This document summarizes a presentation on various topics related to music, media, and technology. It discusses the history of remixing and reusing music, the concept of spreadable media, examples of viral videos like the Harlem Shake, the use of music in games, open source tools for musicians, emerging technologies, and challenges around surveillance, credibility and professionalism versus amateurism. The presentation aims to be interdisciplinary and cover collaboration across fields.

1. Bits and Bobs
Yuwei Lin
Lecturer in Future Media
School of Arts and Media
University of Salford
y.lin @ salford.ac.uk

2. Something about myself

3. Getting my hands dirty

4. What I will cover today
● Remixing and Reusing
● Spreadable Media
● Open Source, Music and hacking
● Inter-disciplinarity and collaboration
● Music in games
● gamifying music
● Challenges
● Emergent technologies

5. Reusing and Remixing
● Nothing new
● “The aesthetic of borrowing and sampling is as old as Western
music itself. Long before hip-hop artists were taking existing
ideas and sounds and splicing them into their songs,
composers of the Baroque were recycling themes from
themselves and others. Bach is the most obvious example.”
http://www.wqxr.org/#!/articles/album-week/2012/jan/01/js-bach-recy

6. Bach and Music reused
● Bach recycled and reused music – Many of Bach’s cantatas
contained themes that were recycled from elsewhere.
● Sweetbox's “Everything's Gonna Be Alright" (based on J. S.
Bach's Ouverture No. 3 in D major, BWV 1068)

7. Variations and Reusing Tunes
● Mozart's Twelve Variations on "Ah vous dirai-je, Maman",
K. 265/300e, a piano composition, widely known as
'Twinkle Twinkle Little Star' these days.
● Mozart wrote many variations of his own music
● Improvisation
● Composing variations is a way of recycling and reusing
music
● Variations were considered as new pieces; reusing
music is not infringing copyrights of the original
● The concept of 'variations' is similar to forking software (as
seen in free/open source software)

8. Freedom of information / data
Freedom to play, to create, to modify

9. Harlem Shakes Viral Videos
● The MediaCityUK example -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQRJiK03SKQ
● Another example -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AJ8CaxRFhM
● A compilation of some fav videos -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlPh_ycy62s
● English National Ballet does Harlem Shake
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/video/2013/feb/28/english-national-ba
● http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2013/feb/22/harlem-shake-tops-us-ch
● Harlem reacts to Harlem Shake videos -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGH2HEgWppc

10. Contemporary Pop
● One Pound Fish
● PSY and Gangnam Style

11. Spreadable Media
- Memes, virals, Web 2.0, Social Media -
● http://spreadablemedia.org/
● Spreadable Media maps fundamental changes taking place
in our contemporary media environment, a space where
corporations no longer tightly control media distribution
and many of us are directly involved in the circulation of
content. It contrasts "stickiness" - aggregating attention in
centralized places - with "spreadability" - dispersing content
widely through both formal and informal networks, some
approved, many unauthorized.
● Spreadable Media examines the nature of audience
engagement, the environment of participation, the way
appraisal creates value, and the transnational flows at the
heart of these phenomena. It delineates the elements that
make content more spreadable and highlights emerging
media business models built for a world of participatory
circulation.

12. Digital Music and Subculture –
Sharing Files and Sharing Styles
● http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1122/10
42
● In this paper, the author proposes a new approach for the study of online
music sharing communities, drawing from popular music studies and
cyberethnography. The author describes how issues familiar to popular
music scholars — identity and difference, subculture and genre hybridity,
and the political economy of technology and music production and
consumption — find homologues in the dynamics of online communication,
centering around issues of anonymity and trust, identity experimentation,
and online communication as a form of "productive consumption."
Subculture is viewed as an entry point into the analysis of online media
sharing, in light of the user–driven, interactive experience of online
culture. An understanding of the "user–driven" dynamics of music audience
subcultures is an invaluable tool in not only forecasting the future of online
music consumption patterns, but in understanding other online social
dynamics as well.

13. The Art of Immersion
● Frank Rose - http://www.artofimmersion.com/
● The blurring of author and audience: Whose
story is it?
● The blurring of story and game: How do you
engage with it?
● The blurring of entertainment and marketing:
What function does it serve?
● The blurring of fiction and reality: Where does
one end and the other begin?

14. User-generated content
● Approaches: re-mix, re-contextualise, re-
purpose, re-use,
● Why people did it?
● Just for fun
● ?

15. Fans and Crowdfunding
● Kickstarter
● IndieGoGo
● Flattr (social micropayments) http://flattr.com/
● http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/crowdfunding-
sites/

16. Interdisciplinarity
Collaboration

17. Music in Games
● Journey – Winner of BAFTA Original Music,
Audio Achievement, Artistic Achievement, Game
Design, Online Multiplayer in 2013
http://thatgamecompany.com/games/journey/
● The Unfinished Swan – Winner of BAFTA Game
Innovation and Debut Game in 2013
http://giantsparrow.com/games/swan/
● Gamifying Music - CBBC music games.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/games/by/type/music
games

18. Open Source and Music
● Amateurs
● Make it available
● Make your own

19. Free/open source tools for
musicians
● JACK (Audio Connection Kit)
● JACK is at the cutting edge of professional media
software, and powers the
● most powerful Free Software applications in the field,
including:
- Ardour: http://ardour.org/
- Hydrogen: http://www.hydrogen-music.org
- Blender: http://www.blender.org/
- VLC: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
- PureData: http://puredata.info/

20. Music and Interactivity
● Raspberry Pi -
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/archite
cture-design-blog/2013/mar/01/raspberry-pi-
design-museum
● Arduino
● Streaming operas (Digital Operas) (National
Theatre Live)
● Gamifying music

21. Music and Hacking
- Ruben's Tube -

22. What's wrong with Web 2.0, user-generated
content, and going viral?

23. Surveillance

24. Downsides of Harlem Shakes Viral
Videos
● Australian miners fired for 'Harlem Shake'
(
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2013/mar/04/ha
● Employers monitor workers' performance on the
Internet (through Facebook for example)
● Big brother / surveillance culture

25. Credits and Licences
● Content by <Put Your Name>
http://<PutYourWebsite>
License: <Put Your License>
● Creative Commons http://creativecommons.org/
● GNU/Linux software usually licensed under
GPL (General Public Licence)
● GNU FDL (GNU Free Documentation licence)
● http://www.gnu.org/licenses/

26. Quality vs. Playfulness
Professionalism vs. Amateurism

27. Emergent Technologies
● Eye-tracking devices – e-Reader or smart phones that track your eyes
and turn pages for you
● Samsung's new smartphone will track eyes to scroll pages
● http://www.extremetech.com/computing/150031-samsung-galaxy-s4-to-
feature-eye-tracking-tech-though-were-not-entirely-sure-how
● Pattern recognition AI software can search tunes and identify the right
pieces for you
● Location-based or context-aware music production and consumption
(e.g., soundscaping, immersion, interactivity)
● Interdisciplinarity
● The future will (still) be about convergence. While things will be
aggregated, stored in the cloud and to be consumed anytime
anywhere, which in turn will allow individual tastes to be differentiated
and satisfied (to tailour, to contextualise, and to customise).

28. This set of slides is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0
(Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported)
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/