OPEN SYNTHWAVE

Written By **Life Patterns** and **Jonny Fallout** *[Photo:* *by Joseph Pearson on Unsplash*]

On Music, Openness, and Innovation

Music innovation is moving at a fever pace — whether it’s the evolution of delivery systems, the software for creating music, or the business models that are being broken even as they’re being made. In fact, music may be the creative industry most disrupted by the digital revolution. We have tremendous power, as artists, at our fingertips now from DAWs to software instruments from distribution platforms to media channels. But the ways in which we work are often still stuck in the 20th century. This is not unusual, of course. It takes a long time for industries to adopt new tools and ways of thinking. And, we’re in the middle of music industry upheaval.

So, where do we go to discover new ways of thinking and working? A familiar quote from cyberpunk godfather William Gibson, is that “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” Cross-pollination is a powerful technique for stimulating innovation — taking ideas from one area of creative endeavor and applying them to others. In borrowing techniques from other industries, we can reap their benefits. And one of the most powerful ideas driving innovation in software, science, and a host of others is open source. Open work can speed creation. Sharing can generate not just new ideas but also build community.

So, what does it mean to be open? In the world of software, open source means that the underlying code is available to modify, build upon, and share freely. For instance, the foundational tech protocols that underpin the Web, like HTTP, are open source. In the practice of open science, knowledge, from data to materials to code, is shared through collaborative networks with the purpose of improving the efficiency and increasing the reproducibility of scientific research. Game developers have long understood the power in open development, baring the creative process for all to see. John Carmack used an early Internet protocol to share a daily log of tasks, along with snippets of code, opinion pieces and observations. Complete archives are available online to this day, including on GitHub. Crowdfunded games like Broken Age had notoriously open development cycles, with fans being given access to regular updates and insight into the process.

Opensource.com discusses the open approach to creative work in this way:

“The term originated in the context of software development to designate a specific approach to creating computer programs. Today, however, "open source" designates a broader set of values—what we call "the open source way." Open source projects, products, or initiatives embrace and celebrate principles of open exchange, collaborative participation, rapid prototyping, transparency, meritocracy, and community-oriented development.”

In a lot of important ways, music already has the underpinnings of open source: the melodies, the traditions, the theory, the culture are all part of a framework, an expansive vocabulary that we build on as our starting point. In retrowave and related genres, that vocabulary also includes the sounds, riffs, musical references and atmosphere of the ‘80s.

We can see elements of openness across the music industry, particularly in remixes, mashups, and sampling that permeates dance music and hip hop culture. For example, in 2015, Converse (yes, the famed sneaker company) introduced Rubber Tracks Sample Library — no cost, royalty free loops recorded by various bands and musicians at their Brooklyn, NY studio — and encouraged artists to build the loops into songs. Well-known electronic acts like RJD2 and Com Truise as well as a host of producers, DJs, and electronic musicians participated in the project, which while clearly a marketing effort for Converse, was also an interesting experiment in community building and collaborative digital music making.

Artists across genres have incorporated open practice into their music to build community. Trent Reznor famously made the tracks and stems for his Nine Inch Nails album, “The Slip” and “Year Zero” available for other artists to remix under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 US) license. Premiere synthwave band, The Midnight, offers stems of their songs for use in remixes, in a non-commercial context. And, Berlin-based indie synthwave artist, Neon Deflector, publishes his music under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license which allows other artists to share and adapt his tracks, like this one, “Outpost X”, for any purpose, even commercially, as long as the appropriate credit is given. “Once you create something original, that work is automatically protected by law. By using a Creative Commons license, you don't take away your legal rights or ownership — it remains your property. However, with a license, you can grant permissions to use the intellectual property in specific ways,” Neon Deflector explains.

*Trent Reznor made the tracks and stems for his Nine Inch Nails album, “The Slip” available to remix under a Creative Commons license.*

Neon Deflector describes some of the reasons he releases his music with an open license and the reach it has given him: “My songs have been used in a variety of ways so far. It's a wonderful feeling to listen to your own sounds in a big SpaceX documentary, as background music to discussions about meme origins, or even in videos about sports cars and urban buildings around the world. The songs thus gain a dimension that I could never have achieved myself. I regularly get comments and positive feedback on my music because someone in this world has used it in the context of their video,” he says.

“I think that above all, you should be aware that once a license has been granted, it cannot be taken back. So if the next movie blockbuster makes millions while your music is playing — don't get angry about it (not that that would ever be a real scenario for me...), but enjoy the reach you achieved.”

“Overall, my music — no matter how it is licensed and used — will always be my music. It's my feelings, my thoughts and it's my work. If a license helps me reach more listeners and gives the songs a life of their own — then that's an asset I love.”

Open Synthwave Concepts

The underpinnings of openness are already present in digital music and culture, but to build new ways of working that extend beyond experimentation into common practice, we’ll need to draw upon and build on the tenets that support open source in other fields.

Open source is powerful because:

It’s distributed and easy to find
It’s battle-tested by thousands, sometimes millions of people
It’s constantly revised and improved upon by the people that use it the most
It can be copied, changed, re-shaped and re-shared by anyone

Open synthwave, then, would operate by sharing both the accumulated knowledge of processes and tools, and the building blocks that can be reused, re-shaped.

Sharing Your Knowledge

Musicians love to talk about their craft. Ask anyone that’s ever approached one with questions about their process, gear or software. However, the ways in which this knowledge is shared tend to be either ad-hoc or monetized. There’s nothing inherently wrong with either approach, but they don’t lend themselves to the type of collaboration that thrives in software development.

So, how do you share that knowledge? Social media is a powerful tool for engaging with peers in a public forum. Knowledge is accrued and spread in that fashion. But, this presents a few issues.

First, searching social media for previously asked questions/answers is cumbersome at best, impossible at worst. In the field of software development, there are entire platforms, like Stack Overflow, dedicated to facilitating the transfer of knowledge in a way that’s accessible at a later date. It’s a difficult problem with difficult and often imperfect solutions.

Second, it becomes hard to build on that knowledge because it is ephemeral and formless. The creation of an album is an incredible journey. It can be personal, difficult, full of triumphs and letdowns, moments of inspiration alongside periods of creative drought. Musicians tend to share bits and pieces of that process, be it snippets of WIP music, threads about a particular revelation that made a song “click”, or even how they walked away from music altogether for a few days to watch movies, cook, play video games.

These flashes of insight are wonderful. They help you understand the person behind the music, which in turn contextualizes the music and enhances it. But they are only flashes. Try to put them together to get a clear picture of the journey that leads to the final album you hold in your proverbial hands and you might feel like the protagonist from Memento, lost in a sea of disconnected symbols.

Today, it’s increasingly common for games to be sold while they’re being actively worked on, with user feedback being incorporated and shaping the end product. Why not a similar approach to music making? Imagine your favorite band making an album available to listen to before it is finished. Imagine being able to follow the process right from the start, from the creative spark that sets the work in motion. This is why making-ofs are popular: people want to see into that process. Even if they aren’t artists themselves, they gain immense insight into the art and the creative process. The artist is humanized and their artwork is further enriched.

At least one artist in the retrowave scene has taken these lessons to heart. Opus Science Collective has been releasing music since 2016. But that’s not all he’s been doing. He also keeps a blog where he writes at length about various topics, ranging from his experiences with hardware or software from his “toy box” to deep dives into the processes and motivations behind specific albums. These posts are a veritable gold mine for fellow music producers and a fine example of openness within the community.

Whether you follow this example, that of game developers all over the world, or even that of artists like Alpha Chrome Yayo and C Z A R I N A, who pepper their Twitter feeds with snapshots from the quieter and happier moments of their lives, there is no denying the power of open, honest connection.

Sharing Your Music

Talking the talk, sharing knowledge and experience is one thing, but what of the music itself? Technology used for creating music tends to be close-sourced. DAWs save projects in proprietary formats. Patches for VSTs or synths also tend to be incompatible with each other, with notable exceptions such as SysEx. Fortunately, the building blocks of music are the exact opposite. Sound clips are playable and malleable anywhere and MIDI is as good and reliable a standard as any.

But, how are open source projects, and the potentially endless spin-offs that can be generated from each one, kept under control? In a truly open project, anyone can look at it, copy it, and change it. For open source software, version control is the answer. It’s a system for keeping tabs on changes to a set of files. Changes are bundled together with a description and they’re automatically assigned a reference number and a timestamp. This creates a permanent log of all changes, since the beginning of that project’s lifetime. Want to spin it into a new project? Pick a point in time and those files are yours to change independently.

How many times have you saved projects with increasingly ridiculous names (“song_final_mix”, “song_final_mix_really_2”, “song_final_mix_really_2_BEST_KICK_5”)? Instead, imagine logging your changes, and writing up notes for future reference.

If this sounds overly technical, that’s understandable. There’s a learning curve to version control. Companies like GitHub and GitLab offer nice, easy (easier) to use interfaces with which to perform these operations, but it requires discipline and effort. However, there’s at least one solution out there tailored for musicians.

Splice is known more for its catalog of samples and rent-to-own model, but they offer up an intriguing solution for version control and collaboration between artists that doesn’t get enough attention. In their own words:

“Splice Studio allows producers to easily collaborate with friends around the world while also backing up their music projects using our free and unlimited storage.”

Here is a decidedly closed source, proprietary platform offering services that make your music more open. Everything stays within the Splice walled garden and freedom is traded for convenience and ease of use. The world of software development is filled with these contradictions, with some of the largest open source projects being driven by companies like Facebook or Google.

No Song Is Ever Done

Open source projects are never finished. They are always iterated upon, improved, updated to keep up with requests, new hardware and software revisions. Music, on the other hand, tends to have an end goal: the song or collection of songs is produced, mixed, mastered and ultimately released. What if music was handled like software? This already happens to a degree. Artists will share snippets of upcoming tracks (alpha), then drop a single (beta), then the full release (version 1.0), then remixes (1.1, 1.2…), then the remaster (2.0). Armenian-german producer Chorchill recently released Kolonie Refonte in which he remixes an earlier release and states his motivation for doing this quite simply but powerfully: “I started working on those tracks again and to be honest, I don't know why. Somehow I wasn't finished.”

Star Wars is perhaps the most famous (and infamous) example of this sort of iterative mindset in 20th-century pop culture. Whatever your feelings are on the changes made by George Lucas over the decades to his beloved franchise, you have to admire the dedication to realizing and perfecting a vision. It’s only unfortunate that there’s been little care with preserving and continuing to make available previous versions of those movies.

This appears to be a familiar feeling among artists. A release is no more than a snapshot of a body of work at a certain point in time, considered “finished”. It would be interesting to extend the open approach to releases, complete with release notes for updates. The thought of releasing something unfinished may appear daunting and counterproductive, but seeing a song or album grow as the artist shapes it might be entertaining, instructive, inspiring. Again, this is something many artists do to an extent, albeit in a scattered fashion.

The thought of releasing something unfinished may appear daunting and counterproductive, but seeing a song or album grow as the artist shapes it might be entertaining, instructive, inspiring.

How Do I Get Involved?

There are so many ways to get started with open practice. One of the most powerful ways is to offer up an existing project that you’ve worked on to the community. Depending on the degree of openness you wish to pursue, you might consider sharing your projects (stems, MIDI, etc.) under an OS license like Creative Commons, which gives you the option of making content available for use in a non-commercial or commercial context and allows you to fine tune how derivative works can be shared.

The possibilities for experimentation in open practice are seemingly endless. You might consider creating your next project in an open fashion, sharing updates to each track as they’re produced. Or you could contribute to another artist’s open project.

This is where the power of open practice is only just beginning. Community is the driver of open source, and a successful community built around a project generates momentum. You can imagine an open spacewave project, constantly evolving as different artists contribute tracks, or stems or patches.

What are the benefits from open collaboration? We’ve hardly scratched the surface of what’s possible musically, given the technological tools available. We’re in a long period of transformation and transition, still incorporating the models of a previous century into the new digital realm. During the second industrial revolution, it took factories decades to change from a centralized model where one steam driven engine powered the entire operation, to a distributed model of smaller electric engines powering specific tasks throughout the factory. New technology, in this case the electric engine, required a different kind of workflow and a different perspective on how work could be accomplished. We are at much the same place, today, in the music industry, with a range of digital technologies and platforms coupled to deprecated ways of thinking. Is open practice the answer? It could be a part of it. And, for indie musicians, it could be worth finding out.

If the past year and a half of pandemic has shown us anything, it’s that we’re better together, even when we’re apart. We’re ready and able to collaborate digitally, at a distance and as a part of a community. This is a powerful moment for musical creation, and the right moment for building on the ideas and ideals of open source and open collaboration in music.

About the Authors

Life Patterns works as a software engineer from his home in Lisboa, Portugal, making music whenever he can find the time. His sophomore album, Bedroom Days, will be out soon. His other releases are available on Bandcamp.

Jonny Fallout has written articles for various tech magazines, several non-fiction books on innovation, design and technology, as well as music reviews for the Boston Phoenix and Film Score Monthly. His new album, Cybetherial, is now available on Bandcamp.