What Happens When P2P Jamming Meets the Blockchain?
The Global Loop Orchestra
Ken Fields is tokenizing the first P2P network music jamming group on the planet with SingularDTV via Tokit, creating GLO to ignite the future of networked music.
Artists and musicians are taking their careers into their own hands by tokenizing their work.
Ken Fields is launching his band/label, the Global Loop Orchestra on Tokit.io via the GLO token. The group is formed by musicians around the world who jam live on high-speed networks by matching polyrhythmic electronic music beats to the natural delays between cities and continents. For example, the delay between Los Angeles and Beijing is about 200 ms allowing two musicians playing music together between these two cities to jam at a tempo of 150 bpms (we’ll spare you the math).
To be more specific, the Global Loop Orchestra is more properly termed a ‘Mesh Label,’ in that it isn’t the same set of musicians playing each concert. The configurations of cities (nodes), musicians and the latencies along their edges is always changing, creating unique beats and styles with each jam. Syneme, Ken’s university lab, has been playing music on the network for years, giving him great insight into the pitfalls and possibilities of real- time, trans-global audio and video interaction. In this naturally decentralized environment paired with blockchain tech, networked music is creating sounds and opportunities that the music industry is slowly coming to recognize. Fields’ work and the music of GLO is ripe with potential, and SingularDTV is pleased to launch the GLO token that enables people all over the world to start participating in multi-location jams and trans-oceanic collaborative concerts.
We sat down with Ken for a discussion about the GLO project, p2p networked electronic music, the methodology of the Global Loop Orchestra, and the future of network music jamming as incentivized by the blockchain
First of all, what IS P2P Network Music?
It’s simply playing music on the network with your band mates. Just think of the internet as really long audio cables. It’s straightforward these days, because of new software that we created called Artsmesh; just plug in and play together. On top of this globally distributed music studio is a ‘meshing’ layer — how you form groups and audiences. Everyone is aware now, that what we do by friending, liking and following is to create these very particular social graphs; like a finger print. However, the first phase of the social network phenomenon was just linked text, documents and static data. The next phase, with much more capable bandwidth, will allow a new kind of graph: a ‘presence graph.’ In other words, real-time high quality audio (uncompressed) and video streams are going to be pushing the limits — while the blockchain ecosystem keeps everything ticking along. I think it’s inevitable that bands are going to be playing live music online consistently, orchestras are going to be distributed, a single virtuoso soloist will be able to be in multiple concerts at the same time! There are so many possibilities that this enables.
How did the idea for a globally linked orchestra come to you?
Taking the definition of the word ‘orchestra’ loosely, as a coordinated group of musicians, work in this field started with the growth of Internet2 and high speed research networks. I was first exposed to live music on networks about 10 years ago, when my lab in Beijing performed a piece with the Stanford laptop orchestra. In electronic music, laptop orchestra’s are called Orks, and there’s a few well known ones, SLOrk (Stanford Laptop Orchestra), PLOrk (Princeton), etc. So after playing music almost daily on the network, I just started thinking of all these collaborations as one big Ork: the Global Loop Orchestra (or GLOrk) — a persistent music mesh in flux — 24/7. It’s not easy coordinating these performances with clunky software, so we worked for about 5 years developing Artsmesh. Artsmesh does everything you need for the networking part; so we call it a digital presence workstation (DPW); think of it as Skype Pro. It doesn’t do any audio or video processing itself, rather it takes all the media streams from your pro software platforms, like Ableton live, or VDMX (VJ software) and just does the hard networking stuff — like hiding all the IP addresses and port numbers, so you don’t have to type in all that stuff manually.
Is there a particular genre that network music plays into?
Not really. Except there is something very unique about network music — latency! As you know, we can’t go faster than the speed of light (fiber optic networks). But as long as the delay is steady (low jitter), which means you need good networks, we can make a metronome with the sound ricochet time between cities, and play music at at a steady BPM (beats per minute). It’s called the ‘ping’ time.
So it is awesomely fun to play loops. or rhythmically cycling types of sounds with Ableton live. You get very unexpected polyrhythms — let’s call it crypto-trans! But really, without bothering about beats and syncing at all, it’s perfect for ambient layered types of sounds, or a bunch of other strategies that we’ve come up with over the years, that will eventually become part of the normal crypto-repertoire of the future. Anyway, being at the university, we’ve done classical music, jazz and experimental music. There is no limit once you get used to it.
What’s the meme that you’re trying to demonstrate with GLO?
Millions of bands will tokenize themselves on the network. So GLO does everything involving any kind of transaction in the Artsmesh pipeline: such as buying tickets for live multi-city concerts, hiring production crews and musicians, hiring remote services — like a guy to record the gig, etc. One of the most useful things however, as brought to you by Ethereum, will be to start blockchain contracts which will manage the flow of the IP benefits throughout the life of a music project: from conception to live performance, to post-live residual recordings, to RIP’ing in a catalogue of, hopefully, high value media properties. You can buy Artsmesh software with 100 of your own band’s tokens! GLO is a use case for this.
More significant however, is the fact that the music industry is going to go through a big change in the coming blockchain years. I think everyone now knows this. Content creators, can not make a living from the pennies that large platforms provide for the long tail of the most creative participants in the industry: the home studio musicians and content creators. The big platforms (itunes, Spotify, Facebook, etc), will surely grow up, bringing us the super-bowl spectacle kind of mixed and virtual reality projects, AI powered, with swarms of drones lighting up the sky types of concerts. But think of this: many musicians don’t have a large enough pool of fans to draw from on the local scene to give up their day job, but with the scaling power that networks bring to the table, regular musicians can find a decent audience in the 1000’s of cities around the world with network reach.
Sounds like you’re only focusing on the live part, right? Do you think there’s a big difference between downloaded content on demand, like iTunes or Spotify, and live streamed content, such as the Global Loop Orchestra does.
YES. ‘live’ is alive — real. There’s magic in presence — including remote presence. Live takes that part of your brain that registers the real-time flow of existence — the unpredictable; so you have to pay attention, you can’t press the pause button or you’ll miss something. Live network concerts are not going to be just a conduit or calling card to the so-called ‘real’ live gig; live networked concerts will be a vivid and authentic participatory event. The broadcast experience doesn’t ONLY have to be a solo phone experience: endpoints can be clubs, home TV with friends, VR headsets, surround dome projection nodes, and cinemas and theaters. A broadcast node could (with mid-level bandwidth) upgrade to be a fully participatory node and be included as an intellectual property holder/hodler. Kids are used to it; live broadcasting is huge now, it’s working. We do that times a hundred, by taking 5 or 10 musicians in as many cities and doing a broadcast from each of their POVs! So the remote audience can choose from among multiple mixes of the same concert. It’s likely that we’ll see future forms of live music experiences besides the mega centralized festival, such as ‘swarm events,’ which would be a more decentralized kind of event — fewer people at each node, but 100’s of nodes; no traffic jams so less consumption of fossil fuel gas — and more consumption of Ethereum gas!
What’s it like funding independent music projects on the network?
Well, if it is anything like funding independent music projects off the network, than that’s a trick question: there isn’t an avenue for the long tail guys. That’s the exciting thing about the token model we’re thinking of. The GLO token is for a thousand mini-launches in itself; GLO allows you to start music projects on the Ethereum blockchain. Your fans are an essential part of your organization — as early adaptors, as promoters and more. By buying into or working on music projects early (before the live broadcast), fans/ team members will be part owners of the IP of that project — with the musicians. Their GLO addresses are written right into the contract. They are tied to the bands that they support. Every band needs an extended network of their own. So we’re looking at a network of music networks.
On a more practical level, how much are you hoping to raise with GLO, and what will it be used for?
We hope to raise 1000 ETH for 1 million GLO first. Those funds will be split 5 ways, between incentivizing production managers in about 10 timezones, software development to keep it all real, marketing/PR/art, production (crews and network costs), and post-production (residuals) team. Remember, we’re a music label for the first tokenized network music bands on the planet, so we’re consulting with and training musicians and their teams on how to onboard their nodes to the network. This requires significant incentivizing. After the initial token campaign, we’re going to put 1 million on the SingularX exchange for those who have missed out or didn’t pay attention to our awesome idea in the first place. Then there’s a further 1 million GLO going to a technical bounty pool this year, as we’re relying on great Dapp developers to work on the infrastructural side of blockchain based, live P2P networked music performances with decentralized broadcasting.
Where do see blockchain technology going over the next couple of years?
Eventually everywhere. But I don’t think this is going to be as fast as some people think. I knew about SingularDTV about a year ago. In the last months, I’ve read everything there is to read and joined all the interesting slack communities I could. There are many pieces to this puzzle — scaling and interchain protocols, fungibility and crypto biz and legal models. Artsmesh is well situated in having an already working application to stress test the ecosystem. Also, I learned that creating a token today is like what creating your own web page was like in the 90’s. It represents your ‘space’, your aesthetic in the new crypto-mesh. Similarly, just having a web page, or a token is not the end all, it’s just the beginning. You need a community, a tribe to sustain a network effect. Network music luckily, is a sort of killer application. Yesterday was the age of downloading, but now we can play music together live on the network. The thing people need to understand, is that we can do this ourselves without capitalism 1.0. The people are the power now; we can do this ourselves with a blockchain business model.
