Interdisciplinary Art

To accompany the release of my book I created a series of social media posts and videos featuring original content, music, and graphics. The visual aesthetics of the project include abstract images which are representations of cymatics — the visual patterns that emerge in liquid when exposed to auditory vibrations. Each chapter of the book features a unique cymatic pattern. The images are vector graphics and I am able to use them across a variety of media types including video productions. I originally drew these by hand with a spirograph, and then scanned, vectorized, and brought into Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and After Effects for modification, colourization, and animation.

I created four videos each with its own original musical composition. Three of the videos are short abstract cymatic visualizations with voice-overs. The other is an in-depth educational exploration of the impact of software on music. I also created versions of the visualizations without voice-over in order to focus the music production.

One noteworthy aspect of my music production process is the use of guitar as a MIDI controller. Through my guitar I can control any synthesizer. Many people don’t realize that there are a variety of MIDI controllers beyond the keyboard including guitar, saxophone, drums, and many others. My conventional guitar playing is also featured on all the videos, and I play or program all of the other parts including synthesizers, basslines, drums. I mixed and mastered the tracks, and synchronized the music with the visuals.

I continue to produce multimedia projects and these production activities serve as a foundation for teaching music and media topics. My passion for making music and digital art means that I stay up to date with a variety of important trends and new technological developments in music production.

Questions

This song is conceived as a digital chant. It features a distorted bass line, a variety of keyboards, and notably my guitar harmonizing with a choir synthesizer.

Kaleidoscope

This song is arranged for electric guitar and drum machine. Several guitars play together while the drum machine utilizes only the bass drum and a clap sample.

AESTHETIC

This song is devised as computer funk and is inspired by the genre of vaporwave. It features an out of control bass synthesizer and heavily effected drum machine.

Music is Black Music

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Portrait of Tommy Potter, Charlie Parker, Max Roach (almost hidden by Parker), Miles Davis, and Duke Jordan (from left to right), Three Deuces, New York, circa August 1947.

If you look at any Top 10 music chart, you will quickly see the presence of black singers, songwriters, producers, and culture. As philosopher and social critic Cornel West wrote in his essay, On Afro-American Music: From Bebop to Rap, sounds and styles of the African Diaspora have been the primary source for popular music in the West. This influence is part of a complex cultural, technological, and economic reality. 

From the 16th to 19th centuries, African people were transported to new lands as enslaved people, forced to work hard labour on plantations, in mines, and as domestic servants. While these enslaved people were sent throughout Europe, the Caribbean, and Asia, the predominant number landed in the Americas. Through these cruel and inhuman conditions, new musical trends began to emerge, blending African traditions with European, Latin, and Asian influences. 

In the United States, the influence of African music merged with European styles and transformed into striking new sounds simultaneously filled with hope, humor, and defiance. These rhythms, harmonies, and structures grew into genres including gospel and blues, which further transformed music theory and composition. These sounds further developed into jazz, rock and hip hop, which would embody the black experience in America.

The evolution of race and social justice in the United States is exemplified through the history of black music. Through the 1900s, radio airplay and Billboard magazine charts came to define popular music genres of the day. For much of the century, popular black artists were featured on their own charts — first called “Race Records” and later, “Rhythm and Blues” — which served as a catch-all genre for music that was played by black musicians and marketed to black audiences. As the number of black artists increased, and the types of music they were making diversified, labels began promoting across audiences, as “Urban” became one of the most popular genres in the world. Recently, artists and labels have pushed back against the “Urban” designation in an effort to move beyond categorizing music based on race. 

Culturally, black music is rooted in spiritual transcendence and the struggle for justice — a countercultural expression of speaking truth to power. It inspires and is informed by protest, defiance in the face of brutality, cruelty, and a struggle against systemic injustices. Songs like The Impressions “People Get Ready” and Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” are captivating and provocative for those critical of the status quo, and often serve as a rallying cry for people struggling to change their realities. 

Technologically, the rise of black music coincided with an era of unprecedented innovation, particularly in mass media and communications, which spread music and culture faster and farther than ever before. Before Napster, iTunes, and streaming, there was vinyl, cassettes, CDs, radio, and television. These modes of distribution allowed consumers to not only listen, but watch and learn about artists in new ways. Album covers and liner notes told stories of inspiration, process, and purpose. Music videos and press photos showcased an artist’s style. Interviews on radio and printed in magazines offered access to their lives. With more ways to connect to their audiences, musicians grew into celebrities, publicly adored and scrutinized. As the barriers to recording and distribution lowered, more people jumped in to share their musical creativity. The influence of the African diaspora extends through these innovations. 

However, many of the early pioneers of black music have been lost in time, their names forgotten. In 1917, the white Dixieland Jass Band recorded the first jazz record, and with it, laid their claim to inventing the genre. Though black jazz musicians were playing in clubs around the country long before the Dixieland Jass Band, their live performances didn’t have the reach of a recording, which became many listeners’ first experience with jazz. Similar injustices continued through the twentieth century and into today, as white performers of blues, rock, hip hop and other genres were mass marketed, while black artists were purposely pushed aside. 

Music is growing and pushing against traditions and standards — from economic and social, to harmonic and rhythmic. Black artists and influences have been and continue to be at the forefront of these revolutions. In Infinite Span, we analyze some of these pioneering artists and movements, and explore why understanding these histories can not only help us develop our lives and careers, but work towards a more equitable and just music industry. 

These cultural, technological, political, and economic shifts affect musicians and businesses in similar ways, regardless of the time period, as new ways of doing things overtake established systems. We cannot say where we are going, but we do know that the current configurations will not remain. 

Infinite Span in the Time of Coronavirus

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Throughout the past months, our lives have been upended in ways that feel novel and unprecedented. It’s even called the “novel” coronavirus. Schools and offices closed, events cancelled, travel halted — most of us, including myself, have never experienced these disruptions at such a grand scale. 

We’ve had to alter our routines, adjust our expectations, and adapt to a new normal. Maybe it’s coincidence — or maybe it’s synchronicity (which happens to be a great Police album) — but shifts like these are exactly what my book Infinite Span: Lives in Music is all about. 

The book includes stories of influential individuals from music history who’ve gone through similar cultural, epidemiological, and technological transitions. It’s a guide for working, growing, adapting and living in an ever-evolving world of creativity, commerce, and connection.

In the modern music industry, concerts and touring often represent the largest revenue source for many artists, venues and other companies. With physical shows wiped out, so too is their business for the foreseeable future. And we don’t know when it’s going to come back. It’s possible that as public events return, there will be incredible demand for live music, but nobody knows for certain how it will look.

We are experiencing increasing cognitive, biological, and societal dissonance. And we don’t know how to resolve it, and move towards consonance. There is no single answer, but we can help ourselves by placing these experiences in context. 

In the late 1990s, recorded music was the most valuable product in the businesses — many artists viewed touring as promotion for records. With the popularization of file sharing, and the industry’s unwillingness to adapt to the digital age, that revenue disappeared. Some thought the industry was collapsing. Why would artists record music if they couldn’t sell CDs? Today, we know recorded music is as popular as ever, but it's been transformed and streaming is the new model. Recorded music remains, but in a new medium.

Through this pandemic, we’re witnessing innovation in digital performance. Future possibilities are coming to life due to necessity. Twitch, YouTube, and Instagram Live — once thought of as platforms for gamers and lifestyle influencers — are offering new promotional and monetization opportunities for artists. When the old live performance model begins to reemerge, these methods won’t disappear.  

Many are lamenting this pandemic’s impact on music and the creative industries. While we are in an economic downturn, we’re also in a creative opportunity. If streaming was born out of file sharing, what will emerge now? In many ways, the emerging and undeveloped artists and entrepreneurs are best placed to take advantage of these opportunities. Large companies can get stuck in their business models. The young, independent musician and entrepreneur can do whatever they please. 

While we can examine new opportunities around us, figuring out what to do is difficult. Those first steps are always challenging. Infinite Span combines history, philosophy, and analysis to provide foundation for self reflection and growth and offer a platform to discover new ways of thinking and learning.

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As a professor, teaching online is not as enjoyable for me as being in the classroom. The technology that affords us this connection is easy to take for granted, but it didn’t exist until roughly the past decade, and even if it’s worse than in person, it’s much better than nothing. 

So like musicians all around the world, I’m working to find new ways to reach my audience. Infinite Span is a new opportunity to communicate, and I hope you join me on this journey.

Software is Eating Music

In 2011, famed Silicon Valley entrepreneur Marc Andreessen wrote that "software is eating the world", explaining that modern society is “in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy.”

We see this with Music, software has changed everything, from creating sounds and playing instruments, to affordably accessing and listening on multiple devices. In June 1999, Napster was launched and ushered in the age of digital music. At the time, standalone MP3 portable media players were the norm, as people downloaded single songs or albums to take with them on the move. Apple’s iPod is the product that helped it become one of the most successful companies in the world. Now, downloading music is rarer, as we stream songs from our smart devices — phones, computers, TVs, tablets, and more.

Napster

Napster let users freely download music for the first time and marked the beginning of the 2000s era copyright wars and the modern debate over the value of recorded music, which persists today.

When we think about recording music today, we might think of a digital audio workstation, or a massive multitrack studio like Jimi Hendrix’s famous Electric Lady Studios. There are more configurations of recording today than ever before. Apple again is at the centre of this universe, with its MacBook a part of the quintessential home production set-up.

Grimes Macbook Pro Ads

In 2018 Grimes debuted the song that’s what the drugs are for in an MacBook ad. The ad featured Grimes making music with her MacBook, using Apple's Logic DAW. Logic is the professional version of Garageband which comes preinstalled on all Apple computers.

In the early days, recording was initially used to capture live performance. The goal was to sound as close to live music as possible. Before microphones were used for recording sound was funnelled through recording horns. The sounds vibrated an attached diaphragm and stylus, and etching the sound waves onto a rotating wax disc. Today, in the recorded music era, this expectation has flipped, with some audiences expect live performances to sound the same as the recorded version, leading some artists to lip-sync over pre-recorded tracks.

Ashlee Simpson Lipsync

In 2004, Ashlee Simpson became the example of when lip-syncing goes wrong. When the wrong background track was cued during her performance on Saturday Night Live, the audience quickly realized she wasn't actually singing. So she did what anyone would do, and awkwardly danced her way into history.

Recording was prohibitively expensive. Artists could rarely afford recording costs themselves, so they needed record labels to access recording technology. In turn, labels then relied on sales of physical recorded product to recoup that money and hopefully make a profit. Vinyl was the medium for recorded music for much of the 20th century, and the “record label” term originates from the round labels in the centre of a record. The most popular vinyl was the 7” / 45rpm. Cassette tapes began offering a portable solution for listening to music, with the Sony Walkman player launching in 1979. This offered a listeners a more personal experience that they could take through the world.

Rick James

One of the most prolific stars of the 1970s and 80s, Rick James became infamous in the music industry for taking advances from multiple record labels at once…without actually recording anything.

As technology advanced, recording became an art unto itself, generating a multitude of new forms of musical expression. Famous artist and engineer teams like The Beatles & George Martin, Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones, and Jimi Hendrix and Eddie Kramer pioneered new sounds and methods in the studio. Soon, live performance began to emulate recordings as they became the listener’s primary conception. The recorded product was the leading currency.

Say Anything

Boy serenading girl outside her home is a classic scene in any romantic work, dating back to Romeo and Juliet. But in 1989’s Say Anything added a twist to the script. Instead of singing for his ex-girlfriend, John Cusack held up a boombox blasting Peter Gabriel’s "In Your Eyes".

For a long time, recording music took a special set of skills. You needed to understand the technical hardware, the space, and the instruments the artists were playing. Not everyone could be a producer or engineer, it was reserved for experts like Ahmet Ertegun and Rudy Van Gelder.

The transfer of recorded music from physical to digital has lowered barriers to entry for musicians and listeners, and moved recorded music from a relatively scarce commodity that sold out of record stores to an abundant, inexpensive media, that can be played anytime you want on a streaming service.

We can still use studios and hardware, but there are also a host of digital software options that we can set up in our own bedrooms.

Digital has not replaced analogue, but it has given artists more options. It’s allowed many more people to record themselves, and spurred the creation of new musical styles that could never have existed before.

Music Technology

The rise of digital production has empowered artists like Kanye West and Deadmau5, who have created new sounds, styles, and genres, opening doors for new kinds of sound exploration.

As the costs of recording have decreased, so too has the monetary value of that recording. Before, an album sold for maybe $10. Today, a stream is worth less than a penny.

In the digital age, recorded music can still be a viable source of income for many artists, but it is no longer their primary currency. Recorded music is one of many currencies artists can use to build strong connections with their fans.

It’s still vital to have recorded music. But the way it’s created, produced, and distributed has to be thought of in a wider context that includes performance, video, community engagement, and other mediums.

Cardi B

Cardi B uses a variety of mediums to connect with fans, including recorded music, video, live performance, social media, and engaging with issues in politics and popular culture.

So, How do we learn about music? We might think of Music Theory, Acoustics, or live performance. But in the information age when we learn about music we invariably engage with software. With digital media and the internet, software has truly consumed music.

McLuhan Map

McLuhan Map

Mixed Media Art Project

visit mcluhanmap.com

Like many people interested in creativity and media, I have felt a vague connection to Marshall McLuhan for much of my life. As a student, I often heard his name and most famous sayings, and knew he was from Toronto, but never really paid too much attention to him. It wasn’t until my Master’s that I understood the full context of McLuhan’s impact on my life. 

Studying McLuhan helped me flip my perspective, examine my interests multiple ways, and find art in the daily activities around me. He taught me that art can be anything I want it to be, and often the most impactful art is interdisciplinary, fusing new ideas, technologies, and environments. 

As a Master’s student at Ryerson University, I created an interdisciplinary digital arts project documenting significant places from McLuhan’s life in Toronto. This interactive Google map uses voice, music, photo, and video to offer an introduction to McLuhan and his philosophies. 
For first-timers seeking further reading on McLuhan, I highly recommend the graphic novel McLuhan for Beginners.