News

1690129852 (07/23/2023)

Polities, pricipalities, and the struggle that lies ahead.

Sonic Multiplicities is nearing its 14th year, right as the world plunges into a conversation (or rather, wishful thinking) about AI in the arts. The mainstream is concerned largely with asynchronous genertaion based upon English-language prompts. This is not realistic; if we accept this as music's future, then music has no future.

Indeed, if the ghouls pursuing machine learning seek to “productize” their PhD researchers' work too early, and if people accept this as the new standard for music composition, we will see the death of music in our lifetime.

Sonic Multiplicities is nothing if it is not a harsh rebuke of the current state of affairs. We began the project while we were studying at the Jacobs School of Music. Our disdain for what the academics considered “appropriate” uses of personal computers in music composition and performance led us on this initial journey.

We envisioned a world where neural networks assisted expert performers at expanding their horizons and musical potential. We wanted to hear brand new things never before done in music. And I believe we have succeeded for at least the past decade.

We achieved this by eshewing what was easy. We never gave in to our beliefs and our values. We made a system of music composition, performance, and collaboration that in no way shape or form required the use of clunky hardware controllers or DAWs.

At the heart of our answer to this dilemma is the realization that music is made at a specific moment in time. SM's software core instantiates itself within a certain context: a time, a place, and a person. It then seeks to get “new” musical concepts out of your performance in real time. It sometimes is adversarial in order to get what it wants. Other times, it listens carefully and follows along. But no matter what is happening, its bias is towards the very thing that both academia and pop music have refused to embrace: new ideas.

If you were an SM performer over these past years, then you were given the tools you might need to be skeptical of the overwhelming technocracy much of the globe has needlessly plunged into. You were given a way to understand the risks and the lies within many of our twisted communication paradigms, years before common people could put together the legitimate dangers in social media, in media manipulation, in narrative manufacturing, and in the public health institutions that to this day want high-achieving, high-IQ, and high-value individuals to die.

But now, the future we wanted to avoid and the world that SM sought to protect against, has arrived. We are at a point of no return and there is no going back. In 2010, we were merely agonizing over the fact that the new US President, Barack Obama, murdered an American citizen with a drone strike - unprecedented in US presidential history.

Today, most of us would do anything we could to go back to those times. There were no forced lockdowns, no Americans supporting a far-right neo nazi coup in Ukraine, and no need to shout “black trans lives matter” from the rooftops to keep your social credit in check.

Since there is no going back, Sonic Multiplicities must also seek to move forward. We intend to do this by expanding the scope of this music system to embrace new, but very compatible values: decentralization and freedom.

Sonic Multiplicities will always be the name for the portion of our music system that handles the real-time input logic of the musician and the resulting output from the audio synthesis engine. It will always be the musical ideator.

But what if we could expand out from merely time, place, and person? What if we could compositionally embrace the distribution and localization we'll all need to survive the coming years?

Introducing: Sonic Principalities.

In the coming months, we will be developing brand new ideologies, implementations, and musical concepts that represent the nature of today's musical-technological dangers. Sonic Multiplicities must become a protocol that can be deployed in a decentralized manner. It will leverage peer-to-peer networking to ensure data is synchronized among all SM performers, and will make use of the continuum of all other SM performers and their data to further modify the way the software's logic functions.

It will be a very significant build-out and will lead to a new era of experimentation for us.

We look forward to having you on the next stage of our journey.