

For the last week or so, there's been a little tizzy in a teapot among the music nerd informatosphere about Microsoft's brilliantly/awfully-marketed Songsmith software (see trailer below), which essentially "composes" on-the-fly, karaoke-style accompaniment to any song you sing into your computer mic.

Most of the commentary has followed Valleywag's excoriation, proclaiming Songsmith the final death knell for human culture, etc. etc.

I respectfully disagree.

First of all, you can't kill something that's dead already. What universe do you have to live in to believe that Songsmith poses a credible threat to "legitimate" music production? The radio, television, internet, and every public space are currently awash in a cacophony of computer-generated, market-researched, auto-tuned, HSS-approved, virtually identical songs, produced by the same handful of engineers, for an ostensibly diverse group of artists, genres and programming formats. Everything is already compressed to hell, as well, adding dynamic flatness to the aesthetic sameness. So I fail to see how this meager intervention by Microsoft could really make things any worse, sonically.

Second of all, despite all of the factors I mentioned above, music isn't dead -- in fact, it's thriving. Never in the history of industrialized society has there been such a broad range of sonic material available at our beck and call, and never in the history of the modern music industry have musicians had so many opportunities to share their work with potential listeners. In fact, some of the most interesting work being made and shared today begins with the insipid songs and tools I have mentioned, and uses them in unintended, unofficial, critical, and resistant ways. This includes lo-fi goofing around, such as creative karaoke, as well as an efflorescence of mash-ups, remixes, glitch and the like. Valleywag untintentionally cops to this in its post, by sharing a bunch of videos in which people have run a capella versions of much-loved pop songs through Songsmith, and paired the result with the original video for the song (The Police's Roxanne, brilliantly songsmithed, is embedded below). In other words, Songsmith may be evil, but its evil may be used for good.

Finally, I am always wary of people who react to any democratizing technology by bemoaning loss of standards and quality; they sound a bit too much like Habermas bitching about the public sphere. Far too many erstwhile defenders of goodness and beauty are slaveowners in liberators' garb, too busy saving us from ourselves to give us the room to save ourselves. The truth is that most people these days don't know how to make music with instruments. It's a damnable shame, but that's how it is, and we can blame everyone -- the government, the schools, the recording industry -- except the people themselves. Clearly, a great many people remain very interested in producing their own life soundtracks rather than buying them ready-made, and I say more power to them. Any tool that helps them move towards this goal is a good tool. And if Songsmith isn't up to the challenge, someone else will come along and offer a better tool (unless Microsoft owns so many patents they effectively chill innovation).

Anwyay, that's my rant. Take a look at the videos below. Buy the software or download a hack, and play with it. Decide for yourself before you start writing society's epitaph.


Songsmith commercial:

"Roxanne," Songsmithed:

Mash-up of Top 25 Songs of 2008

DJ Earworm, a west-coast DJ who recently authored the Audio Mashup Construction Kit, produced a brilliant sonic synopsis of 2008, by mashing up the 25 top-selling songs of the year. I don't really like the sound of it any more than I liked any of its constituent parts, but I think it makes a pretty compelling argument about our musical culture in the final moments of the Bush years (is it any accident that "It's too late to apologize" becomes the dominant lyrical theme?).

I interviewed Earworm a few times for my forthcoming book, Configurable Culture, and I ended up using his insights heavily throughout it. One of the most interesting points he made is that mash-ups can be simultaneous critique and fandom:

Mash-ups “let people enjoy stuff that they ‘ought’ to be critical of, and that their
social cues tell them that they should be critical of. . . . I think most mash-up artists
are critical of the music industry. But not the music.” When I asked him what
elements of the music industry he felt mash-up producers are reacting against, he
told me, “the marketing muscle. The RIAA. The anti-piracy efforts."

Great mash-up: Beyonce + Mayberry Theme

If you've seen a tallish bald guy walking around the village giggling today, the chances are about .027 that it was me, listening to this kick-ass new mash-up by Party Ben, called Single Ladies (In Mayberry).

I could wax academic about how the track reveals the underlying sameness of pop in different ages and genres (thanks for the chord changes, Gershwin!), or about the whitening of Beyonce or the blackening of Andy Griffith, or about the deep strain of parochialism uniting Miss B and Matlock.

I could do that.

But instead, I'm just gonna put my headphones back on and giggle.

Obama, the Mash-up President

Smarter folks than me have long realized that musical innovation often seems to precede social and political change. Even back in the day, Plato warned that "when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them."

A large portion of my research in recent years has attempted to apply this premise to new forms of digital and sample-based music, especially the mash-up -- a musical form that combines several preexisting recordings into a new composition/performance that is both completely derivative and completely original.

Today, basking in the glow of last night's ecstatic coup d'etat, it occurred to me that Barack Obama's ascent to the presidency is (thus far) the defining political manifestation of the mash-up aesthetic/ethic. Or, to put it another way, the man is himself a walking mash-up.

Obviously, there's the racial angle -- with a black African father and a white Kansan mother, he is a living rejection of the American racial binary. By the way, this transgressing of ethnic and cultural lines is also a fundamental, and conscious, goal of the mash-up ethic. As DJ Adrian of Bootie told me, "The audience [at our club] is so mashed up, like the music, and that’s [what] we’re most proud of."

But there are other mashed-up aspects of Obama, as well. His rhetoric is equal parts MLK and Harvard Law. His social agenda combines the "personal responsibility" and "family values" mantras of mainstream (pre-Bush) conservativism with pro-choice, pro-civil rights liberalism. His persona is both young and old, immigrant and native son, Christian, Muslim, and rational humanist. He is both a political insider, a scion of the Chicago Democratic machine, and consummate outsider, a first-term senator with a platform built on "change." He is from Hawaii, Kansas, Illinois, Kenya, and Indonesia. He is both "Barry" and "Hussein."

Critics have suggested that Obama's multifacetedness is just a blind, that he's a chimerical Zelig figure, a screen against which we hopeless optimists project our wildest fantasies.

Maybe.

But I think he's more mash-up than chimera. Like "Smells Like Booty," "Careless or Dead," or -- most obviously -- the Grey Album, Obama is far more than the sum of his parts. His unique juxtaposition of cultural and political logics creates a meta-logic that reveals the deeper truths uniting these seemingly disparate strands, and exposes some of our deepest beliefs to be nothing more than self-fulfilling prophecies of self-negation.

Our categories have bound us for too long. It's time for us to become a full-spectrum society, made of fully realized individuals. Mash-ups give us a template for understanding how society needs to evolve, and Obama has given us the hope that we can get there.

Satie, Electrified

Saturday night, I played a set of Erik Satie's Furniture Music with my good friend Ben Harbert and some other excellent musicians at a club in Brooklyn called Goodbye Blue Monday. It was a last minute kind of thing, but I think it came out great. Here are some video clips (I've got higher quality MP3s too -- if you're interested, email me.)

(the first clip begins loud and distorted because there was no sound check, but it's corrected within a few seconds, so bear with it, or just mute until it gets to 0:15)