Category: Uncategorised

Responding

Yes, respond!

If you just unfriend somebody, they are allowed to believe they are in a consensus where such jokes are allowable. This helps create a climate of hostility against trans people, especially trans women. It’s important to let people know that dehumanising trans people is not considered acceptable by everyone they know.

How you decide to respond is a bit more complex. Has anyone else responded? If someone else has already responded, how you you further engage depends on how the conversation is going. It may be enough to simply click like on their challenge or post that you agree with them. Jumping into the breach, ready for a flame war, may be counter-productive.

Its also necessary to be aware of who is witnessing a conversation. If you take a micro-aggression and blow it up into a flame war, this will be uncomfortable for people who are members of the effected class. It may be best to start gently and take further discussion to private message, to avoid alarming or harming bystanders. Starting publicly is a good idea for a few reasons, one of which is that it shows open solidarity with people effected by prejudice, in a place where they can see it when (or if) they see the comment that caused you to reply.

And, indeed, starting gently can often be the way forward. White fragility is a thing where if you tell a white person they just did or said something racist, their reaction is often hugely out of proportion. This kind of fragility exists in greater or lesser degrees for other kinds of prejudice as well. It may be that the best way to deal with a transphobic joke is to not mention the word ‘transphobia’, but rather say that you think their joke isn’t funny because it’s unfair or mean.

Where you go from there depends on who you are talking to and the circumstances in which they made an ill-advised comment. Your first priority should be solidarity with people effected by the comment. Your next priority is bringing your friend around, so that they see why they said was problematic and why it’s important to respect people different from themselves.

It isn’t easy speaking up and it’s hard to know the right thing to say. Remember that it’s easier for you than it is for somebody who is the target of hateful speech or jokes. This is a skill and it takes practice and it will go badly at least some of the time. Indeed, as we’re all living in a prejudiced world, sometimes it will go completely wrong and you will end up saying something problematic without meaning to and get yelled at by somebody you meant to be an ally to. You should still speak up.

Speaking up won’t work every time, but it will work some of the time. This is how the world changes and becomes better. Minds can and will be changed

Racism and Plunderphonics

A google search for ‘Plunderphonics racist’ returns no relevant results. So here is a rough draft to address that.

Plunderphonics is a tape cutup movement invented by John Oswald. Of course, doing tape cut up pieces from pop culture ephemera and applying tape music techniques to these sources was already occurring. For example State of the Union Message by Ruth Anderson had come out some time previously. As had Bye Bye Butterfly by Pauline Oliveros, who, like Oswald, drew all her material for that from a single song. I think its fair to say that his name recognition and subsequent musical career owes a lot to having got into the charts.

Oswald’s charting record does contain musical merit. Pretender, based on Dolly Parton’s recording of The Great Pretender pulls out hidden depth and vocal timbres in her voice. The choice of material is especially clever, given the rich timbres of her voice. This richness makes her slowed voice a convincing baritone. The program notes suggest that she is secretly a a drag queen (or trans woman), suggesting her femininity is so over the top, it must be self-consciously performative. Indeed, Ms. Parton does not seem to object to this interpretation of her gender presentation. She once entered a drag contest dressed as herself and has repeatedly identified with gay men, as well as been open about the bodily transformations she has undertaken to present her image.

That piece appeared on an earlier EP as well as the one that charted. The one that charted also featured Dab a remix of Michael Jackson’s Bad. the program notes on the Plunderphonics website note that “This is probably the most complicated piece on the album.” And talk about the structure. Officially, it was the copyright violations inherent in this piece that lead to the record eventually being suppressed. Oswald was sued by Jackson and his record label, who forced him to destroy all copies in circulation, never offer the record for sale and never to distribute it in any of the formats that existed at the time. As this was before the web, he has taken advantage of MP3s not being listed to upload the album and its cover image to his website.

However, it was almost certainly the cover image which lead Jackson to sue. The album cover is a modification of the cover of the Bad album, except the iconic image of Jackson in a leather jacket has been manipulated so it shows the jacket slightly open to reveal the torso of a naked white woman.

This album was never on sale. Instead, he sent it to college radio stations across Canada. These stations were influential. Getting a lot of college radio play could get an artist into the charts, which it did for Oswald. Because college radio stations offer a way to get in to the music industry, they used to receive a very high number of promotional recordings – many more than the staff could hope to play on the air or often even listen to and evaluate. This staff was made up of college students who tended to be mostly white men between the age of 18-22. Oswald’s crass joke about Jackson’s race and gender would have appealed to many of these young men, who then took the time to listen to the record and discover it had musical merit.

Although the image was unsubtly racist, there was no trace of that in the audio. Thus, only the DJs saw the image, not the public who came to like his skilfully produced music. Oswald was therefore able to very cannily employ racism as a path to a successful career.

He has cast himself consistently as the victim of corporate bullying, picked on by a superstar out to bankrupt him. However, despite his losing battle with one record company, he has since been commissioned by record companies to do remixes of work in their back catalogues. The lawsuit has hardly destroyed him, but instead, cast him into a victim role which has thus far seemingly prevented any discussion of his own use of structural power against Jackson. Oswald may have been disadvantaged in terms of industry connections, but, as his record cover reminds us, he is a cis white man and therefore, empowered to police the otherness of black people who do not adequately conform to racial and gender stereotypes.

Oswald is not somebody who happens to have done a racist thing. Oswald is someone who owes his entire career to successfully deploying racism. The Plunderphonics cover is not dog whistle racism – it is clearly, indisputably racist. He has never apologised for this and in interviews has doubled down, going so far as to say that Jackson’s body modifications mean that he should have no right to control his own image. He’s framed this in terms of copyright, but the message is clear enough.

As a music tech teacher, Plunderphonics often appears on course syllabuses. Everywhere I’ve taught, the undergrads have included a significant minority of BME/PoC students. Their presence is much rarer doing postgraduate degrees. The number of black composers doing non-pop electronic music is worryingly low and suggest that there are structural issues dissuading people from carrying on in art music. I don’t think covering Oswald helps with this. I also have objections in silently participating in a system where he continues to benefit from his past deployment of racism and transphobia, especially given the absence of any kind of apology.

The success of Plunderphonics is racist and transphobic. I’m going to cover other remix artists instead.

Collaboration in Pd by Kerry Hagan

She has been collaborating with Miller Puckette since 2014. She is a composer, he is a maths guy. It works well together.

She uses Markov Chains with everything she writes. Xenakis used stochastic Markov chains with an equilibrium states. She uses finite state tables with equilibrium states.

Miller thinks composers want Markov chains to get a particular non equilibrium percentage outputs. He wants maximally uniform random results.

This created repeating patterns, rather than stochastic results. If you use a Fibonacci pattern however, there is no repeat aside from rhythmic motifs. Irrational ratios create non repeating patterns.

image

Puckette calls this z12 or claves.

How do you use this musically? Try speeding out up to the audio rate!

You get a nice stochastic drone!

The used delays and band pass filters to separate out different lines of material from a single z12.

She does acousmatic music without gesture. This is to surround people with immersive textures.

Now she’s talking about coupled oscillators which is slightly beyond me. It’s a mass spring system? It’s non linear.

She picked a bunch of cool sounds and had the coefficients ramp from one to another.

Rev3~ is a good reverb. And is updated, so it should be rev4~ but anyway.

Oh god the lines on pd patches are yikes.

This a very fruitful collaboration.

Bowers does a random walk involving weighted bit flipping. This is a bounded walk. Lots of small steps, fewer big steps. She’s making a piece with dentist drill sort of noises that will play on bone conduction headphones.

Q. Z12?

A. They are maximally uniform probabilities. It normalises the ratio to 1 then looks at the ratios of x to y and send the one most needed to reach the desired ratio.

So if it’s 3 to 4 it will send the out put most needed to get the right ratio. This repeats with rational numbers.

Q. ?

A. She got a spatulation algorithm which is exactly the one I want for panning. Each speaker has an angle. Each signal has an angle and a width. She used a cosine signal to pan it. In order to get rid of the idea of trajectory she used a sine wave with variable delay.

Q. Can you think of ways to enable other cross discipline collaborations?

A. With students, the challenge is that students don’t respect programmers and programmers think composing is easy. Therefore successful collaborators have a little knowledge of one and are experts on the other. This was tricky to manage at IRCAM, for example. Successful collaborators respect each others skills. This can lead to issues of authorship.

Q. Why use vanilla?

A. More stable! Also she likes building her own stuff. It’s also more useful for mobile platforms.

Q. Couples oscillators

A. They take impulses, like tapping a mass spring object.

Orla Huges the animal iPad orchestra

Facilitates musical play between parent and child in advance of music therapy sessions.

This is like a toy as there is free play.

The target child is between 3-5. It helps parents and children bond. Kids have familiarity with iPads. MobMuPlat is an iPad tool. This is free and build ui for pd apps on ios and android.

It seems to be an OSC app.

Her project is a great example of an app built for devices. She tested it by taking it to a patent and child group.

Users did not know what a tuba looked like, so whee changed the ui to show pictures of the instruments.

Q. This lecturer has a bee in his bonnet about sampling be synthesis… Will the use of samples help get kids interested in real instruments? This is one of the great challenges of our time.

A. She thought about the iPad as an instrument in its own right.

Q. Would this work for children and people in extreme old age?

A. Let’s try it out!

Q. How long did this take to develop?

A. For months.

Q. This is a non idiomatic use of pd!

A. Yes.

Simon kilshaw on libpd

Pd runs inside unity game engine. It takes up almost no disk space.

Can attach scripts to an avatar’s feet to get pd-generated footsteps. This you don’t need a bunch of footstep samples.

A c# script send a floating point to KalimbaPd. So when the y position crosses a threshold, it sends a bang.

A receive object in pdGets the float or bang.

Kalimba let’s you look at the patch, but you can’t deploy it. Lib4pd costs money but can be deployed.

He’s shown an app with a leap motion that is a theremin.

Q. Is there an advantage to doing  synthesis instead of samples?

A. Recordings of ambient sound might take hours of disk space.

Q. Are gamers happy with synthetic sounds?

A. Maybe.

Q. Do visual cues help with figuring out the semantic meaning of a sound FX?

A. Probably.

Q. How flexible is this?

A. As flexible as you want. Things can be half pure determined to focus on expressive parameters.

Mitchell Turner

Speaking about his piece Blues for Dublin. Influenced by the Delta Blues. But post minimalist blues like Stereolab? He gets bored by Steve Reich.

Works with the electric guitar. Uses a tiny travel guitar. It sounds shit, so he uses a of patch to fix it.

He’s got an ABA form. He is describing his guitar playing techniques.

His pieces solve one problem per each. Hid orbits pieces were live mixed of recorded guitar.

Hid patch is extremely legible. He is good at encapsulation.

He’s built a wee fixed filter and used some reverb. Then he’s got an fx patcher. Huge mess of confections just to change amplitudes of FX.

His template is left audio in, right audio in, amplitude.

He’s got a tap delay line. For a stutter delay that’s a bit smeary, but not granular.

Q. Is this a digital guitar pedal?

A. He has not yet gotten a pedal casing.

Live blogging the of mini con

Interactive music recordings (ala rjdj)  from Keith Hennigan.

1. write some music. The quality of music is the most important parameter for a successful piece

2. Figure out the interaction. What and how you record will be driven by the interaction.

Videogame music is interactive or adaptive or generative. Interactive music has intention on the user’s part. Adaptive music responds to user action aimed at changing noon musical parameters. Generative music changes on its own initiative. This is all dynamic music.

Adaptive recordings could react to GPS, time of day, etc.

Music could change structurally, so the order ABACD could become ACBDA etc.

Or it could play the second always in the same order, but with different stems for alternate lyrics, etc.

3. Programming

The platform you use must be distributable to users. Pd runs on everything.

You are likely to be working with stems, because artists often want to control audio quality. readsf~

Or you may wish to work with samples in order to pitch shift, etc.

Or take full advantage of the system and do your own synthesis. The more pd you use, the greater potential for real time control and interaction.

4. Create an interface
Must be usable by non programmers. You can use 3rd party programme like Unity to create nifty interfaces. This can make apps.

questions

Q. Why do this?

A. We have the technology for the first time. Dynamic sound are like chose your own adventure music. Consumers want this. They don’t want to always be passive.

Q. Classical music is goal oriented. Will the big challenge be coming up with modular pieces of music?

A. Yes, this majorly increases the composers workload. He recommends people try to give this a go.

Q. Are the transitions what make this music exciting? They are a liminal space.

A. Queue to queue transitions are the most difficult to get right. Some game composed have a transition matrix of elements to use at transitional points. Change instrumentation. Add a stinger, etc

Q. What makes music good aside from cultural capital?

A. There can be technical issues within an app, such as unintentional glitches. Music can fail on its own terms. Novelty is not enough.

Q. Does using unity make music expensive to publish?

A. They work with indie devs a lot. Whether this is favourable to paying fees per piece? Maybe find a free kit or work with a designer.

Q. Does this change the definition of authorship of a piece of a music?

A. Is a piece always sound like a single piece then it’s a piece. If it changes unrecognisably, you’ve built an instrument. The intention of the creator also counts.

Trying to become slightly better

Last time, I talked a bit about authoritarians, people who sound entirely unlikeable with their bigotry and small mindedness. Here’s the thing, though: a feature of this personality type is a lack of self-awareness. Nobody thinks that they themselves are authoritarian. Indeed, it’s not a binary trait, but a scale, so we’ve all got lots of these traits.

We all think we’re good and moral but the Milgram experiments showed that most people will obey a guy in a lab coat to the point of electric shocking somebody to death. Any one of us could be in that obedient majority. We think we’re against racism, but so do people with a high degree of authoritarianism. We are all against what we recognise as racism, but dog whistles that we haven’t decoded seem like common sense. In short, part of the process of fighting systemic racism includes learning to recognise it and learning to become less authoritarian.

A lot of white people in the US have zero non-white friends. Indeed, people also tend to be limited by gender, class and age. And yet, to become better people we need to be able to interact with and listen to people who are different from us. We also need to practice not taking up too much space and not speaking over people.

This kind of de-centring does not come automatically. It takes practice and in the mean time, there is a risk of being annoying and/or counter-productive. White folks tend to want to re-explain things that a non-white person has already said (something I’m doing right here) or to explain the ‘white perspective’ to people, often in great detail. Or sometimes white people take up a lot of emotional space, in which we get upset by racism or our own guilt or whatever and want to be comforted. It’s hard not to do these things – we’ve been trained to act this way from our extreme youth. I often find it very challenging to avoid taking up too much space in a discussion.

However, it’s possible to practice listening and learning online. If you’re on twitter, follow @deray, @RE_invent_ED and @Nettaaaaaaaa. I feel like reading these feeds provides an incredible opportunity to learn. I’d suggest resisting the urge to reply, argue, or take up space. And rather than rephrase something good, retweet it – amplify their voice rather than taking over.

You can’t fight racism until you learn to recognise it, and this is one way to learn to do that. It is one tiny step on a long journey to a better world.

Authoritarians

If we’re going to talk to racists, it would be helpful to know about more about some of them. I think it’s important to start this post with the assertion that every Anglophone society is structurally racist. We’ve all been indoctrinated with racism from a very young age. There is no way to get through that without absorbing some racist thoughts and ideas. I’m going to say some things that will sound very us vs them, but this is only for convenience sake. The traits I’m going to describe are not binary, but are on a scale. Everyone posses many of these traits in greater or lesser degrees. This is not a look at how good people can reach bad people, but rather how people who are participating in a bad situation can help each other withdraw support from it.

A researcher named Bob Altemeyer has dedicated his career studying how/why people participate in authoritarian systems. He has written a free e-book about this. I re-read it last night to see if it could offer insight into reaching pro-police racists.

Authoritarianism is a set of personality traits that correlates very strongly with racism and being pro-police state. This is also a dangerous type of racist. If they are on juries, etc, they have strong double standards and are more likely to convict people from vulnerable groups and give harsher sentences. They love cops and law and order. And they reliably vote. Furthermore, they have a tendency to bully people different from them, especially if they feel they have the upper hand. They dig victim blaming. This is the kind of person who says that murdered black people shouldn’t have resisted arrest.

Altemeyer confirms things we already knew about these people – namely you can’t argue with them. (p 93) (p 237) Authoritarians are self-righteous, but also full of fear. They have many self-contradictory beliefs, yet feel they have a monopoly on the truth. This is, essentially, an intellectually precarious position and thus I would expect they’d be very prone to white fragility. Also, although they think all kinds of racist things, they’re also aware that overt racism is bad. (p 100) Again, there is no way to win an argument – they come out of defeat feeling more dogmatic and sure of themselves then they did beforehand. (p 93)

However, there is hope. As might be expected of people with no coherent inner life, they are highly dependent on group consensus to shape their views. (p 89) Indeed, they tend to have very little interaction with people who disagree with them, and use this as a way to maintain their beliefs. (p 88) Unfriending them on facebook, therefore, just makes the problem worse. Posting alternative viewpoints at least breaks up the racist consensus in which they’ve surrounded themselves.

Authoritarian followers really want to be normal. They will moderate their bigotry heavily, if it makes them fit in with the norm. (p 35) Therefore, a good way to engage with them is bandwagon technique. If you can pass along polls that show most people thinking the police are overly aggressive or racist, they will moderate their beliefs to conform with the majority. This is how the US went so quickly from gay people being a political wedge issue to gay marriage having majority support. It also really really helps if the authoritarian actually knows someone who is an alien other, but even exposure to any nice people outside of their belief system can help.

Authoritarianism is also really driven by fear. Everyone who is afraid tends to become more authoritarian. This is also what causes people to lash out in general and drives victim blaming. (If victims had it coming, then I’m safe because I’m good.) Reducing fear is a good way to help people chill out and think more rationally. Alas, I don’t have ideas of how to do this, aside from banishing all Fox News from a person’s life, which is easier said than done.

Finally, obviously, authoritarians are not going to come to your White People Getting Over Racism Event, no matter how many cookies are served there. Other connections must be leveraged to make contact. But you’re not just stuck with people who are already frustrating you on social media. Authoritarians are found in large numbers in fundamentalist / evangelical religious groups. If you are also a Christian, you may be able to reach them through pan-Christian initiatives. Again, exposure to people different than themselves helps them become more comfortable with all kinds of others. Also, authoritarians are not necessarily on the wrong side of every issue. Many have concern about the environment – even if there is disagreement on global warming, they are somewhat more likely than most to sign for local community efforts to do things like clean up streams. If you start showing up to help pick up litter, you’re likely to have an opportunity to befriend people with high authoritarian tendencies and expose them to non-authoritarian ideas. Because you will have bonded by working together for a common cause, you’ll be more receptive to each other’s ideas.

In summary, facebook arguments are not going to help with intractable proto-facists, but will just frustrate you and make them feel more sure of themselves. Instead, the way to reach them is by showing their consensus is not universal, exposing them to alternative viewpoints, and working with them on a common cause unrelated to fighting bigotry.

All of this is a lot easier said than done, but at least gives an idea of where to start with some kinds of social contacts.