Category: music and sound

Magnatune blog and Creative Commons comp

John Buckman, who runs Creative Commons’ favourite “online music label” magnatune, now has a blog. I liked the transcription of a cute exchange between Buckman and a major label exec, who apparently doesn’t like being called evil.

Speaking of CC, Seb’s Open Research points us to the winning video in the Creative Commons Moving Image Contest: Building on the Past (.mov), created by Justin Cone. NIce use of old footage, still images, text and sound, and explains the creative commons licensing system very clearly. I especially agree with Seb that the concluding bit is good:

Creativity always builds on the past and you’re building the past right now.
Share now.
Shape tomorrow.

Couldn’t be clearer, and couldn’t be more right.

New on The Wire Website

The Wire’s shows on Resonance FM are now archived for approximately one month on The Wire website.

Plus:

New additions to the MP3 gallery plus new articles from the Wire vault in the Archive Section:

BBC Radiophonic Workshop by Mark Sinker (from issue 150, February 92)
Exotic Audio Research by Rob Young (from issue 139, September 95)
David Toop’s interview with Bill Laswell (from issue 130, December 94
Portishead interviewed by Rob Young (from issue 178, December 1998)
Iannis Xenakis interviewed by Ben Watson (from issue 136, June 95)

So good to see The Wire enriching their web presence with such goodies.

The GarageBand Controversy

I am just about ready to move on from the GarageBand thing – it will be one of my case studies, but any more consecutive posts on the topic and this will turn into some sort of Apple fansite. And I don’t even have a Mac.

However…

It seems quite a lot of people didn’t like it when Wired said, and quoted me as saying, that GarageBand was quite an important development – this bulletin board discussion is an example. Typically, those already skilled and knowledgeable about PC audio and music production technologies are quick to jump in and point out that (for example) ACID is way better than GarageBand, and plus it’s been around for years.

Well, lest anyone thinks that I’ve only just “discovered” music production software via GarageBand hype, let me state (however uncomfortable it feels to do so) that I’ve been a heavy and enthusiastic user of Logic, Sound Forge, and about a zillion plugins and audio toys since 1997. In the last couple of years I’ve used ACID a fair bit and I know my way around Fruity Loops. I have tertiary music qualifications and a background in professional classical music, abundant (if sadly underused) theory skills and a modest amount of knowledge about sound theory and studio recording techniques.

I list these “qualifications” to explain why I’m not evaluating GarageBand in comparison to, say, ACID: GarageBand is aimed at total novices – and I’m not a novice, and (most) ACID users aren’t either. So it doesn’t really matter what I think of GarageBand as compared to ACID or Logic (just by the way though, I think ACID’s interface is quite counter-intuitive). The real point, as I’ve been saying, isn’t really what GarageBand “does” that other software can’t do, it is who is going to be able to use it – every single person who buys a new Mac – because it comes bundled, and because you really only need ears and the ability to use a mouse in order to get started with it. Yes, it’s about marketing – yes, similar tools have been around for the PC for years already, yes, Apple’s innovations are essentially repackaged and aggressively marketed versions of pre-existing software, but that only makes it all the more interesting to me. As part of their contrastive marketing strategy, unlike Microsoft, Apple is clearly encouraging Mac users to see themselves in a particular way – as creators of culture, as cultural agents if you like. Will it work in the case of music? We’ll have to wait and see.

GarageBand: Usability vs. Hackability

I don’t have a Mac, so I haven’t used GarageBand yet, but I’ve been following its release and its take-up by users very closely. To hear the fruits of this explosion of creativity, visit one of the many online distribution channels for GarageBand recordings that have already begun to appear: MacJukebox, iCompositions, or MacJams.

As I’ve said before, I reckon any software that enables complete novices to make their own music (and not just Rip. Mix. Burn the music of others) has to be pretty much a Good Thing. Good, not only for the self-cultured individual, or for those who want to see more independent cultural production, but even for Culture as a whole. As far as I can tell, GarageBand is ridiculously powerful for its price, and while very simple to use, it is at least to some extent expandable. But the questions I have are more long-term: in the end, does its seamless ease-of-use, its smilingly simple interface, enable or close off the serendipity, misuse, and productive errors that accompany our learning of more “difficult” (Logic) or more “open” (AudioMulch) creative production software? Is it too much to ask for a radically simple entry-level interface that won’t condemn the novice user to following only preset production paths?

It’s too early to tell that story about GarageBand (and I am probably not fully equipped to tell it), but there have already been a few developments that suggest users will pressure Apple to make GarageBand even less a toy, and more a tool for serious leisure, than it already is (and what it “already is” is quite an achievement).

Even the amateur users have quickly tired of simply dragging and dropping the supplied “apple loops” – they are demanding to know how to reverse audio loops, import MIDI files, change the tempo mid-song, and even (god forbid!) escape the four-walled prison of 4/4 time. And the limitations of the software are beginning to show – in fact, the more newbies use it, the more they come to realize what they are missing. For example, GarageBand doesn’t support MIDI out (meaning you can’t use external sound modules like drum machines or synths with it), it doesn’t support Logic’s EXS sampler (despite being built on Logic architecture and sporting some of Logic’s native effects), the software doesn’t come with much sound-editing capability beyond cutting the supplied loops (although you can create loops in another program like ACID and import them), and it is impossible to record more than one track at once.

These limitations seem to be experienced even by “amateurs” as effective limitations on creativity, and as we would expect there are already signs that the hacking has begun.

Musical Amateurism and Technological Change

Two articles that problematize the cultural values attached to the modernist producer/consumer dichotomy, especially with regard to musical amateurism.

From Antoine Hennion (whose work is all too rarely available in English), Music industry and music lovers, beyond Benjamin: The return of the amateur:

[...] the amateur could easily be reinstated at the centre of the world of music. Far from being the slightly ridiculous provincial cousin who insists on blowing his tuba, he is every bit as modern as the musical environment dominated by professionals, techniques and market forces. It should be recognized that he too has changed, and needs to be defined as a user of music, to understand that, on the contrary, neither the professional environment, nor techniques, nor market forces have any sense without him. Thus, not only is there nothing anachronistic about the amateur, but we perceive that he has become, for the first time in history, the sole target of a musical environment completely reconstructed around him. It is not the professional who is a modern, modified variation of the authentic musical practices of our ancestors, it is the amateur.

From history of new media guru Lisa Gitelman, How Users Define New Media: A History of the Amusement Phonograph:

The production/consumption dichotomy harbors a particular determinism: within it lurks a tendency to use technology as a sufficient explanation of social and cultural change. It puts production first and has helped orient the history of technology away from the experience of any but white, middle-class men; rendering a history, according to one observer, in which “inventing the telephone is manly; talking on it is womanly.” An unreflected reliance on the same dichotomy has led to a history of the phonograph that [focuses on individual inventors, policy and pricing].

[...]

Besides the elision of consumption and buying (phonographs and records are played, after all), [most] accounts [of the history of the phonograph] limit the definition of production to the activities of inventors and entrepreneurs. What if that kind of production were only a tiny part of the story, granted its singular importance by the same cultural norms and expectations that construe technology as a male realm? The very meaning of technology might be at stake. The spring motor phonograph “worked” in homes around the world, but would it have been described as “working,” if it did not already make sense somehow within the social contexts of its innovation?

Gitelman’s argument is complex, encompassing shifts in the uses and cultural meaning of the gramophone as well as the familiar institutional and economic shifts more frequently represented as the ‘real’ history of technologies. Most importantly, she focuses particularly on the feminised space (i.e. the home) in which these shifts took place.

And in the conclusion is a broader argument that to my mind is stand-up-and-cheer material:

Casting mass culture as a shift from a tactile, craft-oriented world to a visual, mass-production one [...] seems simplistic at best. Our readings of cultural history must also include the squeaks and noises of change. We must be prepared to explain the intensity of modern cultural experiences as well as their extensive range and appeal.

I love “the squeaks and noises of change” bit.