Pantelis Vassilakis – UCLA School of Music – Nov. 2016

p a n t e l i s v a s s i l a k i sAcousticsLab.org

Impact of Digital Technologies on the Creation, Perception, and Evaluation of Sound and Media Arts

Pantelis Vassilakis – UCLA School of Music – Nov. 2016

Black Mirror – “Nosedive”

Kobalt Music Promo

Pantelis Vassilakis – UCLA School of Music – Nov. 2016

Digital Technologies:

Impact on Sound and Media Arts

Key questions• uniformity of representation vs distinctiveness of modality

• convergent knowledge/skills needed to address ongoing changes to: conceptualization / craft / analysis / meaning of sound & related arts and sciences

• inter-disciplinary collaborations within academia

Pantelis Vassilakis – UCLA School of Music – Nov. 2016

Digital Technologies:

Impact on Sound and Media Arts

Context & Caveats• creators’ and listeners’ positions as distinct

• business / marketing & science / technology dimensions

• power & financial dimensions

Pantelis Vassilakis – UCLA School of Music – Nov. 2016

Digital Technologies:

Impact on Sound and Media Arts

Modified questions• What aspects of and approaches to the experienced digital revolution can support

empowerment versus exploitation of music creators and listeners?

• How much of the responsibility for such empowerment lays on the creators andlisteners themselves and how can educational institutions support them?

Pantelis Vassilakis – UCLA School of Music – Nov. 2016

Business / Marketing

Who is benefiting? • Distribution services (Middlemen); e.g.:

iTunes, Apple Music, Spotify, InGrooves

• Record Labels

• Creators / Artists

• Listeners [consumers]

“Value Gap”

Pantelis Vassilakis – UCLA School of Music – Nov. 2016

Business / Marketing

Minimalism• less ownership – more experiences

• human / material / time resources freed

• Who benefits?Those who “own” whatever everyone else is “renting”On-Demand Streaming (Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play, Amazon, Pandora…)

Negotiate with rights owners (Universal, Sony, EMI, Warner: >70% of rights)

• Money Markets (FED, ECB, IMF – 10 banks >65% of market capitalization)Negative Interest: money as “trash”

Pantelis Vassilakis – UCLA School of Music – Nov. 2016

Business / Marketing

The bottom line• ~$0.005 - $0.008 / on-demand stream

worldwide (<$0.002 for free accounts)

• $0.17 / radio stream

• ~$0.09 or 10% / download (90% / download for independent, user uploaded work)

• Who benefits?

Pantelis Vassilakis – UCLA School of Music – Nov. 2016

Business / Marketing

more

Pantelis Vassilakis – UCLA School of Music – Nov. 2016

Business / Marketing

Alternative Pathways• YouTube clicks incorporated to Billboard / Nielsen charts (early 2013)

• Twitter Real-Time (2014 emerging artists)

• May enter charts in non-traditional ways

• Private agreement

• Registration with US Copyright; BMI / ASCAP; SoundExchange / AARC; Soundscan (ISRC code) - (or via an admin publishing company)

• Radio play• User-uploaded (safe harbor) vs. Radio (Federally regulated)

vs. on-demand (private agreements with labels) – “Value-gap” – under attack

• Radiohead’s 2007 “In Rainbows”

Pantelis Vassilakis – UCLA School of Music – Nov. 2016

Business / Marketing

Alternative Pathways• Licensing (value of fractional vs. 100% licensing) – new legislation and resistance

• Must explore all licensing avenues

• Next Big Sound consolidates analytics used for creator/brand pairings (patronage)

• Millions of available pieces and the illusion of choice/discovery in live streaming

• Pandora and NBS – Attracting new artists? 21st Century A&R? – Pandora & discovery

• NBS Approach - 2016

Pantelis Vassilakis – UCLA School of Music – Nov. 2016

Business / Marketing

Alternative Pathways• Kobalt Music 2000: 1-stop-shop for publishing deal management, online activity, &

associated royalties (The Economist 07/2016) Algorithms that track more/deeper to increase royalties (+25%)

• DistroKid (2013): focus on new and emerging artists (no composition royalties collection)

• CD baby - DIttO - Loudr (moved distribution to CD baby) - MondoTunesReverbNation - Symphonic - Tunecore - Zimbalam

• Usage tracking and rights registration (collection) Music ReportsSongLilySongTrustTune Registry

Outline at Ari’s Take

Pantelis Vassilakis – UCLA School of Music – Nov. 2016

Business / Marketing

Alternative Pathways• Entertainment Law / Music Publishing

• Self-Management for Artists – Marketing

• Basic HTML / Java / Python

• Statistics – Big Data – Digital Accounting

• Live Music - Key source of artist revenue

• Consistently growing revenue (>$6bln) – willingness to pay for the experience

• Vibrant local music scenes Vs. large festivals (financial models / noise ordinances / bots)

• Value of a scene – Sandbox for sound/image/brand crafting – Physical contact

Pantelis Vassilakis – UCLA School of Music – Nov. 2016

Technology / Science

Digital Revolution• Creators freed from past space / time / resource boundaries

• Cloud collaboration tools AVID; Discover; Blend; Gobbler; Kompoz; Splice; Ohm Studio …

• Sample Libraries: new sounds, atmospheres, layered effects & contours Sample LogicComprehensive recordings of unusual instruments – sophisticated arpeggiators Soundiron– cloud-based (Soundly)

• Project studios (e.g. by WSDG)

• Drawbacks

Poor substitutes for analogue resources

One-key “combo” patterns flooding the cloud - Beats & Instrumentals for sale

Low upper-level activity in research & development

Henry Rollins (2:22; 4:00)

Pantelis Vassilakis – UCLA School of Music – Nov. 2016

Technology / Science

Augmented and Virtual Reality• Anticipated explosion of resources / little incorporation of immersive sound technologies

• How do create, capture, post, and distribute audio for such contexts?

• How do we pair head-movement-tracking to individual HRTFs (key to sonic immersion)?e.g. adaptive audio signal processing (C Kyriakakis, USC; S Gerstel, UCLA)

• Beyond powerful processors and clever algorithms - mapping of binary digit manipulations onto sonic manipulations – Acoustics; Psychoacoustics; Music Cognition

• Creative process Vs. a work’s aesthetic field of possibilities Vs. technology & underlying science

• Digital technologies; mapping algorithms; sonic structures & modalities beyond hearing

• Uniformity of representation across perceptual domains and works – differentiation?

Pantelis Vassilakis – UCLA School of Music – Nov. 2016

Uniformity of Digital Representations

Pantelis Vassilakis – UCLA School of Music – Nov. 2016

Graphic Representations of Sound

Pantelis Vassilakis – UCLA School of Music – Nov. 2016

Graphic Representations of Sound

Pantelis Vassilakis – UCLA School of Music – Nov. 2016

Graphic Representations of Sound (signals)

Pantelis Vassilakis – UCLA School of Music – Nov. 2016

Graphic Representations of Sound (spectra)

Pantelis Vassilakis – UCLA School of Music – Nov. 2016

Nature and limits of representation

Sound signals/spectra are graphic representations of sound waves, focusing on select properties of sound waves, based on questions of interest

No representation captures all aspects of a phenomenon represented

Representations also include aspects that do not belong to the phenomenon represented

Representation reification

belief that a representation can stand in for the represented phenomenon in all contexts

expectation that manipulating symbols maps perfectly on manipulating the phenomena these symbols point to

mistaking compatibility among representations for equivalence

Pantelis Vassilakis – UCLA School of Music – Nov. 2016

Brain Representations of Sound

Pantelis Vassilakis – UCLA School of Music – Nov. 2016

Brain Representations of Sound

Cognitive Processes & Brain-Impulse-Set Differentiation

• Sound preservation, restoration, and masteringSound Directions Toolkit (Harvard & Indiana University)

• Audio data compression

Pantelis Vassilakis – UCLA School of Music – Nov. 2016

Using convergent • representations• methodologies• analytical tools

Uniformity of digital representation across stimuli

versus

Distinctiveness of • compression algorithms among stimuli• cognitive processes among senses

Pantelis Vassilakis – UCLA School of Music – Nov. 2016

Creative control of how sounds “sound”

Psychoacoustics

Cognitive Psychology of Sound

Digital implementations of advances in psychoacoustics and cognitive psychology

Pandora – AllMusic – SoundHoundMusicBrainz – Shazam

Pantelis Vassilakis – UCLA School of Music – Nov. 2016

Creators need to become business managers, scientists, and technologists

Creators’ Responsibility – Education’s Duty

Educational Institutions need to formally facilitate access to and curricular integration of all the diverse types of knowledge needed for creators to succeed