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| Moi, Me, Ich, Yo, меня |
- o Strive to make everything you do empowering and emancipating.
- o Look well to the most vulnerable, and everything else looks after itself
So here we are. A wildly intuitive stab at an aggregator platform for world music instrument models and theory tool visualizations. Open-source. Non-profit. Heartily inclusive, acting an an integration platform for AI, ethnic musicians, exotic instrument learners and all the other oddballs the music industry fails to accommodate.
Currently a (more-or-less) top-to-bottom working implementation for one entire instrument family, that of the lutes, with a whistle, theory tools (circle of 5ths and tonal deltas) and waveform model (based on teoria.js), tonal deltas lattice, and half-finished scale tree and concertina model thrown in for good measure.
Earlier versions simply weren't understood. "Wow. Looks great. What did you say it does?".
Now? Plenty of -for the moment- harmless bugs, bits of string, chewing gum and fluff, but probably enough to go for a crowd-funding. The goal? Driving social value and the tools for self-help into places they are most needed. I'm hopeful of persuading potential sponsors that supporting a project like this is to everybody's benefit.
Psychologists speak increasingly of the complexity of the modern world, the loss of traditional orientation systems such as religion and family, and mankind's eternal search for identity, sense, security, stability and love. Like it or not -and no matter how stupid our actions- are all are bound together in a search for fulfillment, identity and acceptance.
Ikigai (生き甲斐), a Japanese concept meaning "a reason for being", depicts the foundational components of personal fulfillment. I rather like it's economy of expression.
I see this project very much in this light. I'll try to gather some of the motivations here. They may at times seem a little disjointed, as I tend to add thoughts as they occur to me. Ideas develop over time, and this project is no exception.
Sadly, the vast majority of humanity are -of necessity- focussed on ‘That which you can be paid for’, to the detriment of all else. With the advent of the so-called technological singularity, this aspect seems in danger of assuming nightmarish proportions. Ok. Big can of worms. But what can we do about it? Like, now?
It doesn't take much thought to realize that for music/wellbeing/contentment there are not one but two major problems: investment is made on purely economic arguments (the benefits of music are economic chaff to many), and -for a non-profit- this has to come out of the public pocket (heavy competition). Both leave social music and dance fairly screwed.
I saw I would have to bring the project far enough along to draw money in. If 90% of financed IT projects fail, I would have to sail as close to unfinanced failure as I could before dropping my crowd-funding anchor - and I would get only one shot at it. Big risk, but, WTH, you only live once. So here I am: a lot proven, sizzling with ideas, eager to get good hands on board - but at my financial tether's end.
Moi, Me, Ich, Yo, меня
As will quickly have become apparent from a squint at any blog entry, I am neither graphic designer, blogger, developer, nor system architect. In fact, apart from idealism, patience and the brute stubbornness to gnaw away at problems nobody else wants, I have no merchantable skills. Still, just getting something strung together 'end to end' eases the path for those who actually know what they're doing. Along the way, I hope to gain some merchantable insights.
Allow me a little rant. I have found bullshit. Mountains of it. Much shoveling just to clear a fragile path. Bloatware frameworks. Legacy programming paradigms. Haste in place of thought. Toxic mindsets. Ballooning hype.
Real motivation comes from within. If strong enough, innovation comes more or less involuntarily. Following on from this, delegating the core conceptual thinking to others seems self-defeating.
That is not a case against delegation, but simply that if you want an idea executed as envisioned, you may have no choice but to stay in the driving seat.
Case in point? The shockingly high rate of failure of IT projects.. In fact, 75% of IT executives believe their projects are “doomed from the start.”
My creative powers seem at their peak relaxing on -say- a riverbank, walking, or in a brief moment of wakefulness in the middle of the night. Though immersion in a problem helps, rarely can they be forced.
Indeed, once in the flow, anything that distracts is unwelcome. Often it’s something banal, such as having to familiarize myself with, and evaluate, yet another technology.
In this sense, I like to think of myself as ‘Autodidact. Laird o' the Windy Waa's. Serial Failure with Attitude. Bit of a Dreamer.’..
..and will never again work for anyone else.
Space Is Big. Really Big.
By the end of any technology project, you know far more than when you first started, so there is no argument whatsoever for thinking anything other than BIG. Moreover, the best guarantee of success is not knowing what you're doing is impossible. :-)
This project is big. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist..
I seem to have been out of my comfort zone as long as I can remember. Yet, self-inflicted poverty aside, this project has been more personally rewarding than anything else I've ever put hand to. It just feels right. No matter what I come up with, there is always a straightforward means of integrating it into the overall architecture.
The roots of persistence, on the other hand? A youth spent (according to one parent 'wasted') on complex balsa models brought me patience, curiosity, tenacity and a certain pride in getting things right, and a lifetime's mountain walking has eradicated any issues with false summits. Likely of far more value than the further education paper-chase that followed..
So rather: jack of all trades, master of none, quietly stubborn but with a clear idea where to go and -given funding- no doubts about finding people with the skills and motivation to help these ideas to fruition. There has never been any doubt as to their feasibility - only of my own ability to articulate them.
Indeed, I've been careful to carry forward a list of those people who have been proven best able to help. Though not long, many are established experts in their field. I hope -with your crowd funding assistance- to bring these people together, optimize, flesh out and scale the existing, and establish simple, reusable solutions to those problems still remaining. This will provide robust templates lesser mortals -self included- can be confident of building upon.
The Seeds of an Idea
My first daydreams of a world music aggregator platform date from 20 years ago -at that time a diabolical undertaking- but it's funny how ideas follow you around.
With every passing year, it seemed more and more feasible, and I was left wondering why on earth someone didn't Just.Do.It.
Apps (certainly those associated with music theory) generally offer a dissatisfyingly fragmented view, one that -at least for me- never held much fascination. Little context. No immediacy or submersion, and little useful content. A universal dumbing-down, not just of device, but of end user.
So, on being tossed -a little too blithely and once too often- out of a stressy and unsatisfying job, and having never really given my imagination free rein, the time seemed right to give the idea a go.
The journey began with a survey of the available tools, about which I was totally clueless. Everyone's opinion differed, no two articles arrived at the same conclusion. Noise, noise and more noise - and it's only become worse.
What did catch my eye, however, was that a guy by the name of Mike Bostock at Stanford University was touting a small library - and showcasing some gobsmacking visual freedoms. At that time, he had a Google forum following of perhaps 50 or so, and was still accessible enough to be confronted with direct questions. I neither hesitated, nor looked back.
A few years later and d3.js is well estabished, sports a forest of derivatives, and has passed through several major releases. My focus has been on bending conventional music-related javascript examples to a D3 data-driven perspective, and generic D3 examples to a musical perspective.
Every success was rewarded with additional freedoms. A generic lute proved itself good as a base for modelling guitar, sitar or saz, an irish whistle for a kaval, an equal-temperament chromatic circle quickly repurposed for use with just intonation.
Having -with D3.js- had immense luck, the platform has long been at a point where those much better qualified could take over. What has proven far more difficult is persuading others of music visualisation's jaw-dropping advantages. With hundreds of defunct music notation readers and editors littering the backwaters of the internet, I suppose most punters simply see no point to it. With technologies such as Web3D / Virtual Reality and artificial intelligence in competition, they could not.be.more.wrong.
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 Current SituationA Modest Income And All Would Be Fine |
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Everything described here has been built by trial and error using well documented open source tools learned from scratch. I have thrown away much well-meaning advice simply because to accede would have brought lorryloads of bloat. In thinking things through afresh, I feel things have been kept surprisingly simple.
And it works, more or less. The odd unpredictable asynchronous behaviour. Reuse scenarios needing a little more effort. Implementation gaps of the kind most likely to turn up in the middle of a demo.
I am under no illusion over the time and effort it is going to take to get this idea off the ground. Nevertheless, I'm in no doubt whatsover that all can be done. Let's see if the day of the musical aggregator platform has arrived.
Personal Motivation
The key to making a start was perhaps the (late) realization that personal fulfillment lies not so much in own achievement as in helping others to achieve theirs. This act of giving is perhaps what really defines us. There is more, far more than enough to go round. Move too far away from giving, and everything -literally everything- falls apart.
The other side of the coin was being driven nuts by stress. For a good number of years I commuted for around an hour by bike, hit the floor running every morning, kept running until the metaphorical evening whistle blew, and biked back home.
In particular, working in support I came to find I couldn't even remember what I'd been working on the week before. Burnout programming, par for the course, bye to that. So yes, health and wellbeing played a role.
What has happened is that I have relinquished the stress and taken up largely unprepared, reflective thinking. That is all. I get more done in a couple of hours at the riverside with nothing to hand but a (paper) notepad than I do in a day at the screen. And that consistently.
A good deal of my music and dance motivation derived from strong and early identification: on one hand from breezy, peat-smokey, sea-bound memories from Northern Ireland and Eire, and later years of community dance and session music of various forms back in Scotland, followed by Balkan and Klezmer in Germany and Switzerland.
It is thanks largely, though, to the sometimes euphoric, improvised Scottish Ceilidh and it's fast-paced partner change, close contact, exhilaration and craic that I even found my musical feet.
Above all, it made me aware of the tight bond between player's skills and dancer's enjoyment.
Perhaps of central importance, however, was my knack for adopting stray instruments for which there was little or no written (later internet) guidance. The Irish concertina is a case in point. Until very recently, the only way to learn was to go to Ireland..
One by one the gaps are being bridged, but -given the mathematics underlying and unifying music- it was clear the platform should be bound by these shared properties into one simple whole. Underlying the configuration workflows is a simple, interlocking mesh of arrays (D3's fodder of choice) with extent delineated by musical properties such as number of notes to the octave (ultimately the system's counting base). Should one array dimension be changed, it can quickly be reflected in all the others. This allows us to keep note names, pitches, color schemes, and positioning in step during (for example) a move from one music system to another.
There are at least three recognisable broad types of traditional music player:
- o the slightly self-conscious, workshop-attending enthusiast
- o the virtuoso, family-pedigreed native player
- o the career-oriented, further-educated professional
As with all of society's innumerable layers, there is good contact but little migration between each. In earlier times, simply moving abroad removed many barriers. Nowadays not so easy.
In the Edinburgh of the 70's, it was possible to dance on pretty much any night of the week. After a lonely first year as a student in the city, discovery of the underground ceilidh scene was a godsend. Even now, I'm every bit as enthusiastic.
There were upheavals, some directly challenging to the authenticity of the dance. Most memorable? A wave of break-dance which exploded into the 80's Edinburgh ceilidh-dance scene. The fast side slip of a traditional eightsome reel was countered by central break dance spins in the opposite direction. The dance equivalent of a circus joyride.
A mould was broken, and -at least for me- tradition gave way to a search for the essence of musical community - and the submersion of self. Being one with the crowd, driving the craic but at the same time just a hand and pair of eyes to make contact with. Sometimes that contact blossoms into talk and friendship. Sometimes you sense someone's need to be there but to be left alone.
More recently, this journey has been eclipsed by the recognition that the simple mechanisms underlying our sense of wellbeing and community are being systematically eroded, stolen and repurposed - by investors, technologists and stage-bound attention hogs.
For music and dance in particular, though, by streaming.
- o no process of identification
- o no link to original land and people
- o an increasingly confusing soup of styles
- o music as commodity of next-to-zero value
- o exposing toxic lifestyles, values and role models
- o driven by commercial rather than community interests
No identification? No motivation. This is the death of hand-in-hand, eye-to-eye contact and community. And it is an epidemic.
Fight fire with fire. With (whatever society's righteous, leisured preachers of work ethic say) universal basic income inevitable, there is going to be a renaissance in social music. Perhaps browser and VR technology can ease access and shorten the path to musical mastery. Nevertheless, this is something to use with care. Without community, our lives cease to have meaning. Left in the company of computers alone, ultimately we get ill.
Learning Progression
I share a strong curiosity about our cultural heritage with people around me. Making sense of it has, however, always been a predominantly visual process.Here, then, my own learning or development progression, with an attempt at linking them to the various music theory challenges encountered en route.
There is nothing special to this: it was curiosity-led by the immediate needs of musical tension, authenticity or understanding. Were I to do it again with the benefit of hindsight, no doubt it would look much more structured - and considerably shorter.
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| My Learning Progression: From the Ground Up |
To my mind, the only perhaps unusual thing here are the number of instruments. This has it's roots in the chase after musical tension.
Instruments are tools, their handling and timbre decisive. Be it the electrifying brilliance of the mandolin, the solid stomp of an accordion bass, the slippery motoring of Irish concertina, the fluid bird warble or haunting strain of whistle, the flat, syncopated pulse of rhythm guitar or gunshot precision of darabukka, I always found it easy to be seduced by sound.
Nevertheless, there was always another field of tension: between the wish to be able to 'simply play' and yet really understand the underlying musicultural context. I wanted, for example, to understand modes in traditional music, but from where - and how?
In all honesty, I couldn't really be bothered to trawl 'classical' music theory textbooks for what would probably be inauthentic insights. Like many, then, I hovered, severely compromised, somewhere far short of technical and intellectual mastery.
The motivation to address music visualisation stems, then, from these hopes:
o visualisation will provide much faster access to and understanding of underlying musical and cultural structures.
o a combination of audio, sight-reading, and visualisations is enough to constitute 'immersive' learning
o mimic traditional, P2P (person-to-person or face-to-face) teaching and learning (as was exercised in countless cultures prior to the arrival of formal music training) with a state-of-the-art graphical toolset.
What was accessible only to advanced learners through many a tedious library visit can now, thanks to data visualisation, be presented in a simple, graphical format and absorbed and understood in minutes.
This will, I hope, bring across-the-board improvements in context, speed, accessibility, immediacy, information content, association, comparison and clarity, and draw learners at all levels into contributing to each other's social wellbeing.
Now
I feel another rant approaching. All efficiency gains over the last 30 years have been completely eclipsed by the rise in production. Our 'major global issues'? Corporate sources of revenue.We've been groomed in lifestyle expectations far, far beyond the planet's means. If I have a secondary goal, it is that people ditch the material in favor of each other's company, the social, the experiential.
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| Complex World |
I feel a great sadness at the scale of cultural and community collapse since the arrival of the internet. Technocrats talk of connectivity and global community, but it's entirely virtual, a chimera. Hand and eye contact are infinitely warmer.
Small Mercies
Happily, ceilidh dances still exist. Having learned through assimilation rather than workshop and study, I accept that in a raw first encounter, they can be seem challenging. Yet for earlier generations, these were routine, effortless and largely taken for granted. All that and not a workshop in sight.Faced with a band, a caller and a set of strangers, absolute beginners find themselves on a knife-edge between confusion and euphoria. A dry run, then dance. Challenge and surprise are, so to say, built in.
In the end all just hot, sticky, mindless fun. A sea of whirling faces, and freedom from self. Mostly it works. Sometimes it doesn't. Who cares? Good craic.
Values
Values probably play a pretty central role, long manifesting themselves in acts of unilateral stubbornness:- Coming from Scotland (a long-suffering folk with a strong sense of unity and justice), have long favoured the social over the egoistic.
- Since a climate summit in Edinburgh in the mid- to late 70s and in which strong evidence for a coming 'high tour of all weather systems' was laid out, a vocal (if persistently frustrated) climate change siren.
- Lifelong cyclist and non-driver - even spending some four years commuting two and a half hours a day by bike and in all weathers.
- Routined, easy-going all-weather jogger (with it: almost never ill).
- Free time spent in the mountains, or on what few coastal bike routes remain.
- No TV, vehement ad-blocker (as all, drowning in debilitating surfeit).
Footnote
Chief among remaining desires is to be anything other than shackled to a laptop. I hope this project will soon take on an vibrant, open source life of it's own.What you see here is dedicated to my love and former soul mate Tina, for whom this path proved too stony. With the best will in the world, fear destroys all.
Nevertheless, it this project helps others to find their mother lode of wellbeing, I will be content.
Comments, questions and (especially) critique welcome.