How music can predict the human/machine future
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:16
I'll come back on stage four. We continue this in English now. The next speaker is Peter Kern.
00:23
Do you want to come up already? Peter will talk about how music can predict the human machine future and I'm really interested to know what it will be about because from the title that makes me really curious. Peter is an American journalist and audiovisual artist.
00:44
He writes at createdigitalmusic.com which is a very comprehensive website recommended reading and is co-creator of the open source me blip synthesizer. So Peter.
01:03
Thank you so much. Thank you. Okay so now I don't have to say who I am which is great. We can get straight into it. I should say that I come from a music background. So we're at what seems to be kind of a technology conference.
01:23
I'm sometimes accused by people who I was going to say people who don't know me but also people who do know me of being techie. But my background is really from music and it actually really comes from non-electronic music. I was trained as a piano player so I am very very
01:41
biased. I'm a very very biased musician. One of the instructions that we got for Republica was do not give a sales pitch. So I'm kind of breaking that rule because this whole talk really is sort of a sales pitch. It's just a sales pitch for music. So we're in a really exciting place
02:01
being in Berlin and even being in Germany in that this is a really special place for where music and technology come together. It's an extraordinary just astounding number of musical engineers in this country and unparalleled anywhere else in the world. I would say even
02:21
unparalleled in the United States and just tons and tons and tons of talent. And those of us in the music side of things haven't always done a great job of communicating with the the rest of the city especially as this this internet phenomenon has happened in Berlin. There's all kinds of conversations that could be happening between these two communities
02:42
that often aren't. So I'm doing what I always tend to do which is being kind of an advocate for music and advocate not just for music as the music industry and listening to records and Spotify and all of those things but really music creation and music performance as a way of understanding how our how our culture works and how to design better for people not just
03:06
musicians but for human beings. So I'm going to talk a little bit about design and a little bit about culture. Design is a great word because and it's a great example of what I'm what I'm saying. You know I taught at Parsons the new school for design while I was in New York
03:24
and talk a lot about the word design and the word design has become synonymous with visual design. So unless someone says specifically sound design and they're talking about the explosions in a new movie or something if you hear the word design people almost immediately
03:42
assume that's visual. At Parsons when we said design we meant visual design and you'll also hear people talk about how we live in a visual culture. I hear that phrase a lot well we live in a visual culture and maybe we're not so aware of of sound. I don't believe
04:00
it's true and actually I think part of what drives people to suggest that we live in a visual culture is that our culture is so sonic and the way that we relate to our environment is so rooted in sound that we take that for granted. It's so important that we almost can't think about it. So those are those are the two things I'm going to kind of talk about today
04:25
but we're going to go back in time a little bit 43,000 years ago to Slovenia. I have 30 minutes so this means I'm now covering 43,000 years of history or 20 in 20 about 20 minutes it's not so good but here's what I mean and is anyone Slovenian or from a Slavic country?
04:46
Okay but if I would ask you how to the right way to pronounce this if I is but this is the this is a flute that we believe is about 43,000 years ago or we believe that it's a flute it's a it's a bone with two evenly spaced holes in it and it's a fragment that was found in a cave
05:02
in the mid 90s. There are a number of archaeological artifacts like this that are tens of thousands of years old but this is the oldest appears to be from the Cro-Magnon period and it really does seem to be a flute. So we think a lot about the first tools and the emergence of language in human beings as as being things like knives and bows and arrows and
05:26
spears but almost at the moment that language seems to appear in human beings or even pre-human beings, Cro-Magnon, and the moment that that these primates start making tools they seem to start immediately making musical instruments where there is some chance that this is not a flute
05:46
the people who studied it figure that the odds are something in the millions to one that you would have two holes spaced in a way that produces this tuning and actually if you think about a basic flute it's a fantastic design it is exactly fitted to the size of your hand
06:02
there seems to even be the appearance of a thumb hole on this particular artifact so it's a physical properties of sound to the overtone series so when we think about tools we should
06:22
think about how musical instruments relate to tools and we'll come back to flutes in a bit and another piece of evidence this is now going back to the future or the present another piece of evidence that we really live in a sound culture as well as a visual culture is noise complaints so this is from wired magazine in 2010 this is how important sound and noise are to all
06:47
of us in new york we have this phone line called 311 where you can dial up the city and you get the whole city and you can complain about anything to this one number and that's been around i think for about 10 years this does not exist in berlin this is a new york
07:02
new york technology is is geared toward complaining so the question is what do new yorkers complain about and and what's what's astonishing is by far the most common complaint is noise that pink area in the center is noise and that's even versus things like rodents
07:21
maybe we gave up complaining about those um you know dirty sanitation problems all these other things people are most bothered by noise so noise is a big part of the way that you experience your environment in fact after today you can try this experiment someone told me that they thought if they had to lose one sense they'd rather lose their hearing than lose
07:43
their vision of course we really would prefer to keep everything but watch people as you as you walk around after the event today and look for people with headphones sometimes it works if you're going toward them it almost always works if you're behind them but what you'll find is people who don't wear headphones like in the ubon they'll know when you're behind them they'll
08:04
actually turn around and they'll kind of see if you approach them if they are wearing headphones they won't see you not only will they not hear you they won't be able to see you and it's because we have such incredible location and situational awareness based on sound that we're really aware of who's around us also also through sound so let's talk about how
08:27
you can design around this natural sensitivity to sound and music and and now we go back to 1920 in russia and leon terriman the soviets were working at the time on back to situational
08:43
awareness proximity sensors they were doing research and how they could kind of figure out where people were and at the time you know electronics and radios and things were almost magical to people we didn't really have a good way to relate to them using almost anything other than the knob and terriman through an accident and an incredibly simple circuit that uses
09:05
something called capacitive induction came up with something that turned into a musical instrument and it sounded like this for those of you who don't already know it so this is
09:20
1920 here we are in 2013 and we're still wrapping our heads around this what if we could relate to technology without touching it if we could just use our natural gestures and muscles the best way to test that theory is to try to play music with that sensor now terriman the
09:44
inventor played beautiful music even more beautiful was the musician clara rockmore so terriman has an unfortunate association with horror movies and science fiction it's a spooky instrument people want to play on halloween but when you listen to clara rockmore
10:00
you might believe this is the most beautiful instrument of the 20th century so any of us who work in electronic sound i think we have to be really humbled by clara
10:24
rockmore with all of our synthesizers and computers here's a person who can make an electronic instrument sound not just half as good as a violin but maybe even a bit better this is the quality of a human voice which is something that bob moog always said he wanted
10:43
to achieve with his synthesizers bob moog created the keyboard instrument that was used in rock and all these other songs that you've likely heard he wanted that synth to sound like a voice as well so that was the analog technology in the 20s it's hard i'm sorry i hate to cut
11:01
that off um that was analog technology in the 20s um the amazing thing that happened at the beginning of the computer revolution was being able to teach the computer to make music and it's actually happened even before computers were really doing any kind of graphics the innovator who led this team was a guy named max mathews so we're now in the united
11:25
states in princeton new jersey he was working leading a team at bell labs which in the 50s and 60s came up with many many of the innovations that we rely on today and so max began with
11:40
software called music this was how early this research was he needed a he needed a name for the software he was writing that would allow you to make music with a computer so he called it music because nothing else did that so that that's how early this was and as soon as 1957 a computer made truly newly generated music for the first time there have been some experiments
12:06
with kind of series of beeps or alert alert tones but in 1957 an ibm mainframe for the first time made real music that was pretty impressive but working with people also at bell labs who
12:20
were researching vocal synthesis max went on to do something even more impressive so how many people have seen the last scene in the movie 2001 okay so how the computer as he's being disconnected he you hear his kind of memory falling apart and the last thing that he does
12:42
is how sings this song called daisy bell and the reason he sings that is the idea was that this evil computer was at some point kind of like a child computer learning to sing and the first song that any computer ever sang was this song daisy bell actually now if you've heard a
13:00
dubbed version of the movie i just learned this the computer sings a different song like i found a french dub where it sings some french song but but um this is this is the song that it sings we're going to hear it actually through a really wonderful piece that's more recent by a friend of the two friends of mine daniel massey and erin coblin reinterpreted created a piece
13:21
of digital art kind of around this moment but here's that here's what that sounded like primitive but remember it's the early 60s in 1962 the world heard a computer scene for the first time when an ibm 704 was programmed
13:43
at bell labs to sing the song daisy bell now in 2009 the song has been recreated for more 2000 sound clips i actually don't know how to advance the video on this but it anyway it's worth researching erin's piece erin goes back and recreates that song using uh using a human
14:02
voices sort of crowdsourced to sing it again um but i think this is a really important moment in how we related to computers because for the first time we were able to make a computer do what we can do and be able to sing a song and since then digital synthesis and and making music with computers has been really a fundamental part of of what we do max's contributions may have
14:25
been influential in other ways as well by being able to produce music with a computer max is able to create a system of digital synthesis that impacted all kinds of signal processing not only in music but in almost every application in computers that would that would come so music was a good
14:42
test but it led to advances that expanded far beyond music and um it some people even argue that the work that max did influenced object-oriented programming he came up with a system for his music software that divided sound into component parts into little modules that you sort
15:02
of interconnect and um some people actually attribute this to object-oriented programming and to the idea of being able to make a computer an extension of your own mind where we can say with some certainty that music was part of that model is in the 1970s late 70s and the dyna book project at zero x park so if bell labs dominated the 50s and 60s and computers
15:26
xerox park was probably the the real hotbed of the of the late 70s and somehow my font has cut off a little bit but the two people here that i can quote are alan k which is a name you may know and adele greenberg which is a name you may not know but uh adele she was also
15:44
really influential in the model that we now have of how we think about computers on the left is something called the dyna book how many people have seen this before the dyna book there's some it got a little bit of presser on the ipad so as early as the late 70s people were saying hey what if we had this computer then instead of being big and clunky
16:04
looked like a tablet that was about the size of a book and had a screen where everything was graphical and what they described was basically an ipad a little bit more than the ipad when it first came out and they had a prototype working in 1977-78 adele greenberg was an interesting character too and that she helped develop the whole if any of your programmers the whole
16:25
model of your controller idea and object-oriented programming and she and alan k and this team of incredible people um what i found especially interesting researching this was that they returned to the idea of a musical instrument to measure how well this human computer interaction
16:42
was working and they said that they even used the flute back to our 42 000 year old model they used the flute as the measure that would determine kind of whether this computer was working so they wanted the the computer to be as responsive and as expressive as a flute because remember at the time and sometimes even now you would kind of make an action on a computer
17:03
and get a result several moments later which is no good so musical instruments make great ways of measuring any interactive system if something feels as good as an instrument does and any kid can pick up an instrument and make noises with it it's a good indication that
17:21
you're on to something and how that will feel to to people doing all kinds of other things and not just music another way of looking at this interaction aside from gestures and and this kind of means of extending your mind is through drawing here's a couple of other early examples
17:42
so before graphic tablets so we'll hear French over the top of me this is the 1970s early 80s
18:03
so the composer Iannis Xenakis developed a system called the Yupik that translated tablet motions into sound and music and this is the as soon as this is as early as the late 70s he started describing this idea as soon as the 60s and Adobe I think just yesterday was introducing
18:24
their new idea of what to do with the tablet but this is another instance where some musical applications predicted what would come and we should oh no slides might be slightly out of order oh no no there's a reason I did this because this is kind of closer to the
18:41
this is a more recent project a student of Golan Levins at Carnegie Mellon in Pennsylvania here's another kind of one of my favorite applications of this idea of being able to draw interfaces and it's called sketch music I think sketch control but using camera tracking
19:02
and interactive software he's able to draw controls for for music or other applications much like Xenakis did with with his work the so these things kind of work as knobs and faders and things and I think there's tremendous
19:24
potential of the ability to kind of draw and sketch out new fluid interfaces in this way the guys we saw earlier researching the Yupik team have developed for their part their own software that uses arcs and curves to create well really strange sounds but aside
19:45
from the ability to make spooky sounds like this with weird looking geometric circles part of the work that they're doing I think is evocative in that it shows us new ways of thinking about time and graphical space so the software Eonix uses via JavaScript coded
20:03
arcs and curves and things the ability to navigate time with big graphical elements whether that controls music or visuals or art performances and so on and spooky sounds we all love spooky sounds another instance of musicians kind of being a bit ahead of the curve
20:25
in thinking about gestural interfaces for music two other examples so if you think about the last 10 years they've been dominated by some new interface paradigms one is the the
20:40
Nintendo Wii remote and I think one is the iPhone iPad multi-touch interface each of these were used experimentally by musicians before they were used in these mainstream applications in fact when people saw the Wii remote a lot of people saw echoes of the 1987 interface again by Max Matthews the radio baton and so here's Max again Max who was the first person
21:05
ever to do digital synthesis in the 50s continued to be an innovator in each decade leading up to his death only a couple of years ago so let me now play a little bit of the music for you
21:29
so this is the radio baton uses a combination of touch sensors and wireless sensors inside the actual mallets which later were extended to work in three-dimensional space here we see
21:41
them working in 2d but Max is doing more than just playing an instrument he's also shifting the time of the music that he's playing he's kind of conducting it with his hands so you'll now when Miyamoto of Nintendo a little bit now he's speeding up when Miyamoto of Nintendo
22:00
stood up on the stage and then performed with the Mi remote Wii remote for the first time conducting he was doing almost identical an almost identical experiment to what Max had done in 1987 and now I have to cut off Bach this is horrible okay but we're running out of time um before the ipad a group of researchers at a french company called jazz mutant
22:26
developed a piece of hardware called the lemur and the lemur before the ipad became the first multi-touch hardware to be available to the public here's a couple of lemurs being used by
22:40
the band glitch mob and so that's why we have smoke everywhere but all of the basic features of the ipad including 10 finger touch control and multi-finger tracking were on this hardware the lemur several years before the ipad came out so part of what happened was the musical community already recognized what they saw at the even at the iphone keynote everyone said
23:01
oh that i've seen that before now i can have that on my phone i know what to do with that so that's sort of a quick overview of the history of musicians being a little bit ahead of curve on on gestural interaction touch interaction why am i telling you all this other than bragging about some people who i admire it's because i think there's probably
23:24
some clues to the future of fluid interfaces in some of these interactions so we live now in a world that has mountains and mountains of data and the people need to be able to navigate all this data if they're going to have any control over it at all we know that
23:41
big governments and big institutions will be able to mine this data but whether individuals will do it seems dependent on whether we can create the kind of interfaces that are fluid enough for them to be able to to navigate them and because machines are so much a part of our life and are taking on new forms and new parts of the world new markets and new devices we will
24:03
be constantly testing whether our designs can hold up to the kind of expressive interaction that makes our machines satisfying to use for human beings i think that a lot of the work that musicians are doing now can can move in this direction and we actually had this conversation a few years ago at south by southwest with joy montford who had led the yahoo
24:23
advanced technology group um actually we had the talk right after it was disbanded which was an exciting moment but in even in that time musicians in particular have continued to explore three-dimensional interfaces that store lots and lots of information in some pretty expressive ways this is a canadian single developer who built something called audio gl
24:45
and the music that you hear is actually being synthesized entirely in real time inside this three-dimensional crazy three-dimensional environment and this is software that he's now made available to to um early supporters and is using on his own it's it's already quite advanced and
25:03
it's since we're running low on time on say it's crazy three-dimensional you've probably seen uh other sorts of examples this is a connect based example which i'm going to kind of scroll ahead you've probably seen some of these kind of demos person using connect to do
25:27
real-time interaction what's great about music for this is how timing dependent music is right so if as a musician you don't want to hear any lag between when you move your arm and when you hear music it's a great way to test the timing sensitivity of something like connect
25:43
is to get someone to try to play music with it and in the case of connect i can tell you people been very very frustrated actually um so it's exciting to see musicians get these leap units if you've seen leap motion it's sort of the next thing in gestural control and test that in the same way uh moving in the opposite direction i think another compelling possibility
26:03
is is the opposite of that so we have lots of glass and touch in three dimensions the other area that people in the music community are working is in devices like the mono so now that we can embed computers in smaller and smaller forms for next to no money we have the
26:23
opportunity to rethink computers as something other than just screens the brian crabtree and kelly kane to some artists from upstate new york have done that with the monom and then later with another instrument called the arc and these devices become kind of physical sculptures
26:44
and then finally so i can take a couple of questions in our like last 60 seconds i'll say that it's also possible to put those two together so here's a friend of mine who's based here in berlin well the video is gone well you take my word for it actually let's take questions do we have time for a question or is there a question no i you know i love
27:26
beer as a way of discussing uh discussing these things uh and i will be around for the evening so you know maybe the best thing to do is uh meet me after the show and thanks a lot