Subject: Re: copyright and intellectual property
From: Damian Stewart (damian@frey.co.nz)
Date: Sun Mar 26 2006 - 07:50:24 EST
Dugal McKinnon wrote:
> The reductive answer to the "silence" of the "academic music
> community" on copyright is quite likely that this purported
> community remains tied to older (19thC) notion of what a
> creator of music is; we're talking composers, who like authors
> of novels, would like to be regarded as "sole authors" of what
> they produce.
Does the concept of 'sole author' ever make sense, though? No-one
composes in a vacuum. Personally, I'm moved to make music that is almost
always a reaction to the music I hear around me -- in fact, the reason I
started making music is simply because everything I listened to was
disappointing in some way or another. In a sense, everything I make has
been authored by the world acting through me as much as by me.
> Auteur theory and petit bourgeois psychology aside,
> this is a good way to ensure you can profit, in terms of capital
> of one sort or another, from what you do creatively.
I think this is rapidly ceasing to be true. Why would I go out and buy
CDs when there are musicians giving away their work for free, legally
and legitimately, over the internet? What's more, by and large the work
given away for free is as good as, if not better than, work I could buy
in the shops.
> in all likelyhood Sven
> König would like to be identified as the author of
> sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ!, even if the software itself is a regurgitation
> machine streaming directly from the sewer/stomach of the beast
> known as pop cutlure...
Here where it gets interesting for me. König is certainly the
owner/author of the /software/. But I would argue that it is not the
software that is being put on show here, any more than the violin might
be considered on show when a virtuoso violinist performs. Rather, what
is being demonstrated is a kind of technical proficiency with the
machinery (instrument). Yes, König could use public-domain video (what
little of that there is, and most if not all of it less than 70 years
old), or he could make his own content; but this would be the modern-day
equivalent of not letting a 15th century travelling minstrel play folk
melodies -- it's just nonsensical.
König is playing our culture the way that a 15th century travelling
minstrel might have played their culture. He is not an author in this
picture but a performer. That leads us to further questions such as who
owns the IP in a recording of a sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ! concert; but given as
how the technology is so clearly built as a performance tool, it could
be said that a recording of the concert is corollary to the idea.
> Personally, my feeling is that
> sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ! is an interesting process, but I prefer a more
> hands-on mode of engagement with the culturesphere - pace Oswald - as!
What could be more hands-on that beatboxing or screaming the noises you
want to hear? ('Concrete poetry,' König describes it as at the start of
the video.) What's on display here is less the sound->database->clip
process than it is the vocalisation -> (sound->database->clip) ->
screen+speakers -> vocalisation feedback loop -- this is looking
remarkably like any other kind of performance practise to me, much less
composition.
> this allows for a more interesting hermeneutic interation with
> the objects at hand.
König "can't can't can't" -> M.C. Hammer clip saying "can't" over and
over again? It's not a particularly 'deep' interpretation of the text
but it's wonderfully postmodern in its surfaceosity. Worth noting at
this stage that "Can't Touch This" is based almost wholly on a loop from
the Rick James recording "Super Freak", although to be fair Hammer does
credit Rick James as co-author on his release. (With the MTV-driven
ubiquity of the M.C. Hammer recording it seems unnecessary for König to
explicitly credit Hammer as co-author, I think.)
> And to knowlingly miss the point,
> sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ! might be more interesting musically if it was freed
> from the grid/lattice of step sequencing... (the parallels to minimalism
> seem close and quickly bore)
It struck me while I was watching that, particularly toward the end of
the 'performance' part of the video, and especially with the Smells Like
Teen Spirit-derived section, the grid basically collapsed, and it was
more like listening to a kind of directed granular synthesis (which is
what the system functionally is) than to grid-based music. Moreover, I'm
certain that with a few tiny tweaks the reliance on grids could be
completely removed from the system.
-- f r e y live music with computers http://www.frey.co.nz
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