Bronze and the rise of fluid music

Static music recordings are now such an everyday part of our culture that we tend to forget that they are an illusion. Staticity is not the natural state of music: music is fluid. No two live performances are ever the same, no recording has ever been known to improvise.

The problem with static recordings is that they impose a ‘creative full stop’ which doesn’t reflect the natural state of music. Musicians and audiences have been kicking against this ever since recordings started being mass-marketed. There are so many examples of musicians reworking, re-appropriating or evolving songs that it’s hard to pick out a few, but I’ll do it anyway: the Beach Boys Surfin’ USA is an intentional reworking of Chuck Berry’s Sweet Little Sixteen; Jeff Buckley’s version of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah is enormously reworked (via a convoluted story in which Buckley is actually covering John Cale); Dylan’s album John Wesley Harding is mainly a conscious reworking of traditional melodies in very much the folk tradition. You’ll be able to think of many, better, examples.

By the 1980’s hip hop made the re-appropriation of existing music commonplace. The whole idea of hip hop is to personalise an existing piece of music; freestyling goes even further, in that a piece is intentionally different every single time it is performed. Like improvised jazz, freestyle rap is a fluid and evolving musical style.

What was different about hip hop was the fact that it utilized actual recordings. Sampling was originally framed in the music industry as theft, with the implication that it was a musically inferior form because of this. Though this view no longer prevails, it happened because the music industry was — and remains — wedded to the idea of staticity. Yet hip hop’s approach was a much better reflection of the true nature of music than static recordings. Today, ideas like sampling, pastiche, collaborations and re-interpretation of existing recordings — all typical in hip hop — have spread into practically all modern music.

Meanwhile artists are finding increasingly interesting ways to reject staticity; in 2016, Kanye West tweeted that his album, The Life of Pablo, was a “living breathing changing creative expression”. He understood that because the album only lived on streaming sites he could consistently change it. In fact, Kanye significantly changed the musical elements of The Life of Pablo over twenty times after its release. The market for this kind of personalisation is evidenced by Soundcloud, an online platform for original musical work which is primarily populated by user-generated remixes and mixtapes. Soundcloud has 40 million users and 175 million unique plays per month. Native Instrument’s “STEMS” takes advantage of this: it’s a music format which breaks a static recording into four constituent parts. Thousands of artists have released in this format to encourage audiences to build their own versions of a song.

But none of these solutions are completely satisfactory: what is required creatively is a moving, evolving, fluid music format.

That’s where Bronze comes in.

A few years ago, a recording artist called Gwilym Gold released an album called Tender Metal as an App. It was recorded using traditional techniques and instruments, but every time it was played back it did so differently. The recording and playback system that Gwilym, his producer Lexx and their collaborator Professor Mick Grierson at Goldsmiths had created was called Bronze.

Bronze is going to change the way we experience music — not because listeners are demanding infinite versions of every song, as was trialled in Sigur Ros’ experiments with the format, but because the way we consume music today means that artists and audiences need a flexibility which static music can no longer deliver.

Let’s dive a bit deeper:

An important part of the success of streaming has been the context-based (CX) playlist. CX playlists are compiled around an activity (running, relaxing, driving) or a time-related event (Summer, Mother’s Day, a day of the week), and they have quickly become the fastest growing way of consuming music on Spotify. CX playlists outgrew traditional playlists by 20% last year and represent 46% of all playlists on Spotify.

“People don’t look at things like hip-hop or country anymore — they are looking at things based on events and activities…We need to be able to deliver the right music based on who we are, how we’re feeling and what we’re doing, day-by-day.” — Daniel Ek, Founder, Spotify.

These playlists are driven by listeners’ individual behaviour (via a slew of complicated algorithms) and not by musical genre (although some CX playlists are hybrid, for instance “Latin Chill Out”; Hybrids comprise 6.7% of the above 46% total). Currently the demand for contextualised music is only being serviced by playlist selection, a wholly inadequate solution given what is possible.

Imagine that instead of selecting a “relaxing” CX playlist, you can select that music be generated in a style appropriate for relaxing. Bronze would transform the music which is currently playing to suit this mood. This is the immediate appeal and application of Bronze: it can generate versions of songs to fit any kind of input or tag, and the actual recording becomes contextualised — not just playlists.

Contextualisation is a good example of how Bronze might be utilised but it is by no means the only application of Bronze, in fact it is probably one of the least glamorous.

Introducing: Augmented Music

Bronze alters the components of multi-track recordings every time they are played while ensuring the track is still identifiable to the listener. How a Bronze track generates, or how others might influence how it generates, is decided and set by the artist. Bronze does not seek to replace recording artists with machine learning; it is a tool with which recording artists can enhance the listening experience. We call it Augmented Music.

Personalised, augmented music is the future and Bronze is how we are going to get there.

So what are our next steps? We’re currently building a composer which will allow anybody to make music in Bronze, and we’ve already developed a web player so that anyone can stream music which changes on every listen.

Find out more about Augmented music, Bronze and how we intend to make this technology available to everyone by visiting us at www.bronze.ai