An music producer perfectly at home mixing sounds
Open source developments in music are leading the industry in a new direction. An increasing number of creators, for example, are building custom instruments and software, then choosing to make the products open source, or sharable in source code format, which allows other creators to produce derivative works free of charge for non-commercial use.
“While open sourcing has been happening on a small scale among academics for some time, it converted over the past few years and is now growing mainstream,” says Ajay Kapur, professor and director of music technology at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), pointing to a new movement of electronic artists seeking to create unique sounds and names for themselves on social media. “It’s been really amazing, there has been so much open source stuff happening in the industry driven by the maker movement.”
Kapur explains that with electronic bits like microcontrollers available – tutorials included – online, artists can access parts and download code to create new, unique instruments and sounds. Artists are strategically featuring code on their websites to drive web traffic, he says, just as they are working to enhance the role that audio plays in enhancing augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) experiences.
“You kind of see it with AI (artificial intelligence),” Kapur explains. “Instead of charging for their AI, Google released everything open sourced. Who would have imagined…it has changed the landscape of AI, and we’re seeing the same type of movement in the arts as well.”
The new music sharing culture will ultimately decrease friction between creators and consumers while offering artists opportunities to build more viable careers, says Nicole d'Avis, managing director of the Berklee Institute for Creative Entrepreneurship at Berklee College of Music.
“At first this was a foreign, controversial concept for the music industry. But other industries have proven that (open source) is the way to go – major players see us as an ally to take their technology-heavy standards and make them usable by more people,” says d’Avis, also an operating committee member of non-profit Open Music Initiative (OMI) that Berklee College of Music and the MIT Connection Science launched in 2016 to advance open standards for musical rights owner identification, educate creators about intellectual property rights and coordinate and promote innovation across the music industry.
BOSTON, MA - MARCH 17: The Berklee Performance Center building at 136 Massachusetts Avenue, right, ... [+]
Comprised of leading academic institutions, music and media industry organizations, creators, technologists and other experts, OMI is focused on building application programming interface (API) specifications that enable industry platform connectivity. Opportunities exist to simplify the ways in which music rights owners are identified and compensated, d’Avis explains, which ultimately creates sustainable business models for new and established artists.
OMI is developing an open network called RAIDAR: Rights & Asset Information in Decentralized, Authoritative Repositories to support the three pillars of open music: open protocols (to streamline and expedite attributions and correct payments), education (on intellectual property and artist practices) and innovation (to grow the pie for the entire music industry). Scheduled to launch in June, the system will offer student creators a place to upload their high-quality music files before rolling out into larger markets targeting individual artists, indie labels and start-up operations. The architecture stands out in the industry, d’Avis says, because it was developed “by artists, for artists” to better monetize assets and maintain control over their work.
“This is a way for Berklee to show what is possible – it is an extension of the architecture of the future of the music industry,” d’Avis says. “We will turn it over to the music industry, not for data or profit, but to begin building solutions, and that is when it will get interesting.”
OMI operating committee member George Howard, also a professor of music business and management at Berklee College of Music, and a contributor to Forbes.com, says that the travel industry serves as a prime example of a market that was revolutionized by opening data and linking databases together to supply information to travel-related websites.
“The music industry does not have a similar analogy, and that is what we are trying to build here,” explained Howard. “We believe in the bottom-up, artist-centric approach – it’s about helping artists create sustainable careers on their own terms.”
