Tag: augmented reality

Postinternet Music

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

The third internet generation for music is here.

Purpose

MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE is on a bit of a hiatus. I started it 2 years ago with the goal of shedding light on topics that I felt were being neglected.

Two years later, I feel more positive about the conversation in the music business. Besides that, great newsletters (like Platform & Stream) and writers (like Cherie Hu) have emerged and cover a lot of the topics I set out to cover with MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE. So what role can I play now in moving the conversation forward?

I have been doing a lot of thinking about what’s next. How will all these trends we discuss combine? What are we not talking about? Where are the opportunities? What is the next generation of artists doing? What do they know that we don’t?

By thinking about this, I have slowly been reinventing MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE along with the topics I cover. Music as a business is a complex ecosystem. Music as a phenomenon has kept generations of musicologists and philosophers occupied in discussions without conclusions for millennia. The question I have been answering is: what do I find important and what is nobody talking about?

Inspiration

By focusing on innovation in music, and always expanding my musical and artistic horizons, I have seen some developments over the last year that are starting to click together. I am now of the opinion that we are seeing the emergence of an important new generation of music that is going to spawn its own ecosystem.

Broadly speaking, music & the internet has had two phases so far:

Phase 1: the great disruption

Let’s call it the Napster moment. It led to the first new status quo. The rule it imposed was this: “anything that can be stored in digits can be communicated digitally through networks.” (this rule has also been called “information wants to be free”) This introduced music, and its business ecosystem, to the age of networks. Instead of moving products through distribution and media channels, it now moved through networks… and anyone that wanted to play the game, no longer had to find a way into the channels — everyone was on the network.

MySpace Tom: a friend for everyone

Phase 2: the MySpace moment

This phase is probably heralded by what I call the MySpace moment. MySpace grew as piracy thrived. Communities formed. We understood what social media could mean for music. Then MySpace collapsed and there was nothing there to take its place. Instead, the smartphone enabled the next generation of music and social platforms. On-demand music services like Spotify and SoundCloud appeared — both making an impact on modern music culture far exceeding MySpace’s. Communities formed again.

Phase 3: the SoundCloud moment

So what’s phase 3? The streaming economy is maturing. We are still figuring out how it will work exactly. Let the constant lawsuits between musicians, songwriters, labels, and streaming services be a testament to that. The shitty smartphones we used to have, have been traded in for phones that are more powerful than the computers on our desks a few years ago. AND they have cameras on both sides, AND we have fast internet, ALL the time. Queue YouTubers, Instagram stars, as well as producers rebooting their careers by becoming Snapchat personalities. 🔑

Meme culture went mainstream. People retiring now, with lots of free time on their hands, have been using the internet for 20 years. People reaching maturity now don’t know the world without internet. They may have been carrying smartphones before taking their first chemistry class. It introduces new questions and phenomena in our culture and in music. A 2017 headline that captured one of those phenomena well was: “Rap’s Biggest Stars Are Depressed & So Are Their Fans”.

Net art commenting on internet & mental health.

OK OK OK SO WHAT IS PHASE 3?!

I can’t tell you. We can only see it once it’s there. But I can tell you how to be part of it.

With each of these shifts media culture shifted, so you have to look at what changes media culture is going through right now. Artificial intelligence, voice activated devices, augmented reality, and virtual reality all play tremendously important roles here. We still don’t know what the SoundClouds, Facebooks, Spotifys, PewDiePies and Justin Biebers (discovered through YouTube) of this phase will be, but we do know what technologies and media formats they may employ.

When MySpace started collapsing, everyone wanted to figure out what the ‘next MySpace’ would be. There was no next MySpace. Not in the way anyone was thinking about it. Ultimately, Facebook and SoundCloud filled that gap and took things way further than MySpace.

So what would the next SoundCloud look like?

This is what I know about the next SoundCloud. It can be clunky. In fact, it may be better if it’s not easy to use (e.g. Snapchat): kids will spend time figuring out how to move into virtual spaces where they can do their own thing. P2P services were not easy to use at first, torrents weren’t easy to use, and as elegant as it was, SoundCloud was not as easy to use as MySpace in its early days as long as you were trying to use it for MySpacey purposes.

It has to do 1 thing extremely well though (let’s call it ‘killer feature’). I remember that SoundCloud’s waveform & commenting feature was so great that artists were learning basic code, so they could remove MySpace’s standard players from their profiles and add SoundCloud’s waveform.

Then it has to have high cultural appeal. The waveform helped SoundCloud travel. It was cool. It’s hard to say what it will be like for the next SoundCloud… But perhaps it’s a cryptotoken. Blockchain is cool and cryptocurrencies are cool. They have cultural appeal, partly because of their association with ordering drugs online via the Tor network. But also because they represent dissent against the status quo, whether that’s valid or invalid. And the first cryptocurrency millionaires in music are already here. 50 Cent.

Perhaps Mat Dryhurst, a prolific thinker and artist (some may know him from his work with Holly Herndon), will be proven right and we will see a tokenized SoundCloud. Fingers crossed, because I admire what they’ve done and the role they’ve played in helping modern music & internet culture take shape.

But what about…

We assume too often that what comes next follows more or less linearly from what was there before. By doing so, we discount important developments and blind ourselves to their potential impact. In previous paragraphs, I have done exactly that. So it’s time to clean up my mess.

What is internet culture?

First of all, I need to clarify what I mean when I talk about internet culture or online culture. I am talking about audiovisual aesthetics, language, cultural memes like jokes, discourse about identity, politics, society and psychology. These emerge online. From bedrooms. From people of all ages and countries, connecting online to collaborate, iterate, remix, and discuss in virtual space.

This has manifested through music genres like vaporwave and nightcore (example below), but also more serious topics, such as a cultural emphasis on mental health, and identity (most notably gender identity). Then there’s a darker side to it too. The alt right has been able to create so much impact, from bedrooms, by using the same internet culture dynamics that previous examples utilize — eventually memeing Trump into the White House. They accomplished it as part of an alliance of mostly pre-internet organisations, institutions, and structures, but those organisations couldn’t have pulled this off without their internet army.

When I talk about internet culture, or online culture, I do not mean to suggest a separation between online and offline. I’m just pointing at the origin. As a matter of fact, the internet has become such a standard part of our lives that we are online even when we’re offline.

On a free weekend day, leave your phone at home. Go explore the city. Go to parts you’ve never been. Soon, you may get lost and want to check Google Maps. You may see something fascinating that you’d like to photograph and share on Instagram or Facebook. You might take a mental note to look that building up on Wikipedia when you get home to get more history.

By now, our minds are always online. Even when we believe we’re offline.

Always online

This is the number 1 thing that changed over the course of aforementioned phase 2. Even when smartphones arrived, we weren’t online all the time. But now we are. The fact that we are always carrying devices around that are connected to fast internet, with cameras on both sides, and with great screens compared to those 5–10 years ago, is one of the most important realities for the future of music.

Musical.ly, sold last year for around $1bn, comes to mind.

Mixed reality

How platforms deal with ‘mixed reality’ may be as crucial as the question of how the previous generation dealt with the rise of the smartphone. Back in Facebook’s younger days, the company was struggling to crack mobile and eventually took drastic measures to become mobile-first. Getting ahead of the problem this time, Facebook entered the virtual reality space in 2014 through the early acquisition of Oculus VR for $2bn.

But I don’t think it’s VR as a medium that will have the high cultural impact that the internet did. I think it’s about the interface to other aspects of our experience. It’s why I believe the below video of Mark Zuckerberg’s wife, Priscilla Chan, calling Mark from ‘the real world’ while he’s in a VR version of his home, was one of the most important tech showcases last year.

Skip to 4:50 if the video doesn’t auto-play from there.

Offline and online is blurring, so what does that imply for music?

Instreaming

Late last year I attended a gig that has really started falling into place since. A friend from Holland (Victor, also known as S x m b r a) was coming to Berlin to do a gig. I met him when he was mostly known for writing for Generation Bass — an important blog for underground bass music culture. He is extremely plugged in and knows so much about trends in music (particularly online niches), so I really trust him as a music curator.

He is also part of something called c a r e, which is described as:

c a r e is a post-internet party taking place online.
c a r e is about sharing together. c a r e is a future sensation.
this digital experience enables you to connect with internet kids worldwide. it also provides the opportunity to meet and discover artists and people which have common interests. we are a based world community that meets at url parties. we are glad to invite you to this virtual concept of partying. we hope you’ll enjoy the event! see you online.

Through c a r e, he teamed up an interdisciplinary collective called Clusterduck which specialises in internet culture. Together they organised a “url / irl party” as part of Clusterduck’s Internet Fame project, which is part of the Wrong Biennale — a global event celebrating digital art.

During the event, an audio & video stream connected people from their bedrooms to the ‘irl’ event. These people could interact with each other online, but they were also “instreamed” so their chat messages & webcam feeds on Tinychat would be shown inside the party. The founder of c a r e, who wasn’t present in person, is even billed on the poster and broadcasted a DJ set from url to the irl space in Berlin.

A lot of people at the ‘irl’ part of the event were familiar with some of the people they saw on the ‘url’ part displayed on a prominent screen above the dancefloor & bar. So it created this sense of community & connection and blurring of irl & url.

You could walk into such an event and think it’s just some young folks who set up some webcams, but when you see it as part of the greater trends in our all-absorbing media & tech culture, what was happening there becomes way more significant.

Internet culture and music

I will be going way deeper into this in future articles and newsletters, but I want to give you an example of what I think people should be paying attention to.

For example, the Sponsored Content album by an artist called Antwood. It’s a perfect example of the post-internet avant-garde expression in music. Antwood:

“In the past year, I found that ASMR [dubbed by Google as the biggest YouTube trend you’ve never heard of], which I had previously used as a source of foley in my music, was a fairly effective sleep aid. I’d been using the videos in this way for a few months, when I noticed a popular ASMR YouTuber announced a plan to incorporate ads into her videos; quiet, subtle ads, woven into the content. What bothered me about this was that these ads would target viewers, such as myself, during times of semi lucid vulnerability. This disturbed me, and I unsubscribed.

Sponsored Content explores this idea of subversive advertisement, at least superficially. It’s obviously about the ubiquity of ads and the commodification of online content. The unlikely placement of ads in the music aims to force the listener to become hyper-aware of being advertised to rather than passively internalizing it. But after the record was finished, it became undeniable that really it wasn’t so much a “concept record” about advertisement; it’s as much about intentionally devaluing the things I’ve invested myself into, and over-complicating my work. When I realized this, I considered taking the ads out, and playing the music straight. But I left the record as it is: honest, flawed, with a little humour, and slightly up its own ass.”

I’ve compiled over 25 hours of albums and releases that I feel adhere to this trend in music (Spotify playlist). My playlist biases towards the club & nightlife variants of this trend, but the visual and musical aesthetics & themes should give you a good understanding of what this is about. The most famous example is probably Arca, who has produced for Kanye West and Björk.

Aforementioned Holly Herndon, who toured with Radiohead, uses AI in her work: “We have an AI baby that we’re training on our voices; on our voices and on the voices of our ensemble. Yeah, it’s learning how to talk and how to sing, so it’s freaking weird”.

Another great example of the post-internet trend in arts and music is YouTuber Poppy, who recently released an album called Poppy.Computer on Mad Decent.

Besides the obvious commentary on internet culture & society on her channel, Poppy plays with the uncanny valley hypothesis of robotics professor Masahiro Mori. The hypothesis suggests that humans feel fine with robots that are obviously not human, but the more semblance these robots get to humans, the stronger our feelings of eeriness and revulsion.

In music, perhaps the best known example of a post-internet genre is vaporwave:

The Virtual Vaporwave Scene

From boardroom to bedroom

Over the last 2 years, I have written a lot about the music business ecosystem. Always with an innovative angle, but often focused on the type of big issues that are discussed and decided about in boardrooms. While those things are immensely important, it’s also reactive. Reaction doesn’t set trajectory — it can only adjust it.

My focus is going to shift from the boardroom to the bedroom. From complex issues with big financial implications, to profound ideas that may not always have a clear link to monetization. It is a focus on the creator, the inventor, the innovator.

The newsletter has always placed emphasis on utility. I want what I do to be useful in some way. The most important way in which I try to do that, is by showing what is next, which I will continue to do. What is next is already here — you just have to know where to look.

This is our culture we are talking about. That is primary.
That is what enables the business around it. Which is secondary.

MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE. Those words say it all.

(This post originally appeared on Medium, which I’m moving away from. When you can avoid the large platforms, you should.)

What the End of the App Era Means for the Music Business

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

The average smartphone user downloads less than 1 app per month, according to comScore. The era of apps is ending, and we’re moving in an era of artificial intelligence interacting with us through messaging apps, chatbots, voice-controlled interfaces, and smart devices.

What happens to music in this context? How do you make sure your music stands out? How do you communicate your brand when the interface goes from visual to conversational? And what strategic opportunities and challenges does the conversational interface present to streaming services?

 

What is the next record? Moving beyond the recording industry

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

What will the next format be to usher in a new music industry, like the record did in the 20th century?

The 20th century saw the rise of consumerist culture as a response to mass production causing supply to outgrow consumer demand. An example of this phenomenon is 20th century fashion which became highly cyclical (and wasteful), marketing new clothes for every season. After World War II, it became common to use clothing to express oneself through styles and fashions which often went hand-in-hand with music subcultures, just think of hippies, skinheads and punk music, hiphop, funk, or disco.

“Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction and our ego satisfaction in consumption. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever-increasing rate.”
– Victor Lebow (Journal of Retailing, Spring 1955)

Consumerism helped turn the recording industry into the most powerful part of the music business ecosystem, something which had previously been dominated by publishers. It changed music. The record player moved into the living room, then every room of the house, and the walkman (now smartphone) put music into every pocket. Music gained and lost qualities along the way.

Previously, it had been common for middle class families to have a piano in the home. Music was a social activity; music was alive. If you wanted to hear your favourite song, it would sound slightly different every time. With the recording, music became static and sounded the same way every time. And the shared songs of our culture were displaced by corporate-controlled pop music. People stopped playing the piano; and creators and ‘consumers’ became more clearly distinguished culturally.

With streaming, we are reaching the final stage of this development. Have a look at the above Victor Lebow quote and tell me streaming does not contribute to music being worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever-increasing rate.

The rules of mass production don’t apply to music anymore, since it’s no longer about pressing recordings: anything can be copied & distributed infinitely on the web. The democratisation of music production has turned many ‘consumers’ into creators again. Perhaps this started with drum computers, which helped kick off two of today’s fastest growing genres in the 70s and 80s: hiphop and house music. Today, this democratisation has turned our smartphones into music studios, with producers of worldwide hits making songs on their iPhones.

We see more people producing music, our Soundcloud feeds are constantly updated, Spotify‘s algorithms send new music out to us through daily mixes, Discover Weekly, Release Radar, Fresh Finds, and we now have the global phenomenon of New Music Fridays. With this massive amount of new music, we are simply not connecting to music in the same way as we did when music was scarce. We move on faster. As a result, music services, music providers essentially, place a big emphasis on music discovery as a result. We shift from the age of mass media, and mass production, to something more complex: many-to-many, and decentralised (music) production on a massive scale.

Has consumerism broken music culture? I don’t think so. As a matter of fact, consumerism is also what producers of music creation software and hardware depend on, which contributes to the democratisation of music and returning musical participation to the days of the piano as the default music playback device.

If streaming is the final stage of the age of the recording, then what’s next?

Embedded deep in the cultures of hiphop and house music, we can see what cultural values are important to the age of democratised music creation. Both genres heavily sampled disco and funk early on in their lifecycles. One of the most famous samples in hiphop and electronic music culture is the Amen Break. With the advent of the sampler, the drum break of the Winston‘s Amen Brother became widespread and instrumental to the birth and development of subgenres of electronic music in the 90s.

Not so long ago, ‘remix culture’ was still a notion one could discuss in abstract terms, for instance in the open-source documentary RiP!: A Remix Manifesto which discussed the topic at length. Things have changed fast however, turning the formerly abstract into a daily reality for many.

Since the documentary’s release in 2008, social networks have boomed. Back then, only 24% of the US population was active on social media, but now that’s ~80%. With the increasing socialisation of the web, as well as it being easier to manipulate images, we saw an explosion of internet memes, typically in the form of image macros which can be adjusted to fit new contexts or messages.

The same is happening to music through ‘Soundcloud culture’. Genres are born fast through remix, and people iterate on new ideas rapidly. A recent example of such a genre is moombahton which is now one of the driving sounds behind today’s pop music.

Snapchat filters and apps like Musically let users playing around with music and placing ourselves in the context of the song. Teens nowadays are not discovering music by some big budget music video broadcasted to them on MTV, they are discovering it by seeing their friend dance to it on Musically.

Music is becoming interactive, and adaptable to context.

Matching consumer trends and expectations with technology

Perhaps music is one of the first fields in which consumerist culture has hit a dead end, making it necessary for it to evolve to something beyond itself. People increasingly expect interactivity, since expressing yourself just by the music you listen to is not enough anymore to express identity.

Music production is getting easier. If combined with internet meme culture, it makes sense for people to use music for jokes or to make connections by making pop culture references through sampling. Vaporwave is a great example. But also internet rave things like this:

Instead of subcultures uniting behind bands and icons, they can now participate in setting the sound of its genre, creating a more customised type of sound that is more personally relevant to the listener and creator.

Artificial intelligence will make it even easier to quickly create music and remixes. Augmented reality, heavily emphasized in Apple’s latest product release, is basically remix as a medium. When AI, augmented reality, and the internet of things converge, our changing media culture will speed up to form new types of contexts for music.

That’s where the future of music lies. Not in the static recording, but in the adaptive. The recording industry that rose from the record looked nothing like the publishing industry. It latched on to the trend of consumerism and created a music industry of a scale never seen before. Now that we’ve reached peak-consumerism, and are at the final phase of the cycle for the static recording, there’s room for something new and adaptive. And like with the recording business before, the music business that will rise from adaptive media will look nothing like the current music industry.

The next 3 interfaces for music’s near future

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Our changing media reality means everyone in music will have to come to grips with three important new trends.

Understanding the music business means understanding how people access, discover, and continuously listen to music. This used to be the record player, cassette player, radio, cd player, and now increasingly happens on our computers and smartphones. First by playing downloads in media players like Winamp, Musicmatch Jukebox, or iTunes, but now mostly via streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music, but also YouTube.

Whenever the interface for music changes, the rules of the game change. New challenges emerge, new players get to access the space, and those to best leverage the new media reality gain a significant lead over competing services or companies, like Spinnin Records‘ early YouTube success.

What is a media reality?

I was recently talking with Gigi Johnson, the Executive Director of the UCLA Center for Music Innovation, for their podcast, and as we were discussing innovation, I wanted to point out two different types of innovation. There is technological innovation, like invention, but you don’t have to be a scientist or an inventor to be innovative.

When the aforementioned categories of innovations get rolled out, they create new realities. Peer-to-peer technology helped Spotify with the distribution of music early on (one of their lead engineers is Ludvig Strigeus, creator of BitTorrent client utorrent), and for this to work, Spotify needed a media reality in which computers were linked to each other in networks with decent bandwidth (ie. the internet).

So that’s the second type of innovation: leveraging a reality created by the proliferation of a certain technology. Studios didn’t have to invent the television in order to dominate the medium. Facebook didn’t have to invent the world wide web.

A media reality is any reality in which innovation causes a shift to a new type of media. Our media reality is increasingly shifting towards smart assistants like Siri, an ‘internet of things’ (think smart home), and we’re creating, watching, and interacting through more high quality video than ever before.

Any new media reality brings with it new interfaces through which people interact with knowledge, their environment, friends, entertainment, and whatever else might be presented through these interfaces. So let’s look at the new interfaces everyone in music will have to deal with in the coming years.

Chatbots are the new apps

People don’t download as many apps as they used to and it’s getting harder to get people to install an app. According to data by comScore, most smartphone users now download fewer than 1 app per month.

So, in dealing with this new media reality, you go to where the audience is. Apparently that’s no longer in app stores, but on social networks and messaging apps. Some of the latter, and most prominently Facebook Messenger, allow for people to build chatbots, which are basically apps inside the messenger.

Companies like Transferwise, CNN, Adidas, Nike, and many airlines already have their own bots running on Messenger. In music, well-known examples of artist chatbots are those by Katy Perry and DJ Hardwell. Record Bird, a company specialized in surfacing new releases by artists you like, launched their own bot on messenger in 2016.

The challenge with chatbots is that designing for a conversational interface is quite different from designing visual user interfaces. Sometimes people will not understand what’s going on and start requesting things from your bot that you may not have anticipated. Such behaviours need to be anticipated, since people can not see the confines of the interface.

Chatbots are set to improve a lot over time, as developments in machine learning and artificial intelligence will help the systems behind the interfaces to interpret what users may mean and come up with better answers.

VUIs: Alexa, play me music from… uhmm….

I’ve been living with an Amazon Echo for over a month and together with my Philips Hue lamps it has imbedded itself into my life to the extent that I nearly asked Alexa, Amazon‘s voice assistant, to turn off the lights in a hotel room last weekend.

It’s been a pleasure to trade in the frequent returns to touch-based user interfaces for voice user interfaces (VUIs). I thought I’d feel awkward, but it’s great to quickly ask for weather updates, planned activities, the time, changing music, changing the volume, turning the lights on or off or dimming them, setting alarms, etc. without having to grab my phone.

I also thought it would be awkward having friends over and interacting with it, but it turns into a type of play, with friends trying out all kinds of requests I had never even thought of, and finding out about new features I wasn’t aware of.

And there’s the challenge for artists and businesses.

As a user, there is no home screen. There is nothing to guide you. There is only what you remember, what’s top of mind. Which is why VUIs are sometimes referred to as ‘zero UI’.

I have hundreds of playlists on Spotify, but through Alexa I’ve only listened to around a dozen different playlists. When I feel like music that may or may not be contained inside one of my playlists, it’s easier to mentally navigate to an artist that plays music like that, than to remember the playlist. So you request the artist instead.

VUIs will make the branding of playlists crucial. For example, instead of asking for Alexa to play hiphop from Spotify, I requested their RapCaviar playlist, because I felt the former query’s outcome would be too unpredictable. As the music plays, I’m less aware of the artist names, as I don’t even see them anymore and I hardly ever bother asking. For music composed by artificial intelligence, this could be a great opportunity to enter our music listening habits.

The VUI pairs well with the connected home, which is why tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Apple are all using music as the trojan horse to get their home-controlling devices into our living rooms. They’re going to be the operating system for our houses, and that operating system will provide an invisible layer that we interact with through our voice.

Although many of the experiences through VUIs feel a bit limited currently, they’re supposed to get better over time (which is why Amazon calls their Alexa apps ‘skills’). And with AI improving and becoming more widespread, these skills will get better to the point that they can anticipate our intentions before we express them.

As voice-controlled user interfaces enter more of our lives, the question for artists, music companies, and startups is: how do we stand out when there is no visual component? How can you stay top of mind? How will people remember you?

Augmented reality

Google Glass was too early. Augmented reality will be nothing like it.

Instead of issuing awkward voice commands to a kind of head mounted smartphone, the media reality that augmented reality will take shape in is one of conversational interfaces through messaging apps, and voice user interfaces, that are part of connected smart environments, all utilizing powerful artificial intelligence.

You won’t have to issue requests, because you’ll see overlays with suggested actions that you can easily trigger. Voice commands are a last resort, and a sign of AI failing to predict your intent.

So what is music in that reality? In a way, we’re already there. Kids nowadays are not discovering music by watching professional video productions on MTV; they discover music because they see friends dancing to it on Musically or they applied some music-enabled Snapchat-filter. We are making ourselves part of the narrative of the music, we step into it, and forward our version of it into the world. Music is behaving like internet memes, because it’s just so easy to remix now.

One way in which augmented reality is going to change music, is that music will become ‘smart’. It will learn to understand our behaviour, our intentions, and adapt to it, just like other aspects of our lives would. Some of Amazon Alexa‘s most popular skills already include music and sound to augment our experience.

This is in line with the trend that music listeners are increasingly exhibiting a utilitarian orientation towards music; interacting with music not just for the aesthetic, but also its practical value through playlists to study, focus, workout, clean the house, relax and drink coffee, etc.

As it becomes easier to manipulate music, and make ourselves part of the narrative, perhaps the creation of decent sounding music will become easier too. Just have a look at AI-powered music creation and mastering startups such as Jukedeck, Amper, and LANDR. More interestingly, check out Aitokaiku‘s Vimu, which lets you create videos with reactive music (the music reacts to what you film).

Imagine releasing songs in such a way that fans can interact and share them this way, but even better since you’ll be able to use all the data from the smart sensors in the environment.

Imagine being able to bring your song, or your avatar, into a space shared by a group of friends. You can be like Pokemon.

It’s hard to predict what music will look like, but it’s safe to say that the changes music went through since the proliferation of the recording as the default way to listen to music are nothing compared to what’s coming in the years ahead. Music is about to become a whole lot more intelligent.

For more on how interfaces change the way we interact with music, I’ve previously written about how the interface design choices of pirate filesharing services such as Napster influence music streaming services like Spotify to this day.

If you like the concept about media realities and would like to get a better understanding of it, I recommend spending some time to go through Marshall McLuhan‘s work, as well as Timothy Leary‘s perspective on our digital reality in the 90s.

Google Glass

When augmented reality converges with AI and the Internet of Things

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

The confluence of augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things is rapidly giving rise to a new digital reality.

Remember when people said mobile was going to take over?

Well, we’re there. Some of the biggest brands in our world are totally mobile: Instagram, Snapchat, Uber. 84% (!) of Facebook’s ad revenue now comes from mobile.

And mobile will, sooner or later, be replaced by augmented reality devices, and it will look nothing like Google Glass.

Google Glass
Not the future of augmented reality.

Why some predictions fail

When viewing trends in technology in isolation, it’s inevitable you end up misunderstanding them. What happens is that we freeze time, take a trend and project the trend’s future into a society that looks almost exactly like today’s society.

Past predictions about the future
Almost.

This drains topics of substance and replaces it with hype. It causes smart people to ignore it, while easily excited entrepreneurs jump on the perceived opportunity with little to no understanding of it. Three of these domains right now are blockchain, messaging bots, and virtual reality, although I count myself lucky to know a lot of brilliant people in these areas, too.

What I’m trying to say is: just because it’s hyped, doesn’t mean it doesn’t deserve your attention. Don’t believe the hype, and dig deeper.

The great convergence

In order to understand the significance of a lot of today’s hype-surrounded topics, you have to link them. Artificial intelligence, smart homes & the ‘Internet of Things’, and augmented reality will all click together seamlessly a decade from now.

And that shift is already well underway.

Artificial intelligence

The first time I heard about AI was as a kid in the 90s. The context: video games. I heard that non-playable characters (NPCs) or ‘bots’ would have scripts that learned from my behaviour, so that they’d get better at defeating me. That seemed amazing, but their behaviour remained predictable.

In recent years, there have been big advances in artificial intelligence. This has a lot to do with the availability of large data sets that can be used to train AI. A connected world is a quantified world and data sets are continuously updated. This is useful for training algorithms that are capable of learning.

This is also what has given rise to the whole chatbot explosion right now. Our user interfaces are changing: instead of doing things ourselves, explicitly, AI can be trained to interpret our requests or even predict and anticipate them.

Conversational interfaces sucked 15 years ago. They came with a booklet. You had to memorize all the voice commands. You had to train the interface to get used to your voice… Why not just use a remote control? Or a mouse & keyboard? But in the future, getting things done by tapping on our screens may look as archaic as it would be to do everything from a command-line interface (think MS-DOS).

XKCD Sudo make me a sandwich
There are certain benefits to command-line interfaces… (xkcd)

So, right now we see all the tech giants diving into conversational interfaces (Google Home, Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, Facebook Messenger, and Microsoft, err… Tay?) and in many cases opening up APIs to let external developers build apps for them. That’s right: chatbots are APPS that live inside or on top of conversational platforms.

So we get new design disciplines: conversational interfaces, and ‘zero UI’ which refers to voice-based interfaces. Besides developing logical conversation structures, integrating AI, and anticipating users’ actions, a lot of design effort also goes into the personality of these interfaces.

But conversational interfaces are awkward, right? It’s one of the things that made people uncomfortable with Google Glass: issuing voice commands in public. Optimists argued it would become normalized, just like talking to a bluetooth headset. Yet currently only 6% of of people who use voice assistants ever do so in public… But where we’re going, we won’t need voice commands. At least not as many.

The Internet of Things

There are still a lot of security concerns around littering our lives with smart devices: from vending machines in our offices, to refrigerators in our homes, to self-driving cars… But it seems to be an unstoppable march, with Amazon (Alexa) and Google (Home) intensifying the battle for the living room last year:

Let’s converge with the trend of artificial intelligence and the advances made in that domain. Instead of having the 2016 version of voice-controlled devices in our homes and work environments, these devices’ software will develop to the point where they get a great feeling of context. Through understanding acoustics, they can gain spacial awareness. If that doesn’t do it, they could use WiFi signals like radar to understand what’s going on. Let’s not forget cameras, too.

Your smart device knows what’s in the fridge before you do, what the weather is before you even wake up, it may even see warning signs about your health before you perceive them yourself (smart toilets are real). And it can use really large data sets to help us with decision-making.

And that’s the big thing: our connected devices are always plugged into the digital layer of our reality, even when we’re not interacting with them. While we may think we’re ‘offline’ when not near our laptops, we have started to look at the world through the lens of our digital realities. We’re acutely aware of the fact that we can photograph things and share them to Instagram or Facebook, even if we haven’t used the apps in the last 24 hours. Similarly, we go places without familiarizing ourselves with the layout of the area, because we know we can just open Google Maps any time. We are online, even when we’re offline.

Your connected home will be excellent at anticipating your desires andbehaviour. It’s in that context that augmented reality will reach maturity.

Google Home

Augmented reality

You’ve probably already been using AR. For a thorough take on the trend, go read my piece on how augmented reality is overtaking mobile. Two current examples of popular augmented reality apps: Snapchat and Pokémon Go. The latter is a great example of how you can design a virtual interaction layer for the physical world.

So the context in which you have to imagine augmented reality reaching maturity is a world in which our environments are smart and understand our intentions… in some cases predicting them before we even become aware of them.

Our smart environments will interact with our AR device to pull up HUDs when we most need them. So we won’t have to do awkward voice commands, because a lot of the time, it will already be taken care of.

Examples of HUDs in video games
Head-up displays (HUDs) have long been a staple of video games.

This means we don’t actually have to wear computers on our heads. Meaning that the future of augmented reality can come through contact lenses, rather than headsets.

But who actually wants to bother with that, right? What’s the point if you can already do everything you need right now? Perhaps you’re too young to remember, but that’s exactly what people said about mobile phones years ago. Even without contact lenses, all of these trends are underway now.

Augmented reality is an audiovisual medium, so if you want to prepare, spend some time learning about video game design, conversational interfaces, and get used to sticking your head in front of a camera.

There will be so many opportunities emerging on the way there, from experts on privacy and security (even political movements), to designing the experiences, to new personalities… because AR will have its own PewDiePie.

It’s why I just bought a mic and am figuring out a way to add audiovisual content to the mix of what I produce for MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE. Not to be the next PewDiePie, but to be able to embrace mediums that will extend into trends that will shape our digital landscapes for the next 20 years. More on that soon.

And if you’re reading this and you’re in music, then you’re in luck:
People already use music to augment their reality.

More on augmented reality by me on the Synchtank blog:
Projecting Trends: Augmented Reality is Overcoming its Hurdles to Overtake Mobile.

The 2010 Google Patent You Should Know About in Pokemon Go’s Wake

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Six years ago, tech media widely reported a Google patent that would let it replace real-world ads on billboards, with virtual ones in Google Street View. Google, after all, is in the ads business, so if they create a virtual layer that represents the real world, they’re going to place their ads in that virtual layer.
Google Street View Patent 2

The VP of Product for Google Maps and Street View at the time was John Hanke. Hanke is also known for being the founder of Google’s internal startup Niantic, which was later spun off and created PokĂŠmon Go. The game uses Google Maps for its virtual layer and has its own information layer on top of that. PokĂŠmon Go has tens of millions of daily active players and has managed to do what Google Glass was supposed to do: make augmented reality mainstream.

John Hanke

Augmented reality is an excellent space for advertising. It generates a ton of data on users that helps you serve them with relevant, local and timely suggestions. The company to make the most money off of this, is not the one that does the advertising, it’s the one that owns the network. The large investments we’re seeing in virtual reality by the tech giants have nothing to do with games, or even the mundane applications of the technology they’re investing in. The investments are about who is going to control the primary augmentation layer people will use.

For some, it might be a lifelong dream to just create a cool augmented reality game that gets people off the couch and into the real world. But for others, this is about more – it’s a virtual land grab and defining the rules before others do, so they can scale these patents to their full potential.

Go deeper: read my longer think piece on augmented reality, advertising and music on the Synchtank blog.

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