How Online Technology is Changing Music Collaboration
“I have a regular chat with a friend of mine in New Zealand. He’s a tetraplegic and a musician, so he invents his own music instruments that he can play with his limited motion, and he can send me his instrument over MIDI to where I am across the ocean and we can play together and we can have an engagement. It’s not possible for him to come to see me in Europe. It would be so expensive, and a lot of work. So, you know, thank God there’s the internet for him, you know. He gets to participate, he has remote concerts, he still plays with his friends. It’s really special.” – Rebekah Wilson
This episode, “How Online Technology is Changing Music Collaboration” is the second half of my conversation with Source Elements CEO and remote collaboration specialist Rebekah Wilson as we discuss how physics and neurology collide when it comes to reducing latency, how the pandemic transformed online music collaboration and gave rise to today’s generation of at-home musicians, and where Rebekah sees sound, technology, and music itself heading in the future, over both the coming decades and even generations from now.
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(0:00:01) – Impact of Latency on Music Collaboration
We continue our talk about the science of latency, and Rebekah explains how it impacts music in ways that our brains only dimly perceive. “If you add a little bit of latency onto that,” she says, “music’s like, one, two… three… music’s not very friendly to that [sort of] latency.” She tells us more about how our brains unconsciously adapt to latency, and how technology relies both on improving speed and taking advantage of our ability to filter out information gaps. “What’s happening is that you’re anticipating it based on this model that’s in your brain,” Rebekah explains. “For example, every time you look at a wall or your surroundings, if it’s not moving, your brain’s not processing it.”
(0:06:02) – Advancements in Remote Music Collaboration
She talks about how the COVID-19 pandemic’s lockdown phase led to a boom in online collaboration, some of which continues to thrive today. “There remained a group of people,” she says, “a small group of people, you know, scattered around the world… who were like, ‘You know what? Some interesting things came out of this. Some interesting artistic development is possible here and it’s worth pursuing.” We discuss the technical and creative innovations that emerged from that period, and where they might lead in the years to come as we continue to innovate. “What we love as humans,” Rebekah says, “is to seek new forms of expression. This is what we do, we’re adventurers. So we go out, we go into the desert, we go out into the oceans, and we look for where something new is. And you know, music and performance and being together on the internet is still very new for us as humans.”
(0:12:42) – Expanding Music Collaboration With Technology
Our conversation wraps up as we continue to talk about online collaboration and creative efforts that can now span the world. “Hey, how does that guy play his trumpet?” she says, considering how musicians can start working together long before they meet in person. “What are his favorite riffs on the saxophone? So when they get to be together in that short time, they’re not starting from scratch, they’re already friends.” She considers the future of communication, collaboration, and the latency challenges that we might face in the future, including interplanetary latency, and we discuss how music helps define us as a species. “It’s such a privilege to be a musician,” she concludes, “to be able to harness sound, to make narratives with it and to build new worlds with it, you know, or to use your voice to tell stories with it. What a privileged, beautiful thing it is that we get to do.”
Episode Summary
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How latency and our brains’ perception of it can impact online music collaboration.
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The rise of “bedroom artists” after COVID-19 and their impact on the future of music.
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How sound, music, and communication might evolve as we reach for the stars.
Connect with the Guest
Website: https://source-elements.com/
Subscribe to Rebekah Wilson on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebekah-wilson-source-elements/
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** Transcript available upon request
