Jaron Lanier Talk @ UCB September 21, 2005

The Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium
of UC Berkeley's Center for New Media Presents:

Can Soulful Music Survive Digital Epistemology?
Jaron Lanier, Artist and Musician,

*Wed*, 21 Sept, 7:30-9pm: UC Berkeley, 160 Kroeber Hall

All ATC Lectures are free and open to the public.
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This lecture is dedicated to the memory of Robert Moog.

Lanier feels that many people have the wrong idea about "Digital Information" and how to use it, and that a tough reassessment of computation could get us unstuck so we can have new musical styles and be soulful again.According to Lanier, pop music in America is in a bizarre state. This is the first time since electrification that a new musical style hasn't appeared with a new generation. Hip hop, weird attitude rock, and so on, are in many bases the music of the grandparents of today's undergraduates. Meanwhile, the term "Soulful" has been applied to music more frequently since the rise of digital metaphors and computational challenges to the very idea of "Soul." "Soulful" music is typically pre-digital, with old blues recordings being the canonical examples; New music described as "Soulful" is usually nostalgic. Making everything fungible gradually reduces the differences between things. This is what happens when all music is digitized, easily available, and remixable. Shouldn't ideas, including musical ideas, be anti-entropic? Is remixing enough?

Digital objects have more explicit boundaries than other objects. Do we have enough self-knowledge to know where the boundaries of music are? A clarinet is made of matter but a computer is made of ideas, and ideas might never be good enough for music making. Do computers confine us to eternally re-digesting the ideas of programmers, even when we are the programmers? Definitions of music and personhood tend to gain and lose transcendental components together. Does attitude about "Soulfulness" matter? His talk will include brief musical examples and performances.

http://atc.berkeley.edu/