Simon Hewitt Jones

How The Internet Changed And Will Change Music

Phase 1: The disruptive force of digital technology, especially the internet (and in particular Social Media), transformed the way we created, consumed and interacted with music.

Phase 2: That change in how we interact with music is completely changing the nature of the music itself.

We just finished phase 1.

News: Musbook and musicDNA announce Joint Co-operation Arrangements

Download press release - click here

Musbook and musicDNA announce Joint Co-operation Arrangements

Brussels, London, Los Angeles, Melbourne - 2 December 2009

Musbook.com and musicDNA™ are very pleased to announce a collaboration that will lead to the integration of their services and technologies to provide a new eco-system for musicians and music lovers.

Peter Tregear, CEO of Musbook.com said “This collaboration helps us become not just an effective on-line social network for musicians but also a powerful conceptual, educational, and commercial tool. MusBook.com has always been about using the unique power of the web to transform, for the better, the way the music world works. musicDNA offers our site a strikingly original and immensely powerful means towards achieving that end”.

Managing Director of Pensive, Peter Brown said “This is an exciting venture for us and confirms our vision of helping people find their way clearly in increasingly busy digital lives. There is an excellent match in the use of our core technologies in this collaboration, with its emphasis on social objects that are managed under user control and networked through such an important online community”.

Antony Pitts of CTU said “musicDNA is about describing the musical universe in such a way that both people and computers can connect up the information we have - our knowledge about music - with actual musical resources: recordings, sheet music, comment and recommendation - from Joe Bloggs’s blog to the most erudite of scholarly articles. Integrating our model with MusBook’s social networking portal is an important step in making this joined-up vision a reality for music-lovers and musical organizations around the globe”.

The mission of all parties is to empower and enrich the world’s community of musicians by enabling not just professional relationships, but also relationships between musicians and music lovers, to develop in ways that have previously never been possible. They will support these new connections with a comprehensive range of services, tools, and information that will help musicians drive forward the development of musical culture like never before.

The combination of the respective contributions by each of the parties will go a long way to achieving this mission. During this period of collaboration they will integrate the existing Musbook.com web portal with the musicDNA service provided by Pensive / CTU - with its dynamic navigation architecture for mapping the musical domain, using models and processes for managing related musical concepts (such as musical works, performances, recordings, artists, venues, etc.). This integration will open up the possibility of creating a new social community for people around the world to share their musical interests, experiences and knowledge.

-- see press release (download above) for contacts --

Company History

Musbook.com was founded in 2008 by Australian conductor and academic Peter Tregear and English violinist Simon Hewitt Jones. From offices in Melbourne, London and New York they are creating a new infrastructure for people to discover, create, promote and share music. The MusBook.com website (http://www.musbook.com/) is a web portal, social network and digital publishing website that hosts a global community of musicians and music lovers.

Pensive S.A. (Belgium) provides a range of information management services that offer “GPS for your information” – either figuratively (in the sense of helping users find their way through difficult or unknown “information territory”) or literally - in the case of musicGPS™. Pensive’s unique approach to treating items of information as distinct “social objects” and valued assets, allows users to organize, identify, discover, navigate, annotate and share information more easily and - in contrast to most so-called “Web 2.0” services - always under the user’s control.

CTU is a research and design team whose members have collaborated at the BBC, at Unknown Public, and at the Royal Academy of Music in London. The musicDNA project stems from a long-standing research interest in the nature of musical, historical, and aesthetic time, and is about understanding and mapping the essential structure of musical events and resources in order to visualize and navigate this rich semantic space.

For further information:

about Musbook.com, see www.musbook.com

about musicDNA™, see www.musicDNA.info

about Pensive, see www.pensive.eu

Sixth Sense for Music

This video is mindblowing:

And here's a slicker demo of the same thing.

The recent release of this video has sparked lots of conversations about what types of changes this kind of technology will bring to our lives. Today I want you to consider what this could mean for music.

We're talking about a wholesale integration of the world of digital data into our offline world. This is as big as the concept of the semantic web (artificial intelligence - computers understanding what we want). Combine the two, and we are living in an altogether different reality.

This is a mindboggling step forward from the basic introduction of the internet in its '1.0' and '2.0' forms.

We are talking about a world where we no longer see a difference between online and offline, and where intelligent machines will be smoothly integrated into our day to day lives.

This is not science fiction: this is a reality that will be with us within the next two decades.

There's a beautiful sentence at the end of the video (10:50, to be precise), where Mistry says: "integrating information into our everyday objects will not only help us to get rid of the digital divide, the gap between these two worlds, but it will also help us in some way to stay human; to be more connected to our physical world."

This is absolutely fascinating: one of the most potent fears surrounding the move to intelligent machines is the idea that 'machines might take over'. But prophets such as Mistry are working to an entirely different tune: their belief is not that our current 'offline' world will be increasingly displaced by a world run by digital machines, but that it will in fact be extended and empowered by digital innovations. The potential of what we can already achieve in our everyday life will be massively increased.

Looking at it from that angle gives a much more humanized vision of developments that are already underway. If technological developments amplify human achievements, then positive human values will be extended in a transformational manner.

Equally, the inverse could be true: a 21st Century Hitler or a Stalin in control of a vast digital infrastructure could wreak infinitely more havoc than their 20th Century counterparts!

That's why it's essential to keep good human values at the heart of new developments - and therefore why it's so important that the arts are open and proactive in embracing technical innovations. We need to keep expressive, emotionally engaging art weaved intricately into the heart of a digital future, because if we don't keep the arts up to date, they will be sidelined. And that wouldn't provide for a balanced society.

Contemporary art is important because it reflects the context of the society in which it is created. And to maintain that relevance as we move into a world that is a digital fusion of on- and off-line, we need to make sure that music innovates as strongly as the world of technology.

There are implications here both for how music is presented and consumed, but inevitably also for how music itself develops.

How could we expect our interactions with music - and music itself - to change when this kind of technology becomes commonplace?

MusBook's Going Live...

It's been a year in the making, but the initial version of MusBook will finally go live within the next 24 hours. You won't read about it anywhere but here; the team in India is just going to discreetly upload it tomorrow morning without any fanfare so that three months of heavy duty testing and improving can begin.

The new site is essentially the same as the prototype that's been up there for the last 6 months, only with a professional design (at last!) and a very fast server, so you'll no longer have to wait 5 minutes for each page to load. It's been an excruciating wait for all of us, but the toughest bit is over, and MusBook can finally enter the phase of iterative improvement that will make it into the de facto worldwide network for Classical, Contemporary and Jazz music.

That improvement process will also take a while -- it will be at least a month or two before the site starts to get really good. But by the new year, I believe that MusBook will provide what's necessary for a new ecosystem for music. Just like MySpace, only better :)

But, as they say... Wait, there's more!

Later in the week we're going to announce a partnership that will bring the new MusBook site together with another international team formerly of the BBC and the Royal Academy of Music, who are dedicated to changing the way that musicians and music information interact through a potent alchemy of highbrow musicology, incomprehensibly sophisticated information architecture, and lots of shiny things that beep. :)

MusBook 3.0, which will materialize at some point in 2010, will add to social networking a new way of interacting with music that will literally change the way you think about and interact with music.

Being a musician - or a listener - is about to get much more exciting :)

Disclaimer: MusBook is ultimately structured as a commercial business, so it could all go belly up and fail within a few months. But I think that's very unlikely - MusBook is the real deal, it's the perfect time to come to market, and the 10 or so people behind it are totally awesome, and will adapt rapidly as obstacles appear. So we have the best shot at this that we could have hoped for. Will it be a success? Only time will tell.

Musical Ontology

A post about Musical Ontology, an area where the philosophy of music and information science increasingly coincide. If you're here for sweet scraping sounds rather than heavy theorizing, you may want to skip this post :-)

Ontology

n.

(Computers) A systematic arrangement of all of the important categories of objects or concepts which exist in some field of discourse, showing the relations between them.

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How Our Musical Ontology Is Changing, And Why Technology is Both The Cause And The Cure

Humans like to classify things, and music is no exception. Unfortunately music is really quite difficult to classify - not least because everyone's experience of it is so subjective. Even something that most people would recognize to exist (e.g. a piece of sheet music) can be difficult to classify because of what it is (e.g. can an arrangement of a piece of music be classified under the original piece, or is it a wholly separate and distinct piece of music?).

Of course, the difficulty of classifying music doesn't stop people trying!

In the last couple of hundred years, but especially throughout the 20th Century, the trend of music becoming a formal 'listening event' increased. Music was more and more a concert hall-orientated experience rather than an indirect result of a ritual or social happening. It moved from being an integrated part of an experience, to the focal point of the experience itself.

As a consequence, more classification of music was necessary. People wanted to be able to communicate to others about what they were playing or listening to, and as people tend to define things by what they already know, so emerged a 'Classical Canon' in which musical works were presented as part of an informally yet universally recognised catalogue. Universally recognized by the Western world of bourgeois listeners, that is!

For the first time in musical history, pieces of music came wrapped up in easy-to-understand bundles of classification. A Symphony here, a Concerto Grosso there. Everything in the 'Classical Canon' had a form that related to another form. If you listened to a new Sonata it might confirm or confound your expectations, but it could still be put back neatly into the metaphorical 'Sonata' box at the end of the evening! Needless to say, these classifications were a little vague. You couldn't see the actual relationships; who was influenced by what, why it happened, and where. Those are the tiny little actions and events that power the natural evolution of things.

Beethoven's 'revolutionary' writing was in fact just an iterative evolution from what went before. But because we can't see the details of the ontology - i.e. all those little micro-influences that affected his work - it's far easier for us to understand his work in the context of musical history if we create a sweepingly vague set of metaphorical classification boxes and bung him into whichever one fits the best!

This kind of classification, which became ever more formal as books and other print media became more sophisticated and widely read, was based - quite naturally - on the zeitgeists of the times. I remember being taught at school about 'the great composers' from wallcharts where musical history seemed to stop dead with the death of Benjamin Britten! It had become accepted in British music education at that time that anything written post-1990 was 'modern music', and handled as an entirely separate body of work to '20th Century' music. Which is a nonsensical division.

It wasn't just the musical forms and genres themselves that formed the basis of the librarianship underpinning the body of musical work - 'the Classics' - that we came to know and love. It was the way those musical forms and genres were seen from the perspective of the society making the classification. That viewpoint was often a highly traditional one, with an emphasis on the past as a self-contained museum-piece, rather than on the past's relationship to the present. Inevitably, the more people who adopted this form of looking at the 'Classical Canon', the more widely recognized and universal it became.

If we accept that the roots of such classification or ontology are based on cultural zeitgeists, then we must also recognize that social change will eventually cause the classification to be outmoded.

The instinctive classification of, say, a late Beethoven piano work, by an early 20th Century music critic schooled in late 19th Century ways of thinking, would fall squarely into place in a lineup of the greatest instrumental, chamber and orchestral works of the preceeding 300 years. We would expect that same piece, if heard by a 21st Century experimental composer with a far more eclectic range of influences and experiences, to be heard in a very different context. So it follows that we would also expect it to have a very different and far more personal classification for that more modern listener.

Therefore, the further we move from the society that defined the 'Canon of Western Classical Music' that came about post-Mendelssohn, the less the existing classifications will work adequately for us. The 'Classical Canon' as an ontology could only survive in that same form for as long as there was no fundamental social change to sweep it aside.

The social change that's gradually making these classifications less and less relevant has been massively accelerated by the internet, and that's what's at the root of the 'musical genre crisis' we're now seeing, whereby the term 'Classical Music' is losing its meaning by the month.

But where a problem has been caused by technology, often a new solution can be found, and it's becoming apparent that where existing non-digitalized ontologies are being swept aside by a new hyper-personalized, social- and digital-media-fuelled individualism, so technology can now come in and capture then connect those new personal ontologies that emerge instead (i.e. the musical classifications that are individual and unique to each individual listener).

Imagine tomorrow's musical ontology being an amalgam of everyone's unique musical experiences and interactions, recorded and interconnected by technology, and navigable in any direction without reliance on outdated genres.

Imagine, if Beethoven were alive today, to be able to tap into his work from any perspective (e.g. as a listener, or a performer, with any motivation, anywhere in the world), and being able to see a complete web of connections between his work and yourself; who performed it, when, where, how... this would be so much more informative and create so many more possibilities than having just an unwieldy terminology that is only useful so long as the people you're interacting with use it too.

Technology can do all this, and probably sooner than you think.

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Further reading:

http://www.musicdna.com/ - an effort to create a musical ontology that is powered by technology and compatible with the future semantic web, including an iPhone app that will log what you listen to, when

http://musicontology.com/ - another initiative working towards the realization of a digital musical ontology

The Semantic Web -- Also: Wikipedia Article