BECOMING A MUSICIAN IN 2022
NO TALENT NEEDED!!!
Musicians in 2022 will be able to produce music using software and their own genetic material. Gone will be the days of practice and the dedication to learning to play an instrument and understand music theory. By merely existing and spending a few moments using simple software, individuals will be producing music that is as unique as they are.
A Future Where Everyone Is A Music Maker – How Apps Will Change Cultural Creation
Hypebot: What do you believe the cultural implications are for a future where everyone is a music maker? Suzanne Lainson: Overall, it’s good for society. It gets more people involved. My ex-husband was a musician (part-time his whole live and full time for several years). He was always jamming with someone. In addition to his bar gigs, he also had people over to our house every week to play music for fun. Some could actually play and others were just handed a wash bucket bass, a jug, or a shaker so they could join in. It was the same no matter where we lived: Nebraska, Ohio, Wyoming, Colorado. I saw how music could become a participatory social event incorporating all skill levels. These days I also see how digital tools are enhancing creativity in a variety of fields. With music, for example, digital tools have (1) allowed people with talent and training to do more by themselves, and (2) have allowed those who can’t stay in tune or play an instrument to make hit records. I think the hardware and software will continue to advance so that anyone will be able to press a few buttons and create a song good enough to share with friends and family. Technology will either fill in the gaps to cover up shortcomings or will act as a guide to show the untrained, unskilled, and untalented how to make listenable music. But with that, as more people think of themselves as music creators, it will be harder for “professional” musicians to
claim they have unique skills. (For example, look how reality TV has transformed the concept of celebrity. Now everyone assumes, and often correctly so, that if they can just get on TV, they will become famous, at least for a little while.) Of course, there will always be a few musical geniuses, but just as karaoke knocked out live music in some bars, homemade music will supplant some “professionally-made” music. (Actually it already has, which is why we’ve had waves of garage and indie bands.) As this trend continues, we’ll be surrounded by lots of people doing some music, but very few people with enough paying fans to make a living at music. This is okay, though. If everyone can make music, it is a better world. Hypebot: The last decade in the music industry focused on consumption; will the next focus on production? Suzanne Lainson:Yes, though I don’t think most people will think in those terms. The direct-to-fan concept is based on the idea that there will be paying music consumers. But that suggests fans are waiting to buy something from a music creator. In contrast, if we give everyone the tools to feel creative, I think that is where they will go. Making your own music is more participatory and more fulfilling than simply listening to someone else making music. Hypebot: Is the sharing of a musical production – as well as the context – what makes a song meaningful? Suzanne Lainson: Sharing is important. Listening used to be more social. Getting into a car with your friends and turning on the radio and listening to a song together created far more memories than listening to it by yourself through headphones.
Here’s another form of sharing: Some of my most successful musician friends grew up directing praise-and-worship programs at churches. They learned how to write music teens could relate to and then to find ways to get those teens to participate in the services. And yet another form of sharing: What creates bonds among musicians is writing, playing, and performing together. It’s like a group orgasm for them. Are there new forms of sharing on the horizon? Well, there are YouTube videos where clips from individual performances are linked to make it look like the musicians have performed together. While these musicians may get some satisfaction in seeing the final product, it’s usually not a true collaboration. A higher level of sharing comes from websites that allow musicians to remotely work on music together. But I don’t see these sites really taking off yet. Maybe what we’ll need is to go back to a form of jam session, where people play
together in person. But there’s no reason why the jam sessions can’t be done with iPhones and iPads rather than voices or musical instruments. For that matter, these impromptu music sessions could even randomly happen wherever people are collecting. I’d like to see music making expand to public places like parks. It would be cool to have installations that anyone, from little kids to grandparents, could play to make music together. Hypebot: Do music production apps enable a fan to become a more active participant in their cultural lives? Suzanne Lainson: Well, by breaking down barriers of entry, it encourages people to at least dabble in music. And I think that has to be rewarding. Look at what Xtranormal has done for homemade animated movies. With this technology, you don’t have to know how to draw or animate in order to create a movie that can go viral on YouTube. The same will happen with music.
This is really the power of generative systems, that you make seeds rather than forests.   —Brian Eno
Symphony of life: Making Music Out of the Human Genome
Can you turn the chemical structure of DNA into music? Composer Michael Zev Gordon explains his strange quest to make science and art work together. Genetics and music are not the most obvious bed-fellows, but we are living in a time of unlikely couplings. Looking for common ground between art and science is increasingly popular, so when, in early 2009, I was asked to write a piece of music that would be part of a Wellcome Trust research project into the genetics of musical ability, I jumped at the chance, because the patterns of the human genome – made of a series of chemical “bases” that can be symbolized as four letters, A (Adenine), T (Thymine), C (Cytosine) and G (Guanine) – looked like chains of notes. It was perfect raw material. With this piece, though, my most basic problem was a solitary one: how could I be faithful to the precision of the genetic sequence being investigated – to stick closely to the order – but still end up with musical music? It’s been a delicate path to tread, and my approach has been shaped by seeing genes as simultaneously physical matter and things of extraordinary wonder. Humans share more than 99% of our genetic material.
But every so often in any gene, at known points, or “polymorphisms”, tiny differences in genetic structure occur between groups of individuals. The different forms of the gene at these points are called alleles – and specific aspects of our individuality are influenced by particular allelic combinations. The scientific research has involved comparing certain alleles in musicians with those in non-musicians. The driving, expressive impulse for my piece has been to highlight these miraculous variants. It took me time to get my head around the science involved. Things crystallized when I began to map a segment of common sequence leading up to my chosen polymorphism – A, C and A on to the same musical note-names; then T – “ti’ in the doh-re-mi solfège system – on to B, and so on. Adding a supple rhythm, I arrived, to my surprise, at something that sounded quite like plainsong: it became the initial gesture of the piece.
Other, pragmatic factors were formative, too. We had to decide who the performers would be. It was a starting point for the project that I would use their specific DNA data in my work – we were drawn to the image of “singing one’s genes”. That led to a multipart choir, and, inevitably for me, the model of Thomas Tallis’s 40-voice motet, Spem in Alium. The common linguistic root of Alium and Allele – the other – was not lost on us either. I had an early view of the piece that its abstract form would describe a very gradual growth from the simplest to the most complex. But how would concrete words fit into this? When the poet Ruth Padel joined the project, it took a decisive turn. Over a month, she produced 23 poems on cells, as her way of discovering the subject, but none of them quite worked for me as words for music. What followed was the most intense set of email exchanges I have
ever had – where she honed a new text, separate to the original poems, to my demanding request for images and verbal patterns that I felt could release the sounds I envisaged. The opening runs: Mystery of tiniest difference, invisible, unknown/ Flight of the tiniest humming-birds, in sequence/ Crimson wings above an unknown sea/ in autumn wind. The mystery of migrating. And I asked for more – that the text be structured as the music. The more the words, music and science could be integrated, the more powerful the piece would be. I drew for this structure on another image from scientific thought and nature: the Fibonacci series and the associated golden section. As the numbers in the series get larger – 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 and so on – the ratio of an adjacent pair tends increasingly to the figure of 0.618. This proportion allows for maximum efficiency in the formation of many natural phenomena – including, some suggest, DNA. It also works extremely well for shaping music, as Debussy, Bartók and others have explored before me. The sections of the text were similarly proportioned; I placed Ruth’s words “Allele, occult as Kabbalah” at the work’s climax. With this line of poetry – direct yet mysterious – I could turn to the heart of the research: here the singers would sing their own individual genetic variants. All that precedes this is rooted in manipulations of the common code – turned into pitch, then rhythmic figures. Meanwhile, guided by another genetic principle – replication – the piece texturally divides and divides again, starting out from a single voice. At the words “Crimson wings above an unknown sea”, for example, the choir splits into two large blocks of 20 voices, richly dappled ripples of sound spreading between them. But I had to be careful – as Tallis showed, you can’t have everyone singing different parts all the time, because the result would be far too clogged.
When I was near finishing the piece, Andrew Morley of St Thomas’s Hospital and King’s Health Trust in London, who had first approached me about the piece, asked why I had been so concerned to stick strictly to the letter of the genome. My answer was that music must have its limitations, its orderings, to produce beauty, wild or gentle. Music needs precision to push against for creativity to occur, whether actual science is involved or not. And perhaps, I hazard as a composer, it is the same in reverse in science. Arthur Koestler in The Act of Creation expresses it thus: “From the Pythagoreans onward, through the Renaissance to our times, the oceanic feeling, the sense of participation in the mystery of the infinite, was the principal inspiration of the wingèd and flatfooted creature, the scientist.” Allele will be performed on 9 July at the Diamond Light Synchrotron, Didcot, on 10 July at the Cheltenham Music Festival, and on 13 July at the Royal Society of Medicine in London.
Bibliography
Bylin, Kyle. “A Future Where Everyone is a Music Maker- How Apps Will Change Cultural Creation Interview.” hypebot.com. 17 January 2011. Web. Gordon, Michael Zev. “Symphony of Life: Making Music Out of the Human Genome.” guardian.co.uk. Guardian New and Media Limited. 24 June 2010. Web.