- Book author
- Adam Łukawski
- Paulo de Assis
Co-edited by Paulo de Assis and Adam Łukawski
Researchers of the MetamusicX research cluster at Orpheus Institute Paulo de Assis and Adam Łukawski co-edited a new book for CRC Press / Taylor & Francis titled “Decentralised Music: Exploring Blockchain for Artistic Research”. The book will premiere on the 14th of August 2024.
The book includes contributions from leading researchers in music, arts, and technology offering a thorough examination of the potential of blockchain technology to transform musical practices. Moving beyond blockchain’s financial applications, it presents various perspectives on how this technology plays an important role in a creative, conceptual, and philosophical rethinking of the current modes of artistic creation.
It is an essential reading for artists, musicians, researchers, and policymakers curious to know more about the implications of blockchain for the future of music. More than an academic exploration, it is a call to the artistic community to critically engage with blockchain technology and its consequences for the creative practice of music.
The original idea for this publication originated in a 2-day webinar “Music NFTs: blockchain technologies for artistic research in music” (Music NFTs: blockchain for artistic research) held on 24-25 May 2022 at Orpheus Institute, which many of the contributing book authors participated in as either speakers or participants.
The book includes contributions from Orpheus Institute’s MetamusicX research cluster members (Paulo de Assis, Adam Łukawski, and Martin Zeilinger) and other authors: Marcus O’Dair (University of the Arts London), Claudio J. Tessone (University of Zurich), Diane Drubay (WeAreMuseums), Catherine Mulligan (University of Lisbon), Kristof Timmerman (Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp), Einar Torfi Einarsson (Iceland University of the Arts), and Kosmas Giannoutakis (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute).
Decentralized Music
This book offers a thorough exploration of the potential of blockchain and AI technologies to transform musical practices. Including contributions from leading researchers in music, arts, and technology, it addresses central notions of agency, authorship, ontology, provenance, and ownership in music. Together, the chapters of this book, often navigating the intersections of post-digital and posthumanist thought, challenge conventional centralized mechanisms of music creation and dissemination, advocating for new forms of musical expression.
Stressing the need for the artistic community to engage with blockchain and AI, this volume is essential reading for artists, musicians, researchers, and policymakers curious to know more about the implications of these technologies for the future of music.
Introduction:
Blockchain for Artistic Research
Musical works are virtual entities. They are made of material and immaterial constitutive parts. On the one hand, they are conglomerates of highly distributed material objects such as scores, manuscripts, sketches, annotated copies, different versions, transcriptions, performances, and recordings. On the other, they are sustained by immaterial qualities such as musical and economic value, aesthetic judgment, performative and musicological interpretations, sociopolitical and historical context, personal meaning, symbolic aura. All these component parts are real. They all have a concrete function in the cognitive and sensual perception of any given musical work. As the basic constitutive parts of a dynamic entity, these particles are constantly negotiated and recombined in ever- new arrangements. Every single particle can be located, identified, and coded; yet it is only through a network of connections between different particles and actants that musical works can be meaning-fully expressed and communicated.
As a consequence of this view, a new image of the musical work emerges in which the totality of particles and connectors that relate to a musical work can be seen as a complex ‘assemblage’ (in the philosophical sense of the term). With its interplay between structure and contingency, organization and chance, form and intensity, the notion of assemblage enables a fluid and dynamic approach to musical works, helping better grasp their historical formation and ever-varied transmission over time. The work concept, which regulated musical practices in the 19th and 20th centuries, operated in a musical world made of centralized mediators: music schools, publishers, concert halls, congregated audiences, critics, recording labels. Today, in the digital age of infinite sources, self-publishing, distributed music consumption, online streaming, immediate feedback, global dissemination and Generative Artificial Intelligence, the concept of music assemblage gains major relevance, stressing the multiplicity and fragmentarity of materials, processes, and outcomes. As society moved from information scarcity to information abundance, more than stand- alone things, properties, and binary relations, primacy is now given to interactions, processes, and networks (de Assis 2023). Melting actual and virtual realities, analogue, and digital modes of existence, music increasingly happens in a hybrid digital-analogue continuum, where questions of data provenance, agency (including its non-human and post-human forms), authenticity, ownership, and value pose a complex set of challenges and opportunities for the understanding and interaction with musical particles. To effectively navigate this wide array of emerging constraints and possibilities, not only new modes of conceptualizing music are needed, but a new technologically-equivalent medium, enabling the implementation of experimental approaches, is essential. Such a medium must be capable of embracing the richness of music’s evolving landscape, accommodating connections between both the tangible and intangible elements of musical works. It should offer a platform where the diverse constituents – scores, performances, interpretations, and cultural contexts – coalesce, allowing for a more holistic appreciation and analysis of interconnected musical particles. In this regard, blockchain technology with its emerging features stands as a promising candidate, enabling new modes of encoding intricately interlinked networks of various objects in a decentralized, yet transparent, way. Often associated with cryptocurrencies and financial transactions, blockchains at the intersection with artistic practice possess a wider promising, yet underexplored, potential.
Blockchain is a secure, transparent digital technology for recording and sharing data across a decentralized network. Data on this shared ledger is organized into blocks that are cryptographically linked together in chrono logical order, forming a ‘block- chain’. The decentralized nature of blockchain networks eliminates the need for a central authority or intermediary to validate transactions or oversee the network. While initially prominent in the realm of cryptocurrencies, blockchain technology has found diverse applications across industries like supply chain, healthcare, and finance for tracking and verifying critical information. Since the advent of ‘smart contracts’ in 2013, blockchain technology has expanded its scope to support digital assets, such as audio, video, and text files. This is predominantly facilitated through smart contract- based non- fungible tokens (NFTs), which serve as a means to authenticate and track their established identity and – on top of it – their ownership (Buterin 2013).