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.

Sweat and synchronicity

Welcome to the last Beat of “on-chain summer,” as I’ll be taking the next couple weeks off to reset my brain and withdraw my gaze from the dreary blue light of digital dreams. I’m writing this one from Singapore, en route to Japan for some contemplation and Miyazakian frisk and foolery. In fact, I sense it’s already begun. The magical realism is upon me, cast in various shades of purple and illuminated by more questions than answers. This Beat’s more whimsical than most.

To get to Singapore, I spent a 19-hour layover in Doha. I landed at night, exiting the airport at 1:11am local time, and I emerged into what can only be described as sauna-like conditions. According to the Internet, it was 41C (106F), but because of the humidity and radiant heat, my phone told me it “felt” like 52C (126F).

By the time I made it to my hotel’s check-in counter, I was in a sorry, soggy state. But my luck was about to change. “You’ve got room 1111,” the front desk clerk said. “That’s a lucky number.” I nodded, dripping, and thought little of luck.

Until the next day, at least, when wandering around the empty streets of the Pearl – four square kilometers of artificial islands surrounded by yachts and Venetian canals – I stumbled upon a cafe called 11:11. Only then did I connect all the recent “ones.”

I peered through the window, where behind the counter hung a neon sign that said “We met at the wrong time. That’s what I keep telling myself. Anyway maybe one day we’ll meet again.”

I walked inside expecting to be swept into a Murakami novel, but there was no one home except the barista, a nice Rwandan man named Fuwad. So I sat down to cool off and catch up on some messages.

The first thing I read was a tweet from music guy and legal guru Kyle Smith’s SuperRare interview, featuring an audio snippet where he describes AI as our collective subconscious made manifest.

It was a thought I hadn’t had before, but it hit home. AI is basically a neural network trained on the things we’ve done and made. But we must also recognize that the things we’ve done and made are inclusive of our deepest desires, our implicit biases – the things that we pour into our creations unawares.

How do we reckon with those subconscious secretions, ethically and legally? In 1976 George Harrison was found guilty of “subconsciously plagiarizing” the 1962 John Mack tune, “He’s So Fine,” in his song “My Sweet Lord.” There have since been untold cases — from Led Zeppelin vs Taurus to Ed Sheeran vs Marvin Gaye — that tackle the issue, begging questions about the thresholds of infringement and the contours of our own waking mind. To what extent is our own subconscious off limits? To what extent is our own subconscious even our own?

Universal access

We’ll have to reckon with these questions as we continue to feed the machine. What exactly will it eat? Which parts of ourselves will we omit? The structural decisions we make today about AI are pretty important. And right now they’re happening on a daily basis.

After OpenAI announced an agreement with the Associated Press to license their content, The New York Times updated its terms of service to prevent AI from scraping its content. On the music side, Google and Universal Music Group are reportedly in talks to license AI models for the latter’s roster.

Universal – alongside fellow major label Sony – is also suing the Internet Archive, a non-profit that, since 1996, has been archiving the Internet and digitizing cultural artifacts in an effort to “provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, people with print disabilities, and the general public.” Their mission “is to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge.”

Unfortunately universal access is at odds with Universal’s access, and the institution of copyright at large. The plaintiffs are particularly upset about the Internet Archive’s “Great 78 Project,” which aims to collect and digitize 78-rpm records (the standard vinyl format at the time) issued from the 1890s to the 1950s.

More questions – could the Internet Archive safeguard its archives by putting them on a public, decentralized blockchain? The parts of our pasts that we archive become training models not just for AI, but for future humans — what happens when the efforts to protect creators’ rights interfere with the process of cultural preservation? Shouldn’t we — at all costs — avoid censoring the database of human experience?

Pythagorean serum

When we do things like make wishes at 11:11, in a sense we’re tapping into a collective consciousness that dates back to antiquity, indirectly invoking Pythagoras’s belief that numbers themselves contain the true nature of the universe.

In numerology – a still popular, astrology-like mysticism Pythagoras taught that connects numbers to coinciding events (that I knew nothing about until I sought meaning behind all the ones) – there are three master numbers: 11, 22 and 33, representing the three phases of creation (envisioning, building and sharing). The most notable characteristic of 11, apparently, is its connection to a higher source of wisdom, and repeating numbers amplifies their effect.

Fairly certain I was engaging with apophenia – the tendency to recognize meaningful connections between seemingly unrelated things (Arrenofsky’s great film Pi is an example) – I contemplated my 11’s and the notion of vision. Does the subconscious inherently lack vision, because it lacks awareness? Or is it the substrate of our vision? Do all these ‘ones’ mean I’m to be envisaging something right now? How can I tell?

I recently stumbled upon this Lex Fridman podcast episode where guest Joscha Bach considers human consciousness as a virtual representation of reality in a way that isn’t so different from AI. And there’s a recent edition of MusicX that considers virtualhumans.org – a database of virtual influencers – where its founder Christopher Travers says said influencers “represent the ongoing merger of humanity and the internet. Virtual influencers enhance and humanize the world’s relationship with digital experiences.”

But in the words of Matt Klein, head of global foresight at Reddit (what a job title) – also referenced in the MusicX piece – “what we’re humanizing — our online convergence — may be unfit for personification. Perhaps it’s a step too far.”

Indeed, are we endangering our humanness by blurring these lines? Or, if AI really is our collective subconscious made manifest, are we just subconsciously trying to look at ourselves in the mirror? When we do, we may not like everything we see…

Music to raise the dead

Seeking refuge from the sun, I spent my afternoon in Doha in the Museum of Islamic Art, and I was fascinated by a folio from the largest medieval Qur’an ever copied – 177x111 centimeters (approximately six feet by 3.5 feet). According to lore, the angel Gabriel recited the Qur’an to the Prophet Muhammad over a period of approximately 23 years. I was struck by how beautiful Arabic – in this case the elegant muhaqqaq script – was, and how much it resembled musical notation.

I was also reminded of a passage I’d just read in Ted Gioia’s upcoming book, Music to Raise the Dead – an essay he titled “How Musicians Invented the Law.” The Locrian Code – the oldest written body of law in classical antiquity – was attributed to Zaleucus, “a lowly shepherd who was born a slave in a Greek colony in southern Italy,” he writes. Zaleucus apparently received his “guiding precepts” from the goddess Athena in a dream.

There’s also a Locrian mode — one of the diatonic modes in Western music theory — Gioia reminds us, which is mentioned by music theorists as far back as the third century BC. Folks like Pythogoras, Gioia says, “were revered as lawgivers, not because of any reputation for impartiality, but due to their visionary wisdom. And this wisdom was embedded in songs.”

Are the foundations of our earliest laws and religions just the products of dreams and visions? Could music, as Tolkien conceived, be the fundamental particulate of the universe from which all else formed? Our source of wisdom and reason? The serum of our collective subconscious – that abstruse reservoir from which we borrow and grow and create? If we cannot rightly say where John Mack starts and George Harrison begins, and we choose instead to build an attribution system that can litigate the space between, then perhaps we’re doing it wrong, and we should simply let it flow freely, and celebrate the whole lot of it as ours.

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. Thanks for being here.