The San Francisco Bay Guardian reports that the SFPD has begun routinely seizing DJs laptops at house parties. Like the ACTA treaty our federal government is currently pursuing, it's representative of a disturbing new trend in law enforcement -- one in which our digital civil liberties, or "e-speech," are not accorded the same protections that they would be in our physical lives or traditional communications media.
However, there's also something very familiar about this story. As I discuss in my forthcoming book, Mashed Up, musical practices and technologies have always been subjected to government regulation, often at gunpoint, from ancient times to the present. This is because music acts as a kind of social and psychological blueprint, and new musical ideas nearly always carry with them new social ideas, which threaten established institutions.
In the case of DJ- and laptop-based music, the new musical ideas are sufficiently threatening to destabilize all of today's modern institutions -- in the government, the marketplace, and even houses of worship. No small wonder, then, that the police would begin to confiscate and criminalize these devices.
Of course, the flip side of regulation is resistance. Even history's most dispossessed peoples (e.g. slaves in the antebellum South) have responded to musical subjugation with innovative and canny countermeasures. I'm kind of looking forward to seeing how the SF DJ scene starts to hide its contraband...
Today I spent an hour on MPR's "Midmorning" (along with Daniel Radosh and Jason Della Rocca) discussing the soon-to-launch Beatles Rock Band, and some of its bigger-picture implications for the media industry and society at large. We also responded to a lot of listener questions. Altogether, it was a nice, freewheeling conversation, aided by host Kerri Miller's terrific moderation.
Michael Jackson is dead, and America the world is celebrating the man who more or less invented the music video by getting together for impromptu Thriller flashmobs, then uploading the video to YouTube. It's kind of cool that we can collectively preserve the his cultural memory from the ground up, rather than relying on the dainty official hagiographies we're bound to see on MTV and network news.
I was lucky enough to walk into one of those flashmobs tonight. Here's my video. Rest in peace, oh gloved one. You rocked a lot of worlds.
These days, I'm loving this little iPhone app called RjDj. It takes the audio from your earphone mic, routs it through a bunch of DSPs (sonic warping technologies), and feeds them back into your earphones in real time. I love to sit on the bus or the subway, and instead of listening to music, just listen to the sounds around me remixed, reverbed and reconfigured.
As the RjDj site explains, in less than subtle fashion:
The listening experience of RjDj is similar to the effects of drugs. Drugs affect our sensory perception, so does RjDj. RjDj is a digital drug which causes mind twisting hearing sensation.
Ok, so the same could be said about music, but still, I appreciate the sentiment.
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute an the University of Salzburg just published new research in BMC Neuroscience demonstrating something that music makers have known for time immemorial: playing music together makes your brainwaves synch up. And the longer you play together, the more synchronized your brainwaves become.
As I argue in my doctoral dissertation and forthcoming book, Configurable Culture, this facet of the musical experience is precisely what makes it such an effective tool for communicating -- and monitoring -- social organizational ideas. Put in other words, the act of making music together is not only analogous to, but constituent of, the act of producing society.
There's a pretty nifty video here showing the EEGs side-by-side with performance footage. Unfortunately, there's no embed link.
I love this project by MIT Media Lab grad student David Merrill. They're computerized, self-aware, socially-aware, manipulable blocks. Depending on the software you run through them, they can be an audio sequencer, an interactive storybook, a spreadsheet, or a visual art program.
Can't wait to see what Nintendo does with this technology in 10 years!
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.
Smarterfolks 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.
Someone named Henry Hey took a piece of Palin's Couric interview, and set it perfectly to expressionist piano jazz. I love stuff like this, that skirts the boundaries between spoken and musical inflection. I think the cadences that Hey's accentuating explain a lot about Palin's media appeal (let's face it, she's not really that hot).
Kind of reminds me of this high-larious "jazz rant" that was circulating a few years ago, where someone set piano accompaniment to audio of a guy freaking out on a customer service phone call.
This Scottish art student used a bunch of obsolete hardware -- oscilloscopes, dot-matrix printers, etc. -- to make an exquisitely undanceable remix of the Radiohead tune "Nude," from In Rainbows. The action starts around 1:10.
Kinda reminds me of my colleagues Ben Kafka and Alex Galloway's dead media archive project.
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