I’ve been watching the debate over Amazon’s e-book rental service, announced a few weeks ago. I can’t help but notice how it recapitulates the debate over streaming music.

Here’s a pretty normal day for me and music: I’ll listen to the radio in my car en route to work. I take my iPod, loaded with MP3s, to the gym. At my desk, I stream music via Spotify, or Last.fm, or by using ex.fm for MP3 links, or Hype Machine, or more. Or I stream more radio. On the way home, I listen to CDs (my car is too old to have an auxiliary input). I might stream Spotify to my phone as I walk out to meet friends for dinner. And I’ll put a vinyl record on when I come home.

Similarly, my office is full of text. Textbooks. Large-format coffee-table style books. My Kindle. Hand-bound copies of all of my theses. PDF e-books on my computer. Printouts of manuscripts to review. Bookmarks to online texts in my browser. Novels: hardbound, trade and pocket paperback. On my phone, Kindle and Instapaper.  Workbooks.

I recently downloaded a number of illustrations from Ernst Haeckel’s 1904 book, Kunstformen der Natur, from the Wikimedia Commons. They first existed as sketches, then engravings, then the lithographs that went into the book. Someone scanned the pages and uploaded them as high-resolution images, which I downloaded, opened in image-editing software, converted to greyscale and resized, and then downloaded to serve as the screensavers on my Kindle.

It’s a fallacy to think that the existence of one technology supplants another. Sure, technologies become obsolete. But as a user and a lover of the content (the text, or the music, or the images), I’m not interested in hurrying up the process. Different technologies have different affordances, and my primary interest is in being able to reach for the most appropriate one for my purpose.

[photo: lost box of tapes! by Flickr user wayneandwax, used here under its Creative Commons license]

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn famously wrote about science undergoing “paradigm shifts”: that scientific change occurs in sudden upheavals. It’s normally not all that dramatic, even. What I’ve observed to happen is something like this: at a conference, someone will present evidence for an alternative explanation of data. Some people will listen, some will scoff, and some will go off to do more experiments. The next year, more people are on the side of the ‘novel’ explanation. Repeat for another year or two, and everyone is on board with the new idea.

Watching the music industry evolve and struggle and try to reinvent itself, on the other hand, reminds me of what Kuhn wrote about the humanties. “[A] student in the humanities has constantly before him a number of competing and incommensurable solutions to these problems, solutions that he must ultimately examine for himself.”

The Rethink Music conference, starting today in Boston, aims to give “creators, academics, and industry professionals” a chance to think and discuss some of these solutions for the music industry.  A collaboration between the Berklee College of Music, Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and MIDEM, Rethink Music’s goal is to foster a dialogue between the ‘traditional’ music industry and the artists, researchers, and entrepreneurs who are exploring a musical universe that’s not a holdover from moving around shiny silver discs. The high-powered speaker lineup suggests that Rethink Music is on track: it includes artist management, lawyers, researchers (including Lawrence Lessig and Nancy Baym), CEOs of a host of companies including SonicBids and The Echo Nest, Kickstarter founder Yancey Strickler, and RIAA head Cary Sherman sharing a stage with Google’s senior copyright counsel Fred Von Lohmann, formerly of the EFF (I have high hopes for a deathmatch).

Rethink Music is quite unusual in how it’s bringing people from across the spectrum together. As a counterexample, at SXSW Interactive this year, I went to two panel discussions around metadata: the first featured researchers from UC Berkeley, and the second was organized by a representative of NARM (the music industry trade organization). Even though both panels were nominally on the same topic, they were worlds apart: one group was talking about things like crowdsourcing taxonomies of musical knowledge, and the other group was talking about linking MP3s with the release dates of albums. So I’m excited to see Larisa Mann, one of the researchers from Berkeley, on the Rethink Music lineup.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, there is already some evidence of friction in this uneasy alliance of interests. Wayne Marshall, a DJ and a researcher in ethnomusicology at MIT, withdrew from the conference over the boilerplate language of the speaker contract (you can read his letter to the conference organizers here). Articles on Hypebot and Mashable took issue with the planned release of an ‘instant album’ by Amanda Palmer, Neil Gaiman, Ben Folds, and Damien Kulash of OK Go (Palmer’s response is here). But of course, the tensions are likely to be what makes Rethink Music an interesting few days.

This is a guest post by Irene Ros. Read more about Death and the Powers, the “robot opera,” here.

A few weeks ago, I attended one of the few Boston performances of Tod Machover’s opera, Death and the Powers. Needless to say, to me, any opera that manages to weave terms like “simulation’” “system” and “cables” into its narrative sounds like an exciting (and nerdy) experience. Enthralled by the display arrays and semi-autonomous robots, I was ready for an evening of fine music and a story that I can identify with. Sadly, I left the show far more disappointed than I thought one could be, given the subject matter.

In the opera, the main character, Simon, is a successful businessman who basks in the glory of the capitalism that made him who he is. But he’s also terminally ill, and he decides to use his hoards of money to migrate his being into the System, an infallible “place.” (Any resemblance of the System to the Singularity is, well, probably not coincidental.) As as I chuckled at Simon singing about his ‘big bucks,’ I started to feel some pangs of missed opportunity clawing at mind. Why pick (another) rich white guy as the protagonist?

Shortly after Simon’s transition to the System, we watched the two female characters in the opera compete for who could appear weaker. His wife Evvy literally loses her voice after Simon’s departure; her subsequent appearances on stage show her as practically unhinged, wandering around the stage wearing headphones to hear the voice of her sublimed husband: after his disappearance, she apparently has no reason to remain a human being with a personality of her own. While Nicholas, Simon’s son, immediately follows him into the System, his daughter Miranda is the only character in the opera who expresses unease. But Miranda’s anxiety is largely presented as how much she misses her father. Her reasoning is so well hidden behind a wall of fragile loneliness that the viewer can’t possibly focus on the legitimate questions she was (almost) asking.

In leaving reality for the System, and taking his wealth with him, Simon somehow crashed the world’s economy (sound familiar?). He resists the entreaties of earthbound organizations to do something to repair it, and the needs of the sick, poor and children then receive their 15 minutes of fame: I was left speechless as a band of what appeared to be zombies walked on stage and attacked Miranda. Why would the needy look like zombies? And were they planning on dancing to “Thriller? Portraying capitalism in such a glorified way, as the destroyer and savior all at once, is nothing short of shameful in my mind. I couldn’t imagine how the opera could get any farther from actually shedding light on our society.

There were so many opportunities missed in this opera to discuss not just the technology question, but also to comment on our social structure through the eyes of the future. While I am certain some would argue that it’s just an opera, and not necessarily the place and time to discuss the impact of capitalism, it would be hard to argue that the storyline didn’t glorify it, at the cost of devaluing anyone who isn’t rich (or male, or white).

Machover heads the Opera of the Future group at MIT’s Media Lab, and it’s past time for us technologists to stop separating our technology from its social context and its impact on society. Perhaps the opera is most successful at showing how technology, thoughtlessly applied, will only recapitulate the existing social and power structures. Where the digital and human merge, the ethical questions and possibilities for change extend far beyond the limited ones presented in Death and the Powers.

Irene Ros is an artist, musician and visualization research developer at the Visual Communication Lab of IBM Research, in Cambridge, MA. Learn more about her and her work at ireneros.com.

This is a response to Wendy Fonarow’s column for the Guardian Music Blog, “Ask The Indie Professor: Why Are There So Many White Indie Bands?” Briefly, in the article, Dr. Fonarow posits that indie bands reflect the makeup of their audience, which is predominantly white (which, while it’s true for the UK as a whole, is probably not true for many urban areas). She then goes on to argue that non-white people are not drawn to the aesthetics of indie music. You can read the full article here.

I’ve been a devoted indie music fan my entire life. I am the daughter of South Asian immigrants. And while I might not be an anthropologist, I am a professor of engineering and a researcher of the engineering student experience, particularly around gender and ethnicity. And much of what I’ve studied about engineering students, particularly woman and minorities, is also applicable to the issue of non-whites and indie music.

At its core, Fonarow’s argument is that there are few non-white people in indie music because they don’t want to be there. But any argument for underrepresentation of this form is suspect, because it fails to consider the effect of the environment on the individual. At a Belle and Sebastian show in Boston a few months ago, there were so few non-white faces in the large theatre that my companion and I played ‘spot the person of colour!’ At smaller venues, I’m quite often the only non-white person at the gig—and bear in mind that Boston is a fairly multicultural city, with a large student population. So while it’s possible that Belle and Sebastian and other indie bands have nothing to say to people who are not of Northern European descent, which is essentially what Fonarow is arguing, it’s far more likely that non-white music fans receive subtle but unmistakable messages of non-belonging. In my own field, women engineering students face a very different academic experience than their male counterparts in a host of ways, many of them subtle, but with a profound cumulative impact. There’s a large body of literature in psychology and educational research that addresses the effect of the cultural environment, and it’s just as applicable to clubs as classrooms.

Second, Fonarow argues that as “being part of a music community is sharing similar sentiments, it should be no surprise that people raised in the same culture would have a similar ethos…”. She also states that “this may not be appealing to immigrant or marginalised groups who have already experienced poverty and experience genuine outsiderness as a social class.” Whoa, seriously? It’s astonishing that Fonarow lumps together all non-whites, whether in the US, the UK, or elsewhere, in this way. To pick just a few examples, this suggests that a Somali refugee, the middle-class, university-bound children of educated immigrants (which is what I was—hardly an experience of poverty or ‘genuine outsiderness’), a fourth-generation Japanese-American, and the child of Latino migrant workers are all one category. Never mind the fact that the children of non-white immigrants, especially in wildly diverse cities like London or New York City, are being ‘raised in the same culture’ (note to Fonarow: it’s actually quite offensive to be told that your skin colour trumps your upbringing). And this cultural-essentialist approach does just as much of a disservice to white people; it fails to explain, as a friend of mine points out, why one of her children is into indie pop and another loves death metal, despite their identical cultural backgrounds.

As an indie music fan, I read and appreciated Fonarow’s book, Empire of Dirt, largely because of how deeply rooted it is in careful observational research. So why is indie music so white? I don’t know the whole answer, but rather than just cavalierly saying, “So indie bands are generally white in the US or UK, but so what?”, I would really have preferred Fonarow to use her ethnographic skills to talk with the people who care about these questions, not just blithely talking about them.

Image: Atari Teenage Riot @ the Sonar…, used here under its Creative Commons license.

1. Mashup Breakdown

2. The Swinger

3. The Toscanini Gestural Interface

4. Dance Central and Rock Band 3

5. Another Green World (33 1/3 Books)

I’ve decided that I really want a mashup of exfm, Shuffler.fm and delicious, with a dash of smart playlisting thrown in.

Here’s the problem: Every day I find cool streaming music in lots of different places. Soundcloud. YouTube. Tumblr. (that’s a piece of my Tumblr dashboard, above). But for most of it, I listen to it once. At most. Because listening to streaming music in an atomized form is a pain. Having to choose and click on a new song every three minutes might be fine for an ADD teenager, but I don’t want my music listening to be completely interrupt-driven. I just want a continuous stream of music I like (and judging by the continuing popularity of online and terrestrial radio, and the love for Shuffler, I’m not alone).

In an MP3-centric world, I’ve dealt with the increasingly decentralized creation and distribution of music by, in essence, centralizing it: by downloading MP3s into my library, and using that as an aggregator. And exfm, which I just started using, is pretty good at getting around the downloading issue. But as more and more music is straight-up streaming, how do we make those tracks into part of our ‘virtual library,’ so that we can find them, embed them into playlists, and otherwise listen at will?

What I really want to be able to do is this: Every time I find a streaming track I’m interested in (whether in Tumblr, YouTube, SoundCloud or anywhere else), I flag it as part of my ‘library’, like delicious does for bookmarks or exfm does for MP3s. Note that, unlike delicious, I don’t want to manually tag it. Because, well, I’m lazy. But also because I either know the song, and I can classify it ways I can’t easily articulate into a folksonomy, or I don’t know it, and can’t classify it at all. So I’d really like some tools to automagically organize it into playlists in a range of ways. And then I’d like to just be able to listen to a Shuffler-like continuous stream that pulls together my flagged streaming tracks, my own MP3s, tracks from streaming services like last.fm, and more.

Oh, and I’d also like a pony. Or maybe a unicorn.

What do you think?

This post is the result of a conversation this morning with Jason Herskowitz, prompted by a question from Mark Mulligan.

Brian Whitman, the co-founder and CTO of The Echo Nest, gave a great talk at Olin College in Needham, MA last week, as part of the Technology and Culture Seminar Series.* His talk was a combination of personal narrative, a recent history of computer-generated music, and a look into the future of the interaction of music and technology.

*For those of you who only know me through this blog or Twitter: I’m on the faculty of Olin College and an organizer of the seminar series, and that’s me doing the intro. And yes, I have the best job ever.

For new artists, any discussion of a band name is likely coupled with a domain name search to make sure the URL is available, since they are constantly being told how to have an effective online presence. But there is an interesting phenomenon emerging: in a world where all information is a click away, some artists are choosing to be deliberately difficult to find on the Internet.

Ingroups and outgroups have existed as long as, well, culture. Or possibly earlier. And music has always seemed to be particularly susceptible to the distinction, as evidenced by the preponderance of hipster music jokes. So perhaps it’s no surprise that artists are taking advantages of Internet-age quirks to narrow their fanbase. Here are a few example strategies:

Have a nondescript name: I’ve long thought that the band The The had the most perfectly unGoogleable name, but since they pre-date the Internet and are deservedly well-loved, typing ‘the the’ into Google does, in fact, give you their official website as well as many ancillary sites (although note that the sixth hit is a typo in NASA’s Image of the Day). But even for a post-Google band, being generic is a dangerous strategy, as success makes you easier and easier to find. When I first started listening to The National, it was almost impossible to find their website unless you knew a priori that the URL was www.americanmary.com, after an early song. Now, of course, the band’s website is the first hit.

Hide behind special characters: GL▲SS †33†H. ℑ⊇◊⊆ℜ. ///▲▲▲\\\. Certain genres—darkwave, witch-house, and drag (any distinction between the three is rather lost on me, I admit)—use Unicode in their band names as something of a trope. Guardian Music speculates that use of symbols rather than alphanumerics for artists in the genre, together with GIF-heavy sites and locked Last.fm pages, are all about creating an ingroup, in which “only the youngest and the most enthusiastic will be bothered to seek them out by reading the right blogs.”

Be mistaken for porn: Type ‘teen’ into Google, and hit space. You’re now in whitescreen territory, where Google Instant leaves you on your own to fill out the rest, rather than offering up suggestions. This has been exploited by bands Teen Girl Fantasy, Teen Porn, and Free Nude Celebs to make themselves less findable on Google. I’m personally waiting for a bands with names that consist of a word from the Google blacklist followed by something difficult to spell, like ‘Squirt Syzygy’ (yes, ‘squirt’ is on the blacklist).

Don’t put searchable info online: A few weeks ago, I went to a concert at the Whitehaus, a Boston art-house and informal music venue. I remembered where it was, but I wanted the street address to punch into my phone for directions. I could find neither the address nor any information about the show was online. For a moment, I thought I was delusional—then I remembered that the flyer for the show was hand-drawn, scanned and uploaded (and therefore the contents weren’t indexable or searchable) and I had been pointed to it by a friend. And I wound up digging the street address out of an e-mail from another friend. Whitehaus has a specific reason to be unfindable by the casually interested—it is a private residence, after all—but this also ensured that the attendees were limited to a small ingroup, largely people with personal connections to the community.

Don’t be online at all: Somewhere, there is a community of loosely-connected high school kids, making music in their basements, recording it with their parents’ dusty disused Technics double-cassette decks, and sharing it with their friends. And we’ll never know about them, at least not until one of those kids becomes the next Mountain Goats.

Other strategies? A friend of mine suggested naming your band “404 Not Found.” Another option would be to name your band with a misspelling of another well-known band, like ‘Metalica,’ which is guaranteed to get you lost in the metadata. If you have other suggestions for ways to hide on the Internet, feel free to leave them in the comments.

UPDATE: There actually used to be a band called 404 Not Found. Thanks, Jesse, for the heads-up!

UPDATE 2: Thanks to William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and everyone else on Twitter who pointed people to this post! This blog, zed equals zee, is primarily about the intersection of music, culture and technology; feel free to explore the rest or to subscribe. You can also check me out on Twitter. Cheers!

I’m spending part of this weekend at the Boston Music Hack Day in Cambridge, MA. Like lots of people, my ideas far outstrip my abilities and (especially!) the amount of time I have, so I thought I’d put some of them up here, in the hope that they may spark some ideas in other people.

Hacks:

Neophile: how musically alive are you? After the nth disappointment with online music licensing, and realizing that their power of the legacy record labels lies in their back catalog, I started to wonder what proportion of music that people listen to is old and how much is new. It occurred to me that you could plot a histogram of ‘number of listens’ against release date, and different people would have different distributions. For example, some people might have a peak centred around the music that came out when they were 21, whereas people who seek out new music might have a curve that’s flat or increasing with time (Paul Lamere dubbed these people ‘musically dead’ and ‘musically alive,’ respectively). The Musicbrainz database includes release years for a number of songs; with that and Last.fm scrobble data, it’s feasible to build this. I’d love to see it.

Ransom Note: I really want a ‘musical ransom note’, where you can piece together the lyrics of a song using cut-up bits of other songs. While the MusiXmatch lyrics API now provides half of that equation. I’m not sure that you can parse songs by lyrics quite yet, so this one might have to wait a bit.

Research questions:

Whose Telephone Is It? I was listening to “Teenage Kicks” (1978) by The Undertones recently, and I was struck that Feargal Sharkey sings about “the telephone” because Lady Gaga, for example, sings about “my telephone.” Somewhere in the last decade or so, telephones went from being communal property to being individual property, and this is reflected in lyrics. So I idly wondered about using the MusiXmatch lyrics API to search for instances of the word “telephone,” and to plot the frequency of the preceding article (‘the,’ ‘my,’ ‘your’) over time. This is kind of a silly example, but there is real, interesting research to be done in analysing the corpus of music lyrics using digital methodologies, for example to track social change (my friend Jo Guldi, a historian at the University of Chicago and Harvard University, does this kind of work with historical documents).

My projects:

I’ve just started re-learning how to code after many years of being strictly an experimentalist, so I have some bite-sized projects of my own that I’m working on. If you’re at the Hack Day and you’re interested in helping a Python n00b figure stuff out (like how to install matplotlib when I have Python 2.7, not 2.6) please feel free to find me.

What Makes a Music Geek? The distribution of musical knowledge. Paul Lamere of The Echo Nest created Namedropper, an online ‘game with a purpose’ that let people test their musical knowledge via their familiarity with artists across a range of genres. I have a hypothesis (half in jest, I admit) that there a very few people who know an enormous amount about music and lots of people who just know a little: in other words, that the musical knowledge in a population isn’t a normal distribution about a mean, but rather a Pareto distribution (shown above). Paul was kind enough to send me his dataset from running Namedropper, and I’m planning to plot a histogram of the scores to test this hypothesis (and yes, I know that it has pretty significant methodological limitations!)

Pandora’s Redemption: A friend of mine recently tweeted, “Pandora just put John Mayer‘s “Daughters” on my 90s grrl rock station. There is no “thumbs down” button large or ironic enough.” So I’m pretty sure my first ‘real’ music hack will be to use the Echo Nest Remix APIs to try to recreate John Mayer songs out of 90s riot grrl bands like Bikini Kill and L7.

Screaming Death Metal: My technical background is in materials science, not music, and it was suggested to me that I could try to merge the two (thanks, Brian). I’ve done a lot of work with the mechanical properties of materials: putting samples of different substances (like metals, ceramics, glass and, in my case, human bone) into a machine that pulls or pushes on them and measures the amount of force required to deform and eventually break the sample, to create a stress-strain curve. The shape of the curve is characteristic of the material, and it should be possible to create an audibilization of the data that captures some of the features that are interesting to a materials scientist in a way that is discernible to the ear: in other words, creating the scream that a material makes when it’s stressed to failure.

Every once in a while, I hear someone argue that music isn’t as good as it used to be — that at some point in the past, usually the 1960s or 70s, music was better. If you’re one of these people, I submit three reasons why that’s unlikely to be the case.

Time is the mother of all selection biases.

Go look at charts for different years – we only remember the gold, and we forget the dross. Time is a fantastic filter for the good stuff.

You are not the same person you were (10, 20, whatever) years ago.

Your relationship to music has changed. I don’t know if this is apocryphal or not, but it’s said that the magic age is 21: that you imprint on what you listen to then (hence the existence of oldies stations).

People have been saying that the older music was better for as long as popular music has existed.

Elvis? What are kids listening to these days?

Beatles? What are kids listening to these days?

Punk? What are kids listening to these days?

Rap? What are kids listening to these days?

Lady Gaga? What are kids listening to these days?

Get the picture? Do you really think that you’re different and special, and somehow the music from when you were a teenager actually was better?

It’s not that a case can’t be made for the superiority of music from one decade or another. It’s just that it’s really hard to convincingly make the case based on your personal experience of music, because you are not a disinterested, dispassionate observer.

I propose a new rule: that you’re only allowed to make sweeping generalizations comparing music from different time periods if they are at least a generation older than you. “The 1880s! That was a terrible decade for music. No soul, man – not like the ’70s!”

I look around, and I think that we may very well be living through the Cambrian Explosion of music. Music has never been easier to create or to distribute. There’s no reason to believe that the amount of good music hasn’t increased too.

Image: Mayan Calendar by Flickr user NCReedplayer, used here under its Creative Commons license.