Creative Commons in particular, and the free culture movement in general, sometimes get criticized for being a bit academic or legal, undervaluing the experience of actual creators. I don’t think that criticism has much merit, but the fact remains that many of the most prominent advocates of the movement are legal professors or software developers. I don’t mean to devalue the countless invaluable contributions to the community that have been made by artists, but only to say that their work is not always apparent to artists who are just becoming familiar with CC. I’ve fielded too many comments from struggling artists who think that Creative Commons is misguided and not in touch with artists, or worse, maliciously trying to exploit them.
Against this background, speaking to Stretta was a refreshing experience. He shares his creative process with his fans by soliciting comments on works in progress. Many of his final works are released under Creative Commons licenses. On top of that, he’s started a sample repository just to share some of the samples he’s created along the way, and licensed the whole collection under CC BY. Most importantly, though, the music that he makes is really good. One of his recent projects, A Funneled Stone, is created on modular synths, and has a really interesting and surprisingly organic feel.
The way he speaks about music push me from interested observer into real fan territory. Here he is explaining his choice to use CC, and praphrasing Tim O’Reilly:
Most of my newer finished tracks get a Creative Commons license, as the primary issue I’m struggling with isn’t exploitation, it is obscurity. I don’t know why unknown artists are so conditioned against exploitation of their work. That’s like the best thing that can happen to you. How many times have you seen a YouTube video and the comments are all people saying “who did the music? what music is this?” It is impossible to hide who made the music these days. Your music isn’t a limited resource. You’ll make more. That’s the easy part. Finding an audience is the hard part.
I love to hear that from somebody who is actually in the trenches, making music. Later he describes how important it is to actually take action:
Same goes for consumers who are indignant about RIAA lawsuits, take down notices and the corporate recording industry. Typing “Fuck the RIAA” on digg is an empty gesture. If you truly want to make a difference, the solution is right in front of you. Support independent music. Support artists who support Creative Commons.
That argument wouldn’t be out of place for a software developer to make (and in fact seems pretty similar to a sentiment about software and hardware expressed by Danny Pickle recently) but it’s still far too rare to hear it from an artist.
It should be pretty clear by now how taken I am with Stretta’s music and his take on the issues. There’s plenty of reasons to feel that way in the interview.
Last week at Drumbeat Berlin, I had the pleasure of seeing Gabriel Shalom present on a project called Junto. We discussed the project that evening and the next day, and agreed that we should each post our ideas on the new perspectives the Drumbeat audience provided. He put together a video blog post about it, and my (long) post is below.
If I understand correctly, Junto is a multi-channel telepresence platform with an incorporated text chat window and support for a Twitter backchannel. Gabriel and the rest of the people working on Junto are huge fans of Twitter, and at Drumbeat he explained that he wanted Junto to be totally open, like that service.
But as fans of Status.net and Identi.ca know, Twitter is not a totally open service. To be sure, when Twitter launched in 2006, it was probably among the leaders for openness in online services: it provides an open and well-documented API, and is very liberal with how users can input and output data from site. There are prevalent mash-ups of Twitter data, and they’ve even planned to store the entire archive of tweets with the Library of Congress. However, as thinking about free network services has developed, as recorded in the Franklin Street Statement and the earlier Open Software Service Definition, in spite of being tolerant of external development Twitter fails some basic tests of being an open service; most significantly, the source code that powers Twitter is unpublished and proprietary, preventing users from modifying or copying it. As such, users are not free to set up their own Twitter servers. Most users wouldn’t want to do that anyway, but it’s important to note that in the absence of those freedoms, Twitter is something different from what enthusiasts like Gabriel think it is.
Twitter has postured itself–and the people most excited about it think of it–as an open protocol, when in fact it is just a service. Open protocols, like those that make up the internet and the web, are sets of rules that computers or humans can comply with in order to communicate with other computers or humans intelligibly. Some of these protocols are very technical, like TCP/IP which allows for packet-switching and robust connections between two computers in a network, while some are extremely social, like the etiquette that governs forums, e-mail lists, and chat rooms. People, or computers programmed by people, adhere to these protocols in order to send information, and they expect information sent to them to comply with the same protocols. Postel’s Law — “be conservative in what you send; be liberal in what you accept” — applies just as well to protocols of the social sort as those of the technical sort.
The reason it’s hard to see that Twitter the service is not a protocol is because its launch also marked the introduction, or popularization, of a new protocol. People tend to call that protocol Twitter, because for a while they were the only game in town, but it could also be described as micro-blogging, or real-time short-form public messaging, or anything like that. What’s important is that we can identify micro-blogging as being governed by a set of rules: messages can be no longer than 140 characters and are presented publicly in a chronological feed, there’s a mechanism for referring to other users, etc. And as it turns out, imposing this particular set of rules on the communication of a large group of people produces interesting results.
But when Gabriel et al talk about the power of Twitter, they’re really talking about the power of a widely adopted micro-blogging protocol. They’re right to praise Twitter for developing a cool set of rules, but are wrong to presume that those rules are tied to the Twitter service. Status.net and Identi.ca demonstrate that the micro-blogging protocol can function independently of Twitter, and because those services are designed to ensure the freedom of their users, are actually a superior implementation. However, many of even the most enthusiastic micro-bloggers haven’t heard of them. Why might it be the case that there are so many fewer users of the Status.net micro-blogging implementation than the Twitter one?
The answer is obvious to anybody who’s used both services: put simply, people like Twitter because of all the people on it. Combine that with the fact that the applications that use Twitter are superior because developers have focused plenty of attention on the dominant platform, and much less on the newcomers. @Evan and company have put plenty of effort into developing a pretty amazing product, but network effects are preventing them from gaining the traction they deserve. (It’s worth noting, here, that they are gaining plenty of traction, and there is more app support and users and interesting things happening there every day, but the numbers are still orders of magnitude below Twitter.)
That’s the scene that Junto enters into. Gabriel and the developers say, and probably with good reason, that there is no way to implement their ideas in a totally free stack. In particular, they will be depending on Adobe Flash Media Server, a non-free program that anybody running a Junto server would have to use. I respect their arguments of feasibility, and I totally understand why they wouldn’t want to wait for free software to catch up or develop it themselves. But it’s also important to consider that once a non-free implementation of a new protocol becomes entrenched, it can be really hard to displace it with a free alternative.
I say this not because developers are lazy, or will not produce substitutes for services with “good enough” freedom, but because of how hard it is to effect user switch. If everybody’s on the non-free Junto, experience has shown that freedom alone is not always enough to get people to switch to a free version.
In his video blog post, Gabriel makes a distinction between the concept of Junto as a process, and the software that they’re building to support it as a form. Relying on a non-free element as an essential part of the stack seems to preclude other forms from freely engaging in that process with them.
I’m very proud to have been involved with SoundCloud’s major feature release today, which includes (among other awesome things, like a track tag explore page) deeper integration and support for Creative Commons licenses. Among the changes were the addition of prominent CC badges to track players, the development of a CC landing page, and the long-awaited introduction of advanced search–including, naturally, search-by-license-type.
I really think SoundCloud has what it takes to be the Flickr of audio, and their commitment to free culture and free software has been extremely commendable. (The site uses Flash, but has developed an experimental HTML5 player, as well as numerousotherfreesoftware projects.) It’s really an exciting organization to be working with!
Der Spiegel has posted on their website an official English version of that article that I translated last week. Interesting to compare and contrast: the official translation is more confident (i.e. more willing to deviate from the original structures and phrases in order to improve flow) and consistent with tenses, but there aren’t any significant differences in meaning.
There’s been a lot of slowed-down action on the web in the past few days after a particularly hilarious slowed-down version of Justin Bieber’s “U Smile” generated over half a million plays on SoundCloud yesterday. Shamantis, the artist behind the recording, pulled off the hitherto considered impossible feat of making Bieber sound like Sigur Rós. The program Shamantis used is called Paul’s Extreme Sound Stretch–it’s a powerful (if not particularly multi-faceted) program that is capable of real-time playback of songs stretched to one million times their original length without affecting the pitch, effectively making an audio texture out of any track, clip, or sound.
Paulstretch, as the program is usually referred to, is written by a guy named Nasca Octavian Paul, and it’s free and released under the GPL. Naturally the source code is available, but Paul doesn’t compile GNU/Linux binaries, and compiling it on my Ubuntu 10.04 system was not totally trivial.
I was able to compile by installing all Fluid and all the libraries specified in the README, and by adding the line #include <string.h> after the line #include <string>
to the MP3InputS.h file, as was suggested in a help forum.
If you want to hear some of my efforts on it, I’ve uploaded a 800% slower version of the Sigur Rós song “Saeglopur” to SoundCloud.