Music

Boston.
(I'm afraid I accidentally deleted a couple of comments here last night - please repost them if you can!)

It's the last day of MiT5, and we're in the first session of the day. Mary Madden from the Pew Center is the first speaker, on Socially-Driven Music Sharing and the Adoption of Participatory Media Applications. She notes that the term Web2.0 is imperfect but convenient for summarising many of the current developments in the online world. Tom O'Reilly defines Web2.0 as harnessing social effects; it may not be a revolution, but there have been important changes. We now need to think critically about how and why it emerged as a major force in the first place.

Boston.
The last MiT5 plenary session for today is on Learning through Remixing, and Henry Jenkins introduces it through examples of remixing as pedagogical practice in earlier times. This can perhaps be described as a process of taking culture apart and putting it together again, in order to better understand how it works.

The first speaker on the panel is Erik Blankinship, of Media Modifications, who build tools for exposing and enhancing the structure of media in order to make them more understandable to all (and he demonstrates this now by using a few redacted clips from Star Trek: TNG). Some of these which will also be online soon at adapt.tv, and another example for this is showing clips from The Fellowship of the Ring (the movie) next to the text of The Fellowship of the Ring (the book), and even a comparison of the Zeffirelli and Luhrman versions of Romeo & Juliet with the original Shakespeare text (which allows the viewer to compare how differently the two directors interpreted the text, and even to created hybrid versions with the 1996 Juliet and the 1968 Romeo interacting with one another). Fascinating stuff!

I was interviewed for an ABC Online science story the other day, about an article published by a number of physicists recently. Not the most likely story to comment on for an Internet researcher, you might think (even if, as it turns out, my first degree was in physics) - but what's happened here is that the researchers in question have applied complex network theory to the musicians' database of the All Music Guide (AMG), which both tracks collaborations between musicians and provides recommendations of musical similarity made by its panel of expert contributors. What's come out of this are two datasets, one indicating the network of collaborations across the 30,000-odd musicians tracked by AMG, and one showing the similarities between these artists as AMG's pundits see them.

Hannover, Germany
We spent the last few days on a brief visit to my home town of Hannover, via a brief detour through Berlin and the Hurricane music festival at Scheeßel, to see Australian sensation Wolfmother. (Luckily, the storms which led to the cancellation of the later days of the festival only hit after we'd already left again.) This is the first time in six years I've been back to Hannover, and only the second since I left Germany for Australia in 1994. Strangely, I'm finding myself in a position of seeing Hannover (and Germany more generally) through the eyes of a tourist rather than those of a native, which is somewhat disconcerting - albeit a tourist with better local knowledge than many of the football fans and other travellers currently traversing the country.

Phew. I have spent four out of the last five working days virtually in non-stop meetings on a wide variety of issues - from research and teaching planning sessions to team meetings for the ACID Press project (which has a very outdated outline on the ACID Website, I'm afraid), meetings of the AoIR 2006 conference organising team, preliminary work for a new book project, and a PhD confirmation presentation by Creative Industries student Stephen Harrington - and tomorrow is looking no better, with an all-day meeting of the team of our teaching and learning project using blogs and wikis at QUT. In between all the meetings about what work needs to be done, it would be nice to find some time to actually do some work... (At least I did find the time to accept an invitation to join the editorial board of New Media & Society, and I look forward to being part of it.)

Following up on my "More DGM, Less DRM" post a little while ago: in his diary, Robert Fripp has now responded to some of the reports about the launch of DGMLive, and clarified some of the usage restrictions for downloaded music which apply for DGMLive downloads. "Act rightly" is the governing phrase - an idea which is positively alien to the mainstream music industry, of course.

I've been meaning to flag the fact that DGMLive has gone online. The site is the new online arm of Discipline Global Mobile, the record label founded by King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp, and offers a growing number of Fripp and Crimson concerts and other goodies for purchase and download. This interests me as a fan, but also for other reasons: music purchased through DGMLive is available in MP3 and FLAC (lossless audio) formats, and is downloaded through the peer-to-peer filesharing software BitTorrent.

Neither of these facts sits well with standard music industry wisdom (now there's an oxymoron for you) that 1. the customer is the enemy, and cannot be trusted, 2. p2p filesharing tools of any kind are evil, and must be destroyed, and 3. because of 1. and 2., there is a need for new music formats which include strong digital rights management (DRM) measures to prevent unauthorised duplication, filesharing, or other supposedly illegal activities. At the same time, having been cheated by industry players at various times during his 40-odd-year career, Fripp can hardly be described as a friend of the music industry - which he has described repeatedly as being 'fulled by greed' -, so perhaps it's not so surprising that he would take a different approach to online distribution.