Interesting sustainable music-tech projects

Afrorack

Brian Bamanya is a Ugandan artist, designer, and technologist who made his own modular synthesizer out of mostly scavenged parts. In a tongue in cheek reference to the eurorack standard he named his synthesizer system Afrorack. While sustainability was not his initial interest in the system design, many of the same design constraints he faced would apply to a more sustainable way of making electronic musical instruments. - modularity - second-hard scavenged parts

Some questions I have are that his work is primarily a DIY adventure. One would have to acquire advanced engineering skills in order to follow his path. However, he himself did not have all of these skills at the beginning of his journey. Rather, he acquired them through making. I question the persistent "scalability" question as I think it has a bunch of assumptions from startup culture and the interests of venture capital baked in. However, I do think it is valid to wonder how a musician interested in electronic music would acquire their instrument when they do not know how how and/or are uninterested in learning electrical engineering in order to make work. The DIY aesthetic itself is also a potential barrier in some contexts. What if a musician wants an instrument that looks polished and professionally made. Are there solutions that add these constraints to the more important constraints of the stress of the project on the ecosystem.

Behind the Afrorack is a desire to break with American and European and to reconnect with his African roots. “Our heritage does not come from Detroit, Chicago or Berlin – but from our own musical traditions. I am convinced that the next electronic music revolution will take place in Africa,” he said with confidence back in 2019.> Indeed, the current synthesizers sold on the market are mostly American or German. Besides their exorbitant price and their scarcity in Uganda, Bamyana rejects industrial tools. “The charm of DIY lies in its power of emancipation: you are able to build yourself an instrument so you are able to create music. I find it very anti-consumerist and I like that a lot“. source: pan-african-music

100r

hundred rabbits (100r) are a design team who live aboard a small sailboat. Their interests include permacomputing and software preservation. UXN is a computer language they wrote for designing software that would last a really long time and would be able to be run on old, outmoded computer hardware. It has been an incredibly successful project. I've seen evidence of artistic software for UXN running on old PDA's, computers from the early 90s, gameboys, and modern computers.

UXN is able to do this because it targets a small virtual machine with limited specs. (For example: all numbers are 8bit). The language is based on Forth. As Forth is a stack machine and only minimally abstracted from the underlying machine, this makes it easy to implement and re-implement. sssssssssssssddwsdddwwassds While I agree with their observation that much of the "progress" of computer tech in the last decades has just been bigger numbers, bigger files, and more wasted processor cycles, I think that the specs of UXN are a bit too limited to explore some really exciting DSP and artistic applications of technology. What does portable, preservable digital synthesis look like?

Modular synthesis

Modular synthesizers are an interesting conundrum when viewed through the lens of sustainable tech. On the one hand they seem designed in a more sustainable fashion. As valuable hardware synthesizers and music tools they are unlikely to be thrown away. As they are self-contained and interoperable, they are somewhat immune to forced obsolescence. Their open standards (such as eurorack) are modular. This makes the instrument easier to repair and customize over time - extending its life and novelty.

However, they are prohibitably expensive - the domain of collectors and hardware aficionados. It could take thousands of dollars to acquire enough equipment to replicate the same functionality that one could find with free VST plugins and any modern DAW. They are often collected by nerdy men who have disposable income and the culture surrounding them has a problematic history as a boy's club. ("muffwiggler" ect...) They are marketed based on novelty and those who use them seem to always be acquiring more equipment. This cuts against the sustainable potential of the technology.

Its unknown how repairable these instruments will ultimately be. One place to look for answers might be how historic modular synthesizers are maintained after their parts go out of production.