Diversity is Health, Contentment is Wealth
The worldwide strategy towards climate change is simple: outrun it. Raise humanity, through technological advance, to material prosperity before the effort's own fallout engulfs us.
This strategy ignores the dramatic rise in consumerism which to date has obliterated every efficiency advance, a feckless and irresponsible speculation culture, and the tyranny of the bottom line in cementing energy producers obsession with legacy sources. For the raptor-hoarders reaping the profits, idiocy quite literally pays.
For half the world -the equatorial and predominantly non-christian half, notabene- the future is bleak. By the end of the century, the combination of heat and humidity in many equatorial countries will be deadly. Above a certain temperature, the human body can no longer cool down, resulting in organ failure and death. Residents of countries such as Pakistan will have little other option than migration. The conflict potential is enormous.
Perhaps the most profound stupidity is that material surfeit and personal wellbeing have little in common. It's clear to pretty much everyone but those applying them that the world's economy is focussed on the wrong metrics.
The impact is to be seen all around us: material clutter symptomatic of mass trauma, an epidemic of loneliness, toxic role models, environmental collapse, creeping militarization, the ever more tightly integrated and automated chokehold of speculation, resource squander and defense, online mobbing, envy, abuse, exploitation and isolation. In their wake, a rise in teen suicides and -at current estimates- a roughly 5% chance of attaining the Paris climate accord goals, our one and only chance of halting a runaway climate. All point unflinchingly to crisis.
Whatever those in power may think, this is utter chaos. With the world's population at over 7 billion, instead of feeding discontent, we should be celebrating sufficiency and voluntary self-denial. Diversity is Health, Contentment is Wealth.
"We must stop constantly fighting for human rights and equal justice in an unjust system, and start building a society where equal rights are an integral part of the design". — Jacque Fresco
Big, brave, open-source, non-profit, community-provisioned, cross-cultural and dongbat crazy. → Like, share, back-link, pin, tweet and mail. Hashtags? For the crowdfunding: #VisualFutureOfMusic. For the future live platform: #WorldMusicInstrumentsAndTheory. Or just register as a potential crowdfunder..
Streaming Is Not Culture: Keep Music Live<
Discontent and Fear
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Economic vanity metrics leave the few with a profound and wholly unwarranted sense of entitlement, and the majority with a growing sense of impotence, foreboding, and futility.
As the hurdles to employment are set ever higher, in many disciplines, not even a lifetime of study will pace with advances in machine intelligence. Prosperity will certainly come - but to an ever diminishing number of people. Those who succeed will inevitably continue to do so at the direct expense of others - often the poorest, and in ever larger numbers.
Moreover, complexity makes idiots of us all. Autonomous learning and decision making are slowly stripping mankind of all control over the more infernal of our machines. If humans -unable to distinguish between a weather balloon and an incoming rocket- have only narrowly escaped nuclear war, what about a complex, highly reactive automaton?
If all this is in profound contrast to the optimism of even a few decades ago, there is good cause. Aggregated, these pressures lead to conflict, it's triggers relentlessly being networked and automated. If mankind is to avoid drifting into global war, there an urgent need for change:
- use economic pressure to force the elimination of contentious energy sources
- replace consumer.ism with contentment.ism, with a completely new set of economic metrics
- drive the 'commons' at every level. Open source, non-profit, local, efficient, economic and low-impact
- eliminate speculation and so (especially economic) fear at every level
- focus on humanity's common dependencies and destiny
These are areas in which open, social projects such as this can -together- have significant influence.
Collaborative Enablement
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| DIY. Doesn't Take Much. |
All beginnings are small. Perhaps the time has come for a new class of community-managed open-source enablement platform, focussing on active empowerment, participation, community, sufficiency, zero speculation and shared, quality time.
Such a platform might conceivably take away some of the pressure to follow bankrupt role models and examples.
Music and dance help us connect with others, with undeniable impact on our wellbeing. Here lies concrete opportunity.
P2P: Person to Person
That is the premise for a new, score-driven visualisation platform aggregating interactive instrument models and theory tools into a highly-customisable, in-browser environment, ultimately supporting P2P (person-to-person) world music teaching and learning worldwide, and opening up a galaxy of comparative musicology applications.
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| Global P2P (Person-to-Person) Teaching and Learning |
Social and Diverse
It will address and foster grassroots musical needs: social music-making, musical community, collaboration, musical diversity and inclusion. While providing learning and teaching tools, it will support and encourage active participation in close-to-hand grass-roots events: the visual means to a musical end.
Good For The Planet
The dramatic impact of climate change and exhaust toxins on urban populations should be all the motivation we need to keep travel to an absolute minimum, yet given human nature, the only way it is realistically going to be stemmed is by rendering it superfluous. Physical access is in all respects expensive; virtual far less so.Away from the Drip Feed
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| Contentment is Wealth |
"Contentment is Wealth", as the Irish (again) say.
Of the many amateur session musicians met through the years, one thing they seem to have in common is an ability to relax. An instrument, a tune or two, good company, and they are quickly content.
There is something tranquil and eternal to this, which is probably why it increasingly fails to engage change-accustomed younger generations. We lose these pools of warmth and social engagement at our peril.
With time I hope this platform will help more people recover faith in their own musical abilities, in the profound value of those immediately around us, and in the power of community music and dance to transport us away from everyday fears and challenges.
"The music industry is a miserable hellscape and always has been. If you can possible earn a living some other way while still pursuing your musical life, you’d be crazy not to". (Ethan Hein, Music Professor at Montclair State University and NYU).
Keywords
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online music learning, online music lessons |
distance music learning, distance music lessons |
remote music lessons, remote music learning |
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p2p music lessons, p2p music learning |
music visualisation music visualization |
musical instrument models interactive music instrument models |
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music theory tools musical theory |
p2p music interworking p2p musical interworking |
comparative musicology ethnomusicology |
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world music international music |
folk music traditional music |
P2P musical interworking, Peer-to-peer musical interworking |
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WebGL, Web3D, WebVR, WebAR |
Virtual Reality, Augmented or Mixed Reality |
Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning |
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Scalar Vector Graphics, SVG |
3D Cascading Style Sheets, CSS3D |
X3Dom, XML3D |
Comments, questions and (especially) critique welcome.