Sustainable Music Technology/ Un-alienated Music Technology

What follows is a very early idea for my thesis... I will update this page with my actual paper

"You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been." ― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

Music Technology

I am an artist and a technologist. I create and practice art - music mostly. I also create tools to create music with. I love both of these practices. For me, they are deeply intertwined.

Livecoding/Algorave Eurorack synthesizers Drum machines and hardware synthesizers Laptop based production

I want to base my investigation of sustainable ICT in music technology because its what I know best and its technology that I don't wish to live without. I could go the rest of my life without attending another zoom meeting, or reading another tweet. I don't know if I can say the same for playing with synthesizers.

False Dichotomies in Technology

“Technology is the active human interface with the material world. But the word is consistently misused to mean only the enormously complex and specialised technologies of the past few decades, supported by massive exploitation both of natural and human resources.” - Ursula K. LeGuin, A Rant About Technology

LeGuin wrote the above in an essay she published in response to a reviewer who had accused her of only writing "soft" science fiction. Soft meaning non-technological. The review went as far to say that "technology is carefully avoided" in LeGuin's work. Of course, LeGuin's work contains plenty of technology - just not the kind the reviewer had in mind. LeGuin's response points out this common substitution that is made when discussing technology. "Hi-tech" is taken as a stand in for all technology.

"We have been so desensitized by a hundred and fifty years of ceaselessly expanding technical prowess that we think nothing less complex and showy than a computer or a jet bomber deserves to be called "technology " at all. As if linen were the same thing as flax — as if paper, ink, wheels, knives, clocks, chairs, aspirin pills, were natural objects, born with us like our teeth and fingers -- as if steel saucepans with copper bottoms and fleece vests spun from recycled glass grew on trees, and we just picked them when they were ripe... One way to illustrate that most technologies are, in fact, pretty "hi," is to ask yourself of any manmade object, Do I know how to make one? "

This false dichotomy between high and low technology is incredibly problematic. As LeGuin points out, the past centuries relentless pursuit of every "higher" technology has had devastating consequences on our shared ecology.

Problem Space

Studies estimate ICT accounts for ₁.8-2.8% of global emissions. Recent studies increase that estimate to ₂.1-3.9%. These emissions are estimated to increase. (Widdicks et al. 2020)

Aviation accounts for ₂.5-3.5% of global emissions. (Richie 2020)

We are used to thinking about emissions that occur through use. Our appliances used to more or less work this way. The emissions that result from building a refrigerator are dwarfed by the emissions from running it all day every day. ICT does not follow this pattern. The lion's share of the emissions from the use of computers are from the manufacturing process and the material supply chains that said manufacturing relies upon. Computer's give the illusion of being "clean" because the massive ecological expenditure needed for their creation occurs long before a consumer ever gets their hands on one.

• Apple’s total 2021 emissions: 22.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide
• 75% was the manufacture of new devices (Gupta et al. 2020)

False Solutions

I do not think the solution to the problems above is to simply stop using "hi-tech" or to only use "natural" means of making sound. Valuing only "low-tech" music creates a mirror problem to the one LeGuin points out. Natural vs. Artificial is itself a false dichotomy with a problematic history.

I also do not think that a solution lies in increasing efficiency in manufacturing, consumption, or recycling of ICT. - Jevon’s Paradox - Increasing efficiency will be accompanied by an increase in consumption that wipes out the gains made through efficiency. Focusing solely on energy and emissions also ignores a whole host of other, related problems - notably exploitative labor relationships between the Global North and the Global South.

Technical solutions rarely work in absence of culture. Anthropologist David Graeber argued that culture is created by acts of "creative refusal". The word "creative" is important here. In order to survive the compound climate and ecological crises, we will need to go beyond wholesale rejection/acceptance of the status quo.

We need a more general way of understanding the tangle we are in with our technology. In Generative Engineering and Generative Justice, Ron Eglash proposes that ...

Research Question

"I don't know how to build and power a refrigerator, or program a computer, but I don't know how to make a fishhook or a pair of shoes, either. I could learn. We all can learn. That's the neat thing about technologies. They're what we can learn to do."

This is the spirit in which I want to begin my investigation of music technology. If technology are the things we can learn to build, can we learn to build the tools for making electronic music in a way that is compatible with our mutual survival? Is it possible to re-claim to tools of the "hi-tech" world and re-formulate them so they can be used responsibly?

How does one create music technology in a way that is sustainable and just? To what extent is it possible to utilize computation for creative expression while ensuring un-alienated circulation of value through both a community and an environment? (Eglash 2018) To what extent can one effectively address these topics in design (by making things) and through design (by provoking critical reactions in users and designers)? (Mankoff 2007, Dorigatti 2022)

Hypothesis

"A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system. " - John Gall, General Systematics

Designing in, with, and for a community that already circulates un-alienated value will reveal paths to a sustainable and just music technology.

scrap:

The things we choose learn how to do and the things we choose build are just that - choices. It stands to reason then that we can choose to learn and build different things and in different ways. Technology is often presented as inevitable - as if its invention and use were not the result of human intervention or at least almost entirely out of human control. This argument usually takes the form of "Well, someone else would have done it eventually" and "once its in the world you can't go back." Indeed "going back" is a dubious idea at best. Why would we choose to live in a world

early brainstorming

• Thesis Project Brainstorming
• Feedback on Thesis ideas