✘ The extended musicking mind as emerging tech
And: Lecture on enshittification; Everyone's a sellout now; Weird magic of digital folklore; Overheard at Davos; The power of thinking outside the brain
Hi all,
A quick note before today’s newsletter with two milestones. 1) MUSIC x is 8 years old. It’s exactly 8 years ago today that Bas sent out the first MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE. 2) We’ve hit 6k subscribers over the past week.
Pretty crazy, right? A heartfelt thank you to everyone who reads this newsletter, shares it, takes inspiration from it, comments on it, likes it. Now, onto our topic for today: the brain.
Lots of love, Maarten
Humans are social animals, we love to play together, work together, live together. In the past few years, scientists have explored the effects on and role of our brain of all this doing-together. On the back of the pandemic and enforced lockdowns, swathes of society have explored, and still explore, the best way of working together remotely. This is also evidenced in music, most obviously through online collaborative creator tools and experiments around avatars, livestreaming, and virtual worlds. By understanding what happens on the level of our brains when we interact together as humans in IRL situations, we can better understand what new technologies should do to aid our creative endeavours. In other words, what is our extended musicking mind and how does that translate into new, emerging technologies?
fNIRS, poker, violins
There are continuous advancements when it comes to brain scanning and imaging. One topic that scientists explore is how the brain reacts to social interaction, classified as social cognitive neuroscience. These scientists use a method called functional near-infrared spectroscopy, or fNIRS. The big breakthrough from this technology is the relative ease with which two, or more, people’s brains can be scanned while they interact together. This has been done, for example, in poker games. Matthew Piva and his colleagues found that human-to-human interaction varies greatly to human-to-computer in a poker game. Put simply, there’s a certain neural, brain-based connectivity that happens when people compete against each other in a face-to-face game. One of the areas that lights up with activity when faced with a human versus a non-human opponent is related to empathy. This then leads to people making different choices when they’re faced with a computer opponent versus a human. Empathy in competition, yes.
Of course, this brain-connecting has also been researched through music playing. The first such study is one focused on violinists, specifically focusing on the roles of leader and follower. It turns out that musicians working together in an ensemble setting have high inter-brain connectivity. The leader, or first violinist, doesn’t just use audible and embodied cues but also a kind of brain cues. Similarly, the second violinist, or follower, shows all kinds of brain activity that means they’re put under quite a lot of demand. More importantly, those same areas of the brain are vital for cooperation.
The musicking mind
What’s striking about all the research papers around fNIRS is that most of them focus on the excitement of being able to study people acting in sync or working together or competing against each other. What this research tells me, is that musicking - music as a verb, a process, instead of a noun, an object - extends beyond our brain. It’s exactly when we commune and interact and play together that our musicking mind comes alive. We see this in a dichotomy visible in our current music culture. On the one hand, there’s more and more bedroom producers and singer-songwriters who do it all themselves. They operate alone and extend their minds only through an instrument or a machine. On the other hand, we see more and more teams of songwriters and producers - people operating in groups. Most of it still mediated by technology.
Similarly, we know - we feel - that there’s no substitute for a live concert experience. The bodily sensations, the communal experiences cannot be replaced when we exist as displaced humans. And that is okay, such experiences should explore different angles. Anne McKinnon, CEO of the virtual world platform Ristband, wrote about her experience of ABBA Voyage:
“While the production was unquestionably futuristic, I did not feel that amazing sensation of experiencing a performance from a physically present artist. However, should we even compare the two? Will virtual performances continue to mimic real ones, or will they become distinctly different in experience and format?”
In this case, asking the question is answering it - the two should not be the same. An avatar, a livestream, a virtual world will not be the same experience as one where we sit, dance, listen, vibe together in the same space. And that is okay. Understanding how our brain loves connecting with other brains, though, can help us find ways to judge what a virtual experience should do. It should be musicking, it should be active and participatory over lean-back and individual.
The extended musicking mind as emerging tech
We don’t think alone, we don’t just think through introspection. Instead, we think together and with the spaces around us. Any sonic experience that is mediated should heed this. Imagine how connections can be established and how what we know about how we connect through our brains can help set the connective tissues. Emerging technologies can feel the same as doing a test in school - there’s no room for bringing in outside help. You’re not allowed to use that calculator to help you explore what an NFT or an avatar or augmented reality can actually do. And here’s why emerging tech takes such a long time to find scale - that calculator is another human. Our brain will understand something new better if it can extend into the brain of another human. This is why we need to argue for artist-driven explorations of new tech, not tech-driven explorations of new use cases. It’s not the tech that allows us to extend our mind, it’s the musicking that does that.
LINKS
🧠 The extended mind - The power of thinking outside the brain (Annie Paul Murphy)
“Our culture insists that the brain is the sole locus of thinking, a cordoned-off space where cognition happens. This book argues otherwise: it holds that the mind constructs our thought processes from the resources available outside the brain. These resources include the feelings and movements of our bodies; the physical spaces in which we learn and work; and the other minds with which we interact—our classmates, colleagues, teachers, supervisors, friends.”
✘ The above article has been on my mind while reading this book, so I wanted to give a special highlight to it here.
💩 My McLuhan lecture on enshittification (Cory Doctorow)
“But in case you want to use enshittification in a more precise, technical way, let's examine how enshittification works. It's a three stage process: First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”
✘ I could be considered a fan of the term ‘enshittification’, which seemed to rule some parts of the Internet I frequent a lot last year. This lecture by Cory is a great intro to the term and how it’s developing for him. He also does a great job of describing the cure to this horrible disease in this lecture.
🤑 Everyone’s a sellout now (Rebecca Jennings)
“Because self-promotion sucks. It is actually very boring and not that fun to produce TikTok videos or to learn email marketing for this purpose. Hardly anyone wants to “build a platform;” we want to just have one. This is what people sign up for now when they go for the American dream — working for yourself and making money doing what you love. The labor of self-promotion or platform-building or audience-growing or whatever our tech overlords want us to call it is uncomfortable; it is by no means guaranteed to be effective; and it is inescapable unless you are very, very lucky.”
✘ Another great probe into the current state of the creator economy. Rebecca highlights what I spoke about last week - the artist, the creator, is responsible when something flops because they didn’t find the audience. Those audiences are on the major social platforms, but they’re not permanent, nor should the whole system rest on self-promotion. There’s other options, like the cozy web.
👾 UDO: The Weird Magic of Digital Folkore (Alessandro Y. Longo)
“What is so mysterious about games? Each videogame player can precisely define what Red Dead Redemption 2 is, distinguish it from Persona 5, and not confuse it with Baldur’s Gate 3. Videogames would seem, at first glance, to be objects of consumption like many others. At the same time, many videogames - certainly the three mentioned - are considered first-rate artistic works. They are not just a simple commodity or another digital service.”
✘ If you follow this newsletter, you know that I care deeply about the intersection of music and video games. This piece goes into the ‘glitch’ and the importance of it as a revelatory moment. UDO stands for unidentified digital object. Read the piece, and you’ll want to explore so many of those games again. At the same time, it helps us understand the role a glitch can play in shifting the rules.
👂 Overheard at Davos (Shain Shapiro)
“Therefore, if we advocate to increase the use of music as a social good, we should do so within a framework that ensures it can also be an economy. Making music when faced with extreme challenges can support physical and mental health. It being listened to, and then money flowing back to the creator, as a result, is not just added value. It is just as important.”
✘ Get music into every town, province, state, and nation’s policy and life will get better for a very broad section of society. Shain will keep advocating for this, and so should you.
MUSIC
A new release by Burial always excites me. This one is a bit different. Dreamfear feels like a different type of journey. Burial broke through with journeys centred around sensations such as being on the way back from a rave. Here, we have a journey through rave, there’s so much happening here but Burial stitches it all together through rhythm. It’s a trip, have a listen.