The Beat

Welcome to The Beat, Decential’s weekly breakdown of the music-web3 byway.

Like most things in web3, the music space moves at breakneck speeds, issuing regular bouts of hope, cringe and FOMO. That combination of qualities blur the essence of the movement – the enduring solutions to legacy industry problems and the people building them. Let’s focus on the essence; the rest, as Alex Ross wrote, is noise.

Sybil-cybin

I’ve been reading lately about Sybil resistance, or the ability of a system or network to withstand and prevent Sybil attacks – i.e. when a single malicious entity creates multiple fake identities or nodes to gain control or disrupt the system. It gets a lot of attention in web3 builders’ pursuit of decentralized, trustless systems, because when networks aren’t yet mature, they’re susceptible to malicious actors compromising the consensus mechanism and making off with the treasury. 

While reading, I had a moment of brain fog that re-ordered and expanded ‘sybil’ into ‘psilocybin,’ and I haven’t been able to shake the connection.

When comparing the two, of course there are different principles at play. Fungi in mycelial networks don’t have distinct identities to impersonate (that we can tell) or manipulate, and they’re certainly not digital. But mycelial networks do exhibit a decentralized structure, and they demonstrate resilience and adaptive properties, relying on redundancy and interconnectedness to maintain their functionality – a la Sybil resistance.

Perhaps it’s not by accident, then, that mycelia are common mascots and mirrors across web3. There’s the Mycelia project spearheaded by Imogen Heap, who was one of the first artists to demonstrate how smart contracts could be used to circumvent traditional intermediaries. Identity verification is a key component.

There’s fungi godfather Paul Stamets’ Mycelial Earth project, “a community based initiative…to harness the power of blockchain technology, the core principles of decentralization, and the potential of the Mushroom Kingdom to restore our ecology.” 

There’s even an emergent group of MycoFi enthusiasts, modifying the DeFi and ReFi epithets to invoke mycelia and the economy of the forest, where unused resources are constantly recycled and shared across vast underground networks of plants and other life – the positive sum “myconomics” of mycelial networks.

In some ways, Sybil resistance feels like the digital embodiment of a game mycelia have been practicing for millions of years.

Music for Airports

More abstractly, there’s a case to be made that psilocybin's effects on human brains make us more Sybil resistant. There’s increased openness and creativity, and ego dissolution and profound shifts in perspective, where the boundaries between the self and the external world melt away. We become less susceptible to certain manipulative influences and misinformation, because we can critically evaluate information and see beyond our usual cognitive biases.

So what happens when we think more like mushrooms? For one, we harm ourselves and other people less. Elsewhere, Francis Crick credited LSD for allowing him to envision the structure of DNA. Steve Jobs cited his acid experiences as some of the most significant in his life. And Brian Eno, whose Music for Airports I’ve been listening to on repeat while writing this, credits psychedelics for playing a role in his innovative music-making processes. 

Music for Airports has long been a companion of mine – a soundscape “as ignorable as it is interesting.” Indeed, that’s the crux of Eno’s definition of ambient music, as he wrote in the album’s liner notes: “Ambient music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting."

Listening to Music for Airports is like walking in the woods. Both offer a backdrop for deep thought, but when particular attention is paid, they present untold wonders.

While listening earlier this week, I read one of Maarten Walraven’s recent MusicX filings, in which he cites the “soundscape scholar” (what a title) Barry Truax and his theory of “acoustic sustainability” – “our ability as a culture to live within a positively functioning soundscape that has long-term viability."

“Just like the sonic environment always impacts us, we also sonically impact the environment around us,” Walraven writes. “It’s like we’re a bunch of jazz improvisers continuously responding to what our environment cues up for us and vice versa. If we understand this interplay, we can take the step to listen to music as a way for us to make sense of our environment and steer it.”

Eno was motivated to create Music for Airports after waiting several hours for a flight at Germany's Cologne Bonn Airport, wholly uninspired by the background music that filled the space.

While composing, he relied on improvisational exercises and chance. The producer spent hours recording his musicians improvising, then listened to the takes and discovered bits of melodic lines that intersected in interesting ways. He looped them, phased them, slowed them down and whittled everything into protracted meditations on sound and life.

The beauty is not just in Eno making sense of his environment and steering, but in the music’s ability to “accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular.” Eno invites listeners to explore soundscapes without preconceived notions or overexerting his own ‘centralized’ control as composer.

Music for Airports adapts with the environment, and with the listener – even though we’re all listening to the same thing. It changes color and meaning as we move about the world, as we try to make sense of things and figure out how to live with other jazz improvisers, to find consensus, to not be malicious and shitty. It’s decidedly mycelial.

Coda

For this coda, more food for thought from Walraven, taken from the same piece:

“We should also listen to our soundscape when thinking about our biological environment. We still participate in that, just like we did when we sung and danced during harvest. Culture still has that same connotation. We participate within it, and by making music together, by creating sounds, by providing feedback loops through songs, we can guide that participation towards a more sustainable future. Simply put, making and listening to music helps us become more aware of our environment.”

Now go outside and listen to music – it’s a beautiful day.

My name is MacEagon Voyce. For more music and less noise, consider subscribing to The Beat. And if you already do, consider sharing with a friend. Thanks for being here.