by The MTF Community | MTF Podcast
https://musictechfest.s3.eu-west-3.amazonaws.com/podcast/100-universe.mp3From neuroscience to embroidery, digital sampling to government policy, AI ethics to storytelling, pop stardom to climate change, space travel to fashion design – and all the wonderful characters and human stories that connect them.
Have a listen and feel free to dig into the archives to explore more if anything piques your interest!
Dubber Hi, I’m Andrew Dubber. I’m the Director of Music Tech Fest, and this is episode 100 of the MTF Podcast. And because that feels like quite a milestone, I wanted to look back over the past couple of years, pull out some highlights and favourite moments. Not as a greatest hits, because that doesn’t really make any sense in that context, every single one of these are my favourite episode, but more to create something of a taster show. Something that highlights the breadth and depth of the MTF community and the brilliant minds of the artists and scientists, academia and industry, that go to make up that community.
And, of course, you’re only ever really going to skim across the surface in something like this, and the whole point of the MTF Podcast is to get to know these amazing people in our community rather than just get them to talk about their work, but maybe there’s something in here that piques your curiosity and encourages you to dive in a bit further. I’ll tell you who’s talking along the way so you can go back and find their episode, but hopefully this will also make for an enjoyable compilation listen all by itself. It’s not a catalogue, but a bird’s-eye view of MTF.
From neuroscience to embroidery, digital sampling to government policy, AI ethics to storytelling, pop stardom to climate change, space travel to fashion design, and all the wonderful characters and human stories that connect them. This is the MTF Podcast, episode 100. But more importantly, this is MTF. Enjoy.
Dubber Let’s start with a few words from ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus.
Dubber One of the things that people observe about your songs is that, on the one hand, obviously, they’re incredibly catchy pop songs, but also they’re incredibly intricate and thoughtful and complex.
Björn Yeah.
Dubber To what extent is that the ABBA trick, is that there is the complexity hidden within this simplicity of melody?
Björn Always searching for that wonderful, simple melody, that’s what we did. But that wonderful, simple melody doesn’t necessarily have only three chords. It can have more chords. And especially if you explore it in a studio, trying various styles and trying various ways of doing it. And above all, backing vocals. Intricate backing vocals. Things that you couldn’t write down as an arranger, but you can only try. The girls would do something, and you’d say “No, try that instead. Just that note there.”, and suddenly something happens. And that’s where the intricacy comes from, I think.
Dubber Right. In harmony, particularly.
Björn In harmony, particularly.
Dubber Right, wow.
Dubber This is Dr Kelly Snook. Inventor, instrument maker, and rocket scientist.
Kelly Kepler says something in this book which is really funny, and I’m just going to paraphrase because he writes in 400 years ago language. But he says something like “I’m laying this out for you. God has finally revealed his grand order through these mathematics. Use your art to express this in the world. And I’ve laid it out there, even if it takes 100 years for technology to catch up.”, basically. And it’s been 400 years, and technology is just at the point where we can make this into something that you can experience viscerally. With your ears and with your eyes and maybe other senses as well, like feeling tactile feedback from this instrument. But that is the whole point, is to take something that has been reduced to boring mathematical equations and make it mind-blowing again.
I worked for a very long time at NASA, and there’s something weird about the way that we present things sometimes, especially to other scientists. That if it’s super freaking cool, then it’s for the kids, or it’s not actual science, or… You have to make it sound dry and boring in order for it to be legitimate, in a way. So I wanted to switch that up a bit and give people permission to experience the incredible, intrinsic harmony that we have in our reality. One place where it’s expressed just so simply is in the movement of the planets, but it’s really everywhere and in every structure that we have in life. And so eventually I’d love there to be musical instruments that you can play or that you can experience that give you insights into all sorts of different truths through beauty.
In a way, these are both concepts that have gone out of fashion. Truth and beauty. Truth, people are even asking “What is truth? Is there such thing as truth? Does truth matter?”. This is actually a conversation that’s happening in the United States. People are claiming that “Actually, there is no truth. It doesn’t matter.”.
Dubber Former Executive Assistant and right hand to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, and Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Ann Hiatt.
Ann I took it very, very seriously to double their output, and that meant I needed to be on par with what they were doing. In the early stages, I did that by reading everything they read. For example, Jeff Bezos every morning came in with three newspapers, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Seattle Times, so I started reading all three of those every morning, cover to cover. I read every briefing document that came across his desk, every single email, listened to every phone call. I leaned in. I googled every term I didn’t know, every person’s name who I didn’t know.
And so going onto that next level allowed me to be more proactive in my relationship with him instead of reactive. I could come to him with ideas, opportunities, and even share some of my talents he didn’t know I had or areas of interest where I would volunteer for a project that would normally be outside my role. And that gave me an amazing opportunity to really grow, and the job was so much more fun too. Nobody wakes up excited about calendaring or putting together research documents and things like that, but…
So my role with Eric Schmidt was very much that. It was extremely proactive. It was very high risk because my job was to aggregate all of the requests across the company, evaluate those for where Eric could have a deep impact, and rank those and make a recommendation to him on how he was going to spend his time or focus. Or maybe a weakness that we had, an area of expertise we hadn’t yet developed, and come with a proactive plan of how we could get that knowledge or those relationships that we needed. And so it very much became a business partner relationship with him, and that’s where it’s really fun. Also terrifying because sometimes you’d get it wrong, and it’s a billion dollar company, so the impact is large in successes and failures. But that was a risk I enjoyed.
Dubber Probably my favourite recording artist in the world today, the wonderful Jan Bang.
Jan In the mid-’90s, I found, by coincidence, a way of putting my studio gear on stage. Being a producer in the mid-’90s using samplers in order to create songs and do remixes and productions and so forth, I was invited by a friend of mine… I just had done a remix of Bugge Wesseltoft, the Norwegian jazz player, and he was interested in getting in touch with people from the electronic music. So he asked me “Jan, what could you do?”. I was thinking “Well, I have this sampler that somebody gave me. Why don’t I…? Instead of sampling records, I could sample your musicians on stage.”. And that was in ’96.
And we did one concert, and I realised in the soundcheck that this is just a new route. This is a new possibility for myself to discover new things. There’s fresh sounds every day, fresh from the baker, and as a composer and as a musician, that’s quite a present. So by meeting him, then he introduced me to other, more freeform players. And from there I never really returned to the studio that I was working with. Working in, as a producer. I just left the studio. My big American case and everything with it.
Dubber Hackademic, Gabriella Coleman.
Gabriella So a trickster figure is probably familiar to most just because trickster figures are common in many different societies and cultures around the world, from Coyote in Indigenous Native American societies to Loki in Nordic societies. And they’re figures who are willing to transgress boundaries. They tend to also be identified with an inability to filter speech, often willing to trap others, and in the process get trapped themselves into problems, and historically they tend to be identified with myth and stories.
And the myth and stories around tricksters are valuable because they tend to offer moral lessons, both about the importance of transgressing boundaries but also the problems when you go too far in transgressing boundaries, as well. They’re a rich area of anthropological study. And I thought, and I still do think, that they apply extremely well to the field of hacking or Anonymous, and it’s, again, because of the willingness of hackers to transgress boundaries. And so I think that model fits well.
I think one of the big problems, and this gets to the baggage part, is that, in part because of the Disneyfication of the trickster figure, I think some people believe tricksters are always good, and that’s not necessarily the case. The point of the trickster is to make clear the moral stakes of transgressing boundaries, let’s just say. And then, because of that clarity, you could say “Oh, this is good. This is helpful. No, this is bad. This goes too far.”. And, for example, Loki, I think, is a good example of a trickster who… He’s terrifying, and he’s a jerk, and he’s horrible. This is not necessarily someone to celebrate. Whereas Puck, on the other side, is a much lighter side of tricksterism that we can live with.
Dubber Much more fluffy.
Gabriella Exactly, and the world of hacking has both sides. And so I use the figure not simply to celebrate hacking but actually to show that this domain, like the trickster figure, provides an arena for us to rethink questions of boundaries and norms, not simply to blindly accept everything that comes from the world of hacking.
Dubber Composer and polymath, Nitin Sawhney.
Nitin Music is a healing thing, from my point of view. I was listening to Mary Anne Hobbs’ show last night, and she played, actually, a piece that I did with Anoushka Shankar for Ravi Shankar’s centenary. And she played some beautiful music which I found really soothing. And I’d been in a difficult mood all day because I just was getting frustrated with all of this. I’m not technically in the high-risk group, but I am asthmatic, and so I’m keeping myself pretty much in isolation. And so, from that point of view, it’s great when you hear music that opens up your feelings and your mind like that. So music is…
You could get into the technical side of it, and there are parts of the brain that respond literally in a pleasurable way to music. And there’s a part of the brain called oscillatory phase-lock which they find in chimpanzees, as well, where they respond like we do to consonance and dissonance in different ways. So dissonant intervals in music actually create unrest and irritation, but whereas, with the chimpanzees, they actually respond really well to consonant intervals. So Mozart, for example, would go down really well with a lot of chimpanzees because a lot of the intervals are consonant intervals. And that’s to do with the ratios and so on.
But it’s very soothing and very healing to listen to great music that you can empathise with. It’s not just the technical side, it’s also nostalgia, it’s also… It evokes so much feeling in us. Whereas in animals, primarily they’re using music for survival, reproduction, and communication, we’re using it in so many different, nuanced ways to actually really enhance our moods.
And, in fact, I talked recently about, and I was talking to a psychologist, the idea of EMDR, which is eye movement desensitisation reprocessing. And that in itself is about left, right… I suppose stimulation, in terms of the hemispheres of the brain, and it’s alternating in the way it works. And my psychologist was saying even walking or running or playing the piano or doing anything where you use your hands in alternating ways can actually really enhance your mood and do a lot for working through problems that you have in your life.
Dubber Textile artist and arctic crafter, Deirdre Nelson.
Deirdre I was involved in a lab in Glasgow, and I’ve forgotten the name of it now, but they brought together coders and makers together, and we did separate projects. And it was an amazing way to work because we realised, in loads of ways, we work in very similar ways. I think there’s a real craft to working with coding and working with Arduino and all of these things. And through being involved in the repair lab in Glasgow, I’ve realised that… I watch some of these guys fix computers and electronic… They’re working with their hands in a really skilled way and in a… Particularly something like embroidery is very fine-tuned skills, and I can see those same skills in the guys working on circuit boards or… So I think maybe we need to do a circumpolar tech traditional skill lab or something. It would be fantastic.
Dubber It sounds like something Music Tech Fest should take on.
Deirdre Yeah, definitely. It would be amazing. And also just, I think, with any of these things, you need time to experiment. And the informality of the way we worked in the Circumpolar Crafters Network would be a really lovely way to work with technology as well.
Dubber Maker and children’s author, Helen Leigh.
Helen Hand made things and how that fits in with technology, often in the media you’ll see them pitted against each other. Robots vs craft or hand made vs mass-produced. But I actually think that’s a false dichotomy, and that there’s so many beautiful things happening in the intersection between craft and technology. And I really wanted to write a children’s book that celebrated that and used craft as a way into technology and technology as a way to augment craft, because it’s not a one-way street, of course.
Dubber You only have to look at a knitting pattern, and this is programming.
Helen Absolutely it’s programming. And, in fact, I think often these crafts are undervalued, and the history of them is destroyed. There’s a fascinating book that I read recently called ‘Subversive Stitch’, and it’s all about the feminist history of embroidery. And also I read a really interesting article on knitting spies. So in the World War II, they had ladies knitting things and dropping stitches to pass secret messages on to other people. It was a form of communication. Of course it was code.
So, anyway, this book is called ‘The Crafty Kid’s Guide to DIY Electronics’, and it teaches the basic concepts of technology but through sewing and through papercraft and origami, and through DIY robots and wearable things. It’s very much project-based. It’s not a textbook at all. You do learn something in every project, but it’s set in the context of a project. Things like making a moving origami ladybird that buzzes around or a secret mood signal badge that teaches you the basic concepts of binary. So these imaginative projects.
And I can’t actually take full credit for all of these projects. I worked with an advisory board of 200 girls to write this book. And they were on my mailing list, and I would send them hundreds of ideas, and they’d come back and vote on their favourite ones. So, actually, the inclusion of every single project in that book is thanks to a group of girls and not thanks to me at all. In fact, lots of my favourite ideas were completely designated uncool by the committee of girls.
Dubber Musician and technologist, Tim Palm, aka DJ Arthro.
Tim Yeah. So my diagnosis, basically, it makes my joints unable to move. It’s at like 30 degrees movements in the arms and legs. And because of that, my muscle is also losing strength. So it’s a two-part situation. So I’m sitting on a special built wheelchair, and I’m performing with my nose, mostly.
Dubber Right. So you have limited range of motion of the limbs but a flexible face, so you can actually operate gear like that.
Tim Yeah, it’s something like that.
Dubber So let’s talk about your gear. Somebody like me who recognises that it’s an iPad but not necessarily the software that you were using, what’s actually in the rig?
Tim So we start with the iPad. The main application is called ‘touchAble’ which is an app built to integrate with Ableton, which is the main software I use. So it’s fully integrated, so I can control the MIDI software, can control the CC and the… Everything. Fully functional. Launching clips and changing BPM and everything. And I can rearrange it however I want. Or if I want big buttons, I can get big buttons if I want. So I have this template that I use to perform.
Dubber Okay. But there’s more going on than an iPad on your rig.
Tim Yeah. Then I have a… It’s a big one. It’s a half-circle of gear.
Dubber Yeah, it’s right around… It’s like Rick Wakeman kind of…
Tim Yeah, exactly. So there’s a synth as well. It’s a Yamaha reface synth, which is the only synth I’ve found with no knobs, only up and down sliders, because turning knobs with your lips is quite difficult.
Dubber I can imagine.
Tim You can’t make a 360 with your head.
Dubber That’s true.
Tim That’s impossible.
Dubber Yeah, for sure.
Tim So having just up and down sliders for everything gives me full control over the synth. And I found it four years ago now, I think, and I was like “I have to buy this one.”, because it’s quite boring to just have these software synths.
Dubber Science fiction author, blogger, and activist, Cory Doctorow.
Cory If we want to know how Google shapes our behaviour, it’s by being the only search engine anyone uses and deciding what goes on the front page. But that’s not mind control. That’s a very cheap trick if it’s a mentalist act. That’s like the mentalists who have hidden cameras that watch what people write down on the card when they say “Think of a word and write it down on the card.”. It’s a bit of technological virtuosity, but it’s not mind reading.
So I think that big tech wants you to think the reason that their sector is concentrated is because first-mover advantage and network effects and globalism are what count, and I think it’s that the Apple II Plus came out the year we elected Ronald Reagan, and he promptly dismantled antitrust enforcement. If it was first-mover advantage and network effects, we’d all be searching AltaVista with our Cray supercomputers.
One of the things that we know about tech is that you can accumulate a technology debt. If you’re married to a certain approach in technology, when the technology changes, you have this huge institutional crisis in convincing the people who work in your firm to stop making supercomputers and start making minicomputers, and stop making minicomputers and start making PCs. These are huge problems that firms wrestle with, and being a first-mover sucks.
And network effects are great, but you live and die by the sword. If your network doubles in value every time someone joins it, then it halves in value every time someone leaves it. Which is how Myspace can be on top of the world one day and on the trash heap the next day with Rupert Murdoch sitting on top of it with his thumb up his ass.
Dubber Is this the safety net for something like Facebook having all this power? Is it the fact that there is a fragility built into these things?
Cory No, because this is where monopolies matter. So Facebook lost 17 million 12 to 34 year olds in 2017, up from 9 million, I think, in 2016. They are haemorrhaging users to Instagram.
Dubber Right, which they own.
Cory Which they own.
Dubber Professor of responsible AI, Virginia Dignum.
Virginia AI is software, is an artefact that people build. It’s not magic, it’s not something which happens to us, it’s not something which comes out of outer space and happens. It’s something which is consciously developed and engineered by people to do some purpose which is also determined by people. So that is, I think, the most important part to understand. Then, how does it work?
What distinguishes it from other types of software is basically the capability that these techniques have to be able to analyse patterns in current situations and current contexts and use that analysis to come up with potential new suggestions or new insights. I don’t really like to talk about predictions. I don’t think that AI makes any predictions whatsoever. It can correlate or extrapolate from existing data, but the prediction is something that we might, or not, decide to do ourselves based on what AI is identifying.
Dubber Philosopher, author, composer, multimedia producer, and turntablist, Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky.
Paul You are not your data. The fun part about our time is there’s a separation between analogue media, playing vinyl, going out to social spaces with actual, real human beings, and then the digital mirror that people are just pillaging for financial gain. So how does that work with your everyday experience? This is something I think we’re all queasily realising.
Your data is being used in all sorts of unanticipated ways, whether it be for computational propaganda during the 2016 election or stuff like Cambridge Analytica or The Internet… What was the IA group out of Russia, in St. Petersburg? They have a very generic name like The Internet Agency. Something really, really generic. But really freaking evil.
So that’s on one hand, but then on the other hand we’ve seen an explosion of all these platforms and routes for getting work out. More people are creative than ever before. More people are being freed from the norms of how they think about expression, their work, or getting it out.
So we’re seeing a renaissance of many, many different approaches, but at the same time, there’s a Darwinism in effect with all these… Like I said, the furious five. Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Google. Five companies that dominate the landscape. Meanwhile, if you’re in China, you’ve got the China versions of those. Youku, Alibaba, stuff like WhatsApp, etc., or WeChat.
Dubber The Tencents of the world. That sort of thing.
Paul Yeah. And I feel like, as an artist, these are intriguing. Personally, I could do without social media. I would love to delete everything and just sit across from a person and have a glass of tea, or whatever medium they’re into, and actually have a human dimension there. But you then realise, why limit yourself? Because you have all of these different platforms. Let’s play.
Dubber Senior Data Scientist at Axel Johnson, Celine Xu.
Celine 90 percent of data in the world created after 2010. And all this abundance present a big problem, the paradox of the choice, because we have so many choice, and we need to spend too much time trying to pick one. And sometimes we try so hard, but at the end, we actually pick something wrong. And the recommendation engine is actually using machine learning technology to help companies go over all the possible options and learn what we, or as a customer, like, and recommend the options we would love best. So this machine, or system, provide us an option. Having the abundance of the options, at the same time have a certainty in our decision.
Dubber Artist, teacher, and instrument maker, Tom Fox.
Tom I wanted to start building instruments just because I loved collecting instruments. I’ve got a passion for lots of different types of instruments. But I realised that if I start building them and I do it wrong, it might be a massive waste of money and resources, so I just started building them from recycled materials. I really limited myself to just focussing on making sure everything was found or recycled or reclaimed. That actually led me to be more creative with the stuff I was making. So I ended up using recycled electronics and motors for pickups, and that led to developing instruments based around the things I found, as well. So I started a whole organic process of building instruments based around the stuff I found, and it spiralled out of control from there.
Dubber Because most of the things that you make don’t look like musical instruments.
Tom No, not at all.
Dubber Some of them do, but they’re actually books that have been turned into guitars, or… But, typically speaking, I’m thinking of your spring thing.
Tom Yeah, the spring thing. There’s a law of physics which is Faraday’s law of electromagnetic induction, and that’s my favourite law of physics because you can do all sorts of bonkers stuff with it. It’s how motors work, it’s how speakers work, it’s how electric guitar pickups work, and they all use the same bit of physics. So you can manipulate that piece of physics to have them all interact with each other to create really interesting sounds and really interesting ways of playing music, as well.
Dubber Head of Operations at Ericsson ONE, Matilda George.
Matilda We have seen that it’s three reason why ideas or start-ups tend to fail, and one of them is that you develop something that no one wants. So for us, it’s very important to support them with the business aspect because if we have a very creative and talented person who only wants to focus on the tech aspect, then we need to support them with other kinds of competencies as well. And that is something that we are doing from Ericsson. We are bringing in a business person, for example, to help them with that. But also educating them on how you can do it in a very easy way, and it can be something like going out and asking people if they would buy or test your solution. So that’s a very easy way to actually test the business case of it.
But also one of the other three things that make ideas fail is that you are mixing teams poorly. So maybe you have a team of only developers, so you also need to add in the person with another background, so business or design or HR or something else, so that you have the diversity within your own group when developing the technology, from the beginning.
And then the third thing is that you lack focus. I think that it becomes your obsession, but if I have one idea, maybe I found ten different things that I want to do around my idea. So I think that to really keep focus on what I need to do to get what I want with my idea, that’s also a very important part of the journey in going from idea to finally an emerging business. So that is the advice that we usually give to start-ups.
Dubber Sound diplomat, Shain Shapiro.
Shain To me, what’s great about music is how it impacts everything around it. Music is a way to have a conversation about all sorts of things. About getting to know each other better, about conflict, trying to reduce conflict, even, about equality across gender, race, ethnic, discipline, so on and so forth. I think that music is a tool that we have. I think music and food are the only tools that we have where we can cross any boundary and still find something to unify us.
So, for me, I believe that we underestimate the power that music has, but yet we’re using its power every day without recognising it. And it doesn’t matter what political affiliation. Even Trump going on stage to songs he’s not allowed to play, he’s uniting people via music, and I think that’s an incredibly powerful thing. Whatever you believe in, there is something positive that music can bring you. And if we recognise that better, if we create policies around that, then I think it can improve everyone’s day-to-day.
Dubber We would say Senior Recruiter or Chief Head Hunter, but her business card simply said “Alchemist.”. Cheline Jaidar, formerly of Apple.
Cheline I was brought in, and that was that trip to San Francisco, to work with the industrial design group. So that was the first official group that I worked with as a full-time employee with Apple, and that dominated most of my time. And so I was looking specifically, at that time, for industrial designers. So that’s how it started. And as I, working as a lone ranger with them for… I’m trying to think. I don’t even know if it was a year. People would reach out saying “Oh, she does creative, she works with designers. Can we have her over here? We’re redoing the graphic design group. Can she come and work with us for a little bit?”.
So I went to work with graphic design. Helped them. They were a splinter group of different external and internal teams, and some people wanted to leave, and they didn’t have a clear leader. They were looking to find another more creative leader. I was brought in to help them find that role, and then I started working with that group, and then I was dividing my time between industrial design and graphic design.
And there were more things like that. I started working with iTunes Europe. That was really almost a start-up. It felt like a start-up. As the graphic design, in some way, felt like a start-up as well because they were recreating it. When I think back on my career, other than the industrial design group, some of this work really feels like you’re starting a start-up within a very established company. But it still has that essence of building something from something very small or nothing.
Dubber Improviser, academic, author, and solo bassist, Steve Lawson.
Steve The experience of being on Myspace was a great learning experience. I joined Myspace in the same way that all musicians did, with this incredibly narcissistic focus to just friend loads of people and build a big audience. And the futility of that and the way that that killed the conversation about the music became apparent very quickly. So at that point, I started to conceive of a use of social media that was genuinely social and that wasn’t a marketing tool, and it wasn’t all the things that all the people were writing about. “This great new way for musicians to network and do this.”. It was like “Well, no. It’s just about creating a story around what you do.”. And so I think the whole idea of storytelling came in fairly early on.
And one of the big advantages I had in that mid-noughties period when blogging was an incredibly important resource for musicians was that I’m a writer as well. I’m a journalist. I wasn’t trained as a journalist, but my partner from back in the ‘90s, she was a sub-editor and a very good journalist, and so she taught me how to write. She would edit what I was doing, going “You can’t write a 150 word sentence. That’s ridiculous.”. And so I developed this set of skills, and I got to practice in magazines and harness that for this process of storytelling.
So as that storytelling process fragmented away from being about long blocks of text on a blog and became about Twitter and Facebook and Myspace updates, I got pretty good at writing in small chunks and diarising my musical life in a way that people could engage with as an unfolding story rather than as a set of marketing tools that were cynically planned to promote a product.
Dubber Digital plumber and creator of websites for famous pop stars, David Peris.
Dubber ’99 hits, Napster comes out, everything goes into a panic. How did that affect what you did?
David It was dramatic and swift. And I’ll tell you my first interaction with Napster. It’s interesting. But I was 24/25, and I was dating someone who was in the midst of college. And I walked in her dorm room once, and she was really busy on her laptop. And I looked at her, and I was like “Well, what are you doing?”. “I’m playing with this thing. It’s called Napster.”. And I was like “What’s Napster?”, and she said to me “Oh, it’s great. You type in a song, and you hit submit, and you can download it.”. Mind you, there was no streaming or anything at this time. So I know this sounds primitive, but you could download it. I was like “Well, how do you pay for it?”, and she said “No, you don’t pay for it. You just download it.”. And I immediately got on the phone and called my boss. I was like “Have you heard of this thing called Napster? Oh my god.”, and she was like “Yeah, everyone in the dorm is using it.”. Because in the colleges, obviously, it was one of the few places you had high-speed bandwidth. Even, I think, the bandwidth at the college was better than what was in the office, if I remember right.
So I was just blown away. Like “Oh, wait. This MP3 thing…”. And I think this is around the time of the Rio Player and all this, so MP3 was still in its infancy. But just this idea that kids were making playlists with music that they didn’t buy from iTunes and… It was wild.
So the next thing that came along, of course, at the record label was “Oh my god…”. There was some MP3 trading, of course, on the web, “Click here to download the MP3.”, and we would have to call our friends at the RIAA and shut that down, and this and that. It was a whack-a-mole. It was cat and mouse. But this changed the game because it was decentralised, of course, as everyone knows. There was nothing to shut down. So the label and everybody else went into a panic, and it was crazy times.
Dubber Audio networker, Matthew Hawn.
Matthew So it was an operational role. I think I was VP of Digital Operations, I think, or something. It was that point I’ve got some ridiculous title that they give out. But it was digital business, was the group at there. And it was in conflict, to be honest with you, with the physical distribution guys, who were the mobsters you’d expect them to be. It was a very rough and tumble place where it was about how many units of vinyl you shipped. That was the point. And the way we measured our business was very different than we did digitally.
So as that world was falling off and dying, I’m in the fast-moving, shiny group, and my suggestions are not really… Because I’m fairly senior at that time, they’re… I get to go to all the meetings, but I make suggestions they don’t like to hear, like “We should digitise the whole catalogue and put it on Napster, because it’s like radio.”. And I got not invited back to certain meetings after that.
Dubber Right. Because I see you as, again, being somewhat counter-cultural within that corporate environment.
Matthew Well, it was harder with Sony than it was… It was nice because we were building something fast, and there was a lot of money happening quickly. And once we’d built the team out… And it was about 45/50 people who did the operational thing, but it was working with small partners. We worked early on with Last.fm, where I ended up going later. We worked with Spotify. We worked with Vodafone. We were working with all these new companies who… And to try to figure out how we were going to get music to their customers and our customers. But we were still treating it like a distribution method. We were going to ship units to them, and they were going to sell them to customers. We were not actually doing direct to consumer sales, which is what I asked to…
Before I left Sony, I was in charge of direct to consumer at Sony where we built out a way for Beyoncé to sell you stuff directly, and Bruce Springsteen to sell T-shirts, and Christina Aguilera to sell perfume, which we did. So there was always a bit of a new thing, but at some point after eight years at Sony, I was like “I can’t do this anymore.”. There’s a little red dot in front of my desk. I’m like “What is that? Oh, it’s where I’ve been banging my head for the last eight years. We’re just not going fast enough. This is not fun anymore.”.
Dubber UK Music Publishers Association General Manager, Lucie Caswell.
Dubber I’ve got 1,000 questions, but they would boil down to “Is copyright fit for purpose?”.
Lucie Copyright or copyright law?
Dubber Good question. Copyright law is what I’m talking about. So is current copyright law fit for purpose? Do we need to amend it, or do we need to throw it away and start again from first principles?
Lucie This is exactly the conversation that we’re having now, but it’s more than that. It’s also, as I say, the law is much slower than creativity, so there comes a point where you have such a change in consumption, in the way that the market works, it would be weird not to update your law in alignment with that. So this process has to happen. It always happens in markets over different generations and different evolutions. Doesn’t mean it’s an easy conversation, because you have to understand the push and pull that you describe. But everybody is living in the same ecosystem, so we’d like to think we can find a solution. But that solution has to make it sustainable to keep producing that music.
Dubber Right. I’ve had a lot of conversations in the past with copyright reformists, and I would kind of consider myself one, to a large extent. But there is a real debate, I think, to be had about whether the thing to do is to update copyright or to start again and go “Right. What are we trying to achieve with this? What are the first principles? And what can we achieve if we write the rules again from the beginning?”.
And it does seem to me, very much, that legislators, because of… Whether it’s about lawyers trying to keep their income ticking over, or whatever the agenda might be, but it very much seems like every time we have these conversations, we end up just going “No, we can just make a tweak. We can make another tweak. We can make a…”, and it seems like we’re just adding features to something that actually really isn’t doing the job that everybody would really like it to do.
Lucie Well, maybe that’s why the conversation, that’s only about Europe, has happened for over two years, because it’s more than a tweak. But it also is because it is a conversation that includes so many people, and music is just one part of that. And that, thankfully, has taken time. And I say thankfully because otherwise it would be a tweak or just a single action. But we do also have to remember, in the same way as we have to remember this business isn’t in one city, we have to remember that this is a global conversation.
Dubber Innovation leader and Lean and Process Manager for Lufthansa, Marlies Endres.
Marlies I have a very strange background, so to say, but it’s a background that may mirror many realities for Venezuelans. Both of my parents are from different nationalities. My mom is from Costa Rica, my dad is from Germany, born in Venezuela but from German parents, and I was born in Venezuela. So when I was growing up, I was basically a culture mixture, so to say. And that gave me, from a very early age, a different perspective on how things were, in theory, supposed to be done and how they would actually happen, because I was taught at home certain things. For example, punctuality, and if you say your word, you have to keep it. And in a culture where punctuality is being two hours after the time you agreed, or agreements is more something informal instead of something formal.
So, basically, it was already a clash of values that made me understand that one of them is not necessarily right and the other one is wrong. It’s, basically, if you mix both of them, you can do something very interesting out of it. And that has a lot of similarities with innovation, so to say, because it’s about cutting with the strict rules of “This has to be done this way.”. You actually break those barriers and try to see the blank spaces, like we said in the innovation course that we just had. It’s try to see in between the gaps that you have and how those different types of knowledge mix each other.
And, for me, it was a huge cultural crash when I came to Germany, which stereotypically is known as a very innovative country with a lot of new ideas, and instead what I found is not that it’s not there, but it’s in a very controlled environment and very conservative environment instead of a flexibility that I was used to. It’s where our role in Latin America could be more interpreted instead of followed, here, rules are to be followed. And these rules, of course, also mean that you probably are going to be able to see things only through the eyes of this rule instead of challenging the rule. And with this, I’m not saying to go against the rule, but it’s, basically, understand what the rule is trying to accomplish, and understand “Can you do the same that you wanted to do with the rule in other ways?”.
Dubber Swedish innovation agency and funding body Vinnova’s Head of Strategic Design, Dan Hill.
Dan Streets are now run by traffic engineers, pretty much. And I have this diagram. If you put ‘traffic engineer’ into the street, traffic is what comes out. The clue is in the name. And you can get more or less of it, but basically that’s what it produces. If you let gardeners govern the street, you get gardens. So we don’t. We let traffic engineers do it.
So I’m just saying “Okay. How many different perspectives can we get into this complex thing called ‘the street’? And let’s see it as a complex thing, but in a beautiful, everyday kind of way.”, and then we can see that as a real, powerful multiplier of all kinds of diverse activities. Music, festivals, businesses, life in general, greenery, everything. And traffic is one of the things that happens there, for sure, but it’s not the point.
Dubber What you’re saying is, rather than divide a large city up into its functions, you divide a small amount of city up…
Dan As a powerful generator of possible things. Again, I imagine if you had a Department of Gardening running the streets, you’d have a very different kind of city coming out of that. So I’m not suggesting that, but I am suggesting that is one of the…
Dubber Does sound like a nice idea.
Dan It’s not bad, yeah. And, funnily, not to namedrop, but this is where I had a chat with Brian Eno about this, because I was part of a commission in the UK working for the government on the industrial strategy, and, one reason or another, too long to go into, Brian and I ended up in the commission. And it was fantastic having him in the room, as you might imagine, because the bunch of the rest of us were so-called experts in our areas. Me, now, as an urbanist sort of expert.
And I was responsible for coming up with some challenges to the government around mobility, and one of the things I was talking about was streets and so on. I was heading that way. But I was also, I realised in retrospect, playing it safe a bit because I knew the Department of Transport and others were on the end of this, so I can’t walk in there talking about gardens straightaway. They literally would laugh me out of the room. I was heading that way, but meandering that way. Brian instantly just subverted the whole thing beautifully at one point, in this afternoon in this boring committee room in UCL in London, when he said “This is all great, but what if we could imagine a city where people just slowed down a lot more and things moved a little less?”. And it was just [explosion sound].
Dubber AI ethics philosopher, Professor Charles Ess.
Charles The arguments I’ve heard for autonomous vehicles have been very strongly in the direction of utilitarian ones. That if we dramatically reduce accident rates, then what’s the problem? And, prima facie, yeah, sounds great. The problem… There are several problems that line up.
One of them is it turns out that autonomous vehicles can, and probably ought to be, programmed in such a way that if the choice is between saving the driver or five people, it’ll save the five people. Now, are you as a driver going to go buy a car that you know might literally kill you if it thinks that’s the best decision? Not many of us are going to step into that kind of context, I don’t think. And there’s also a question of rights that are raised by that.
I’m rather confident that in the US, if you could produce those kinds of vehicles, then you might have a stronger chance at making that kind of utilitarian argument. The flipside is that they’ve found in some studies that people really don’t want to give up driving, especially in the US. For many people, it’s their flow experience. It’s one of the places they have control over their lives. And so there’s other things going on in there besides just running a vehicle down the road. And I also wonder…
There’s, I think, a really fine movie called ‘I, Robot’ with Will Smith, and there’s a scene in there that literally gets to the heart of this where the Will Smith character is in a car accident. The other vehicle has a driver and a 13 year old girl. A robot sees this, and the robots are programmed to save human lives, and so the robot calculates that Will Smith has a 45 percent chance of survival and the 13 year old girl has an 11 percent chance of survival. Simple. And what Will Smith says, after this is all over, is “She was somebody’s baby. 11 percent was enough. Anybody with a heart would have known that.”, approximately. “They’re just difference engines. They’re just lights and clocks.”. And that’s a little bit harsh, but what I find, obviously, moving in that is this sense that we know something in our ethical judgement, that has to do with relationship, that we’ll take chances that machines wouldn’t. And you could maybe reprogram the machine and say “Let’s save little girls rather than old men.”. Okay, fine. I’m still a little sceptical.
Dubber NYU music tech Professor and President of AES, the Audio Engineering Society, Agnieszka Roginska.
Agnieszka My philosophy is that technology and art go hand in hand, and one has to drive the other and vice versa. I think because the technology is evolving, it is giving new ideas and new forms of expression and creativity to artists, and artists are taking these technologies and running away with it and doing things that they wouldn’t be able to do before. But vice versa because now artists are creating new ways of making things, technology is catching up. So it’s this constant evolution moving forward. Technology goes forward, art, creativity goes forward, and so on and so on. And so I think that we are doing different things that we were not able to do before.
And even thinking about just now, the specific situation that we’re faced in where people don’t get together as much as they used to. So now we have to be able to make music together across distances. Like at NYU in our department, all the ensembles, orchestras, jazz ensembles, percussion ensembles, everything had to be taken online. So now we have to be creative of “How do we create music together, make it sound good, and perhaps create new forms of music that not just allow us to do the things that we’ve been able to do before, but let’s think of new ways of making music. Let’s use this. Let’s use this in a way that we wouldn’t be able to use this before. The fact that we cannot get together anymore, which means that we can get together in a remote setting with people that we would normally never get together before and make music before.”. So now the geographical boundaries are gone.
Dubber Digital media lawyer and music tech business advisor, Cliff Fluet.
Cliff One of the core differentiators about law is it is not a law of nature, it is not a law of science, and it’s not a law of God, i.e. it’s made up by men as they go along. And I still get to meet lots and lots of people in their lives who just say “Well, the law says this.”. I go “Well, the law doesn’t say anything. The law is applied and construed and interpreted. It doesn’t say anything.”. And then, actually, in many ways, you can bend it to your will. So that, very much, has a lot of how I did the rest of my career, which is essentially understanding that the law does not stand still, and it has to catch up, particularly when it comes to music technology.
So 30 years ago, I’m starting my university. I’ve never been out of London very much. I’m a couple of years in. I didn’t have lawyers in my family. I didn’t get to do work experience at places or anything like that with family friends. And outside my lecture hall, I had a conversation with three other lawyers… Well, law students. We were not lawyers. We were anything but lawyers. Where somebody told me that there were these lawyers who in their offices had fridges with beer in it, and they were lawyers at record companies. I was like “Why does a record company need lawyers?”, like “Well, you know, artist contracts and stuff.”.
Flash forward to 25 years ago, I’ve now qualified to be a lawyer. I have decided that I’m going to become a real estate lawyer, of all things. I’m going to be a property lawyer, and that’s what I’m going to do for the rest of my life. And I picked up my roommate’s copy of The Times at 3 a.m., stuck on a boring transaction, and I saw an ad for a job at a record company, and I thought “Huh. I wonder if they’ve got those fridges?”.
Dubber MTF’s Founder and the Chair of the Industry Commons Foundation, Michela Magas.
Michela You have seen examples where the data from music… Because the data from music is widely available, it’s highly complex, it comes with all of these different challenges that are really well known. And then when we use it in test environments, we can actually use it in test environments that are to do with something completely different, like finance. But if you used finance data, well, you couldn’t access it because of GDPR. And then if you did access it, it would be without certain elements because of GDPR.
Dubber Sure. People’s financial data, people’s medical data.
Michela And then it would be expensive, or rather it would be a problem for the bank to be releasing things like that. There would be all kinds of legal issues and whatever. Instead, we just take music data, which has very similar characteristics. It also has proportion, maybe particular variables on there that are comparable to the case study that we are examining in the other domain, and therefore is entirely replaceable.
Dubber Is this why the creative sector is so important in the midst of this? Or is this just one kind of element of what makes music industries, creative industries, more broadly, central to this? Because it’s become central to this. And I really want to talk about, that’s been the payoff of you going to Brussels and working with the European Commission, is that now the creative industries are a central pillar to all of the ways that these industries are thought about. Is that a large part of it? It’s because nobody dies if you mess up the metadata on an MP3?
Michela I don’t think that the creative industries have become this important just because their data is easy to use. I think that the creative industries have really grown in importance because, essentially, what we are facing at the moment are so many unknown unknowns that creative practitioners are the ones who are trained to investigate unknown scenarios, and they have methodologies to tackle these new, surprising scenarios. Let’s face it, every single time that we run our labs that involve AI neural nets and any kind of system that’s complex, where the human being is interacting in an entirely new way, we get…
Dubber Blockchain, neuroscience, robotics…
Michela Yes, this combination of new things. Because the prototypes that we now build, their effects are so fast, the results come up so fast, the amount of different surprises that come out of these new scenarios, they really are overwhelming. And no linear problem-solving system, no prior training can prepare you for those, unless you are a creative practitioner who has been, by default, trained to do problem-solving by looking at things from completely different perspectives.
Dubber Enterprise Development Manager, Jeni Oliver.
Jeni I think that the creative industries is in every other industry. Every other successful industry is engaging with the creative industries. But what I would say is it’s less about what these other industries are doing. I fundamentally believe it is that, for the creative industries, it’s content. Distributors, platforms, they are slightly different. I’m always interested in “Who’s generating intellectual property, and where are they taking that intellectual property?”. What intellectual property assets they have. How can we get that keeping going?
And it’s about keeping those stories moving. Keeping those stories engaging and involving and relevant. That’s where the creative industry sits for me. We can wrap it up in all sorts of other industries, names. We can wrap it up in all sorts of different definitions, but, fundamentally, I think that what sits at the core of all of this, and has for thousands of years, is stories. Stories influence the direction of travel for human nature, our economies, our politics, everything. It comes from stories.
Dubber Because that was going to be my next question, “Why are stories important?”, but you think it’s because stories drive everything else? Is it how we’re wired?
Jeni Stories drive decision making. When you find a story that you engage with, when you find a story that resonates with your value sets as an individual, then you will migrate in that direction. Sometimes where your value sets are almost aligned. Sometimes you can see a little bit of a nudge coming through on that, and you see people evolving in their own value sets and their own thinking, and that’s very clever creative industry strategies if somebody’s deliberately trying to do that. But I do believe that story is at the core. And we can call it anything we want, going forward. Anything we have in the past. Fundamentally, people are telling stories.
Dubber Session CEO, Niclas Molinder.
Niclas I started when I was young. School was nothing for me. And I hated school, to be honest, and I didn’t fit in. And the funny thing with music, I cannot find anyone, except for my grandad, in my family that played any instrument.
Dubber So not a musical family.
Niclas No, not a musical family. My parents, they listened to ABBA when I was young.
Dubber Of course.
Niclas And now it’s funny that I partner with Björn Ulvaeus, which is pretty cool.
Dubber They must be very impressed.
Niclas Yeah, they are, actually. But I always loved music. And, actually, my mum, she has a picture of me when I was three years old, next to my grandad because he was playing the accordion. And I’m sitting there on the picture, and he’s playing the accordion, and I have a tambourine in my hand. And there’s a lot of people around. The family was standing… And mum sometime was telling me about this picture. Everyone was so impressed how I, as a three year old, could actually play in tempo as a three year old. So maybe that’s when my music interest was born. I have no idea.
Dubber Podcaster and science journalist, Arielle Duhaime-Ross.
Arielle When I was a climate change correspondent on TV, I knew that I was not necessarily going to be the person to change someone’s mind about anything. When you watch a documentary TV segment about climate change, you’re going to take away what you want from it. And if you’re already convinced, you’re going to say “Okay, this is further evidence that supports my view of the world.”, and if you are not convinced, you’ll somehow find a way to take a sceptical view of it, or go “Oh, but…”. To nit-pick.
And so what I have learned over the years, and also what one of our recent guests talked about, Liz Neeley, who’s a science communication expert for a non-profit called The Story Collider, is that a lot of the way that people change their minds is through the people that they have surrounding them. That what you hear in the media and what you read on the news, if you’re an avid Fox News listener, that’s one thing, but you also really care about the people around you and what they think. And so if you have somebody in your life that is sceptical of climate change or that believes that 5G cell phone towers are somehow inducing the symptoms of coronavirus, as opposed to an actual virus, you can play a role in guiding them away from that thought process, and…
And the way to do that is not just saying “You’re wrong, and here are all the articles that prove that you are wrong.”, because that won’t work. The way to do that is to have a conversation with those people and to take them seriously, and to be empathetic and to say “Okay, explain to me why you feel the way that you do.”, and really listen. Really listen to the entire thing, all of the arguments, which might be hard. And then at the end of that, you can… What you will most likely hear is fear. What you will most likely hear is a problem with uncertainty. And those are the
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