Where Everything is Music
'Where Everything is Music' is an exploratory musical lineage project - lightly uncovering how interwoven strands of place can affect musical creation, and encourage looking deeper.
Overview#
Where Everything is Music is an experiment in interaction with musical lineage.
It was created out of a manifold desire to encourage curiosity into both music itself, and how music, and its lineage can sometimes be used as a lens to explore cultural history, and the complex ways in which geographies are woven together.
It also was created out of a desire for greater interaction and impact with music - something that is increasingly becoming fungible and transient to some.
The Platform#
The demonstration showed a prototype of the platform, where people were:
- encouraged to bring a song they were interested in learning more about
- the platform would capture the audio from the song, and pull in information from different sources (Wikipedia, LastFM, MusicBrainz)
- it would then produce a summary, ’liner notes’ of the song,
- it would try and add some of the historical context and circumstance around the artist, the album, and if relevant, the movement
- it would go on to explore and attempt to its ‘musical lineage’ - what different types of music, and cultural factors fed in
- it would do this by attempting to draw 3 disparate strands, for example, traditional english hymns, blues, throat singing.
- this, very imperfect, process would aim to open up questions and considerations around the different cultural and other factors that influence music.
Lineage Examples#
This system inevitably sparked more interesting results where there were very different influences.
An example that was in mind through the creation of the project was some parts of cuban music:
- spanish colonisation brought guitars, harmony, and dances like contradanza and bolero
- african traditions, carried to Cuba through the transatlantic slave trade, brought polyrhythms, call-and-response, and percussion (conga, bongó, batá).
- out of this mix came son, rumba, danzón
- the 20th century saw son fuse with U.S. jazz
culminating in artists like Buena Vista Social Club.
Better Recommendations#
It would then take some of these disparate strands, and try and recommend some other artists or songs to check out.
I loosely mirrored this on my own way of exploring music - through reading as much as I can, finding out who played with who, who they were listening to at the time, and had an impact, and listening to them. And so on!
Next#
As mentioned, this was just a prototype - ideally I’d love to see this first and foremost, off a ‘regular screen’. I’ve been exploring and resonating with the concepts of ‘calm computing’ recently, and I think being off a conventional screen is a) a good thing, and b) would help encourage users to interact with a different headspace.
Ideally I’d love to see this as a passive experience, actively listening, exploring, recommending, explaining, in a public place where there’s music - cafes, galleries, restaurants etc. This might also help keep places accountable for what they play - what consideration has gone into one sense dimension, one that is sometimes lacking care, attention and love.