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The PNW Section's March 2023 meeting was held via Zoom, and discussed how technology is evolving to allow legitimate personal music streaming, with proper credit, and not be in the control of a few major companies. About 26 AES members attended and 11 non-members. Leading the discussion were PNW mastering engineer Steve Turnidge as our host, Jam Galaxy founder Dianne Krouse, and former AES Executive Director Bob Moses.
Roon is a music playback program that aggregates and presents metadata from multiple sources and presents your music in a magazine-like format. A recent release from Roon (Roon ARC) provides new functionality allowing personal and private streaming services. This meeting demonstrated one example of this process, and was an introduction to a possible future using AI and Blockchain to bring personal agency back to the musician, producer and engineer. This is currently the vision of Jam Galaxy, represented here by Dianne Krouse, their CEO.
The meeting began with self-introductions of attendees, replicating our physical meetings and letting people know who is in the virtual room.
Steve Turnidge started the discussion with a short description of Weedshare, a music superdistribution model active from 2003-2007, which was a model that paid you and the artist for sharing their files. Then Bob Moses discussed and described the research he and Steve worked together to design in Plus Z, a vision of a possible blockchain music system based on decentralized processes rather than systems only controlled by single companies or entities. This was expressed by the "Plus Z Ladder," describing the rungs of acquisition, validation, coding, storage, access and a presentation application. The idea of a "Transaction Patch" was introduced, which is a user interface to music tracks (or other media) that combines musician and engineer credits with the systems that brought the track to you.
Next, Steve gave a short discussion on the concept of decentralization and how it is a different mindset from what we've been used to. This led into a discussion of Jam Galaxy and SingularityNET from Dianne Krouse, CEO of Jam Galaxy and a member of the Jam Galaxy band, which has an AI Robot as its lead singer. She told of the mission of Jam Galaxy to use the new technologies of AI and Blockchain for the benefit of musicians and their community.
Steve then described Roon and its history, and Roon's audiophile customer base that wanted external access to their music libraries. Roon met this request with the ARC offering, providing Android and iPhone mobile interfaces to their music collections. This capability unintentionally provided a platform that could be used as a personal and private streaming service. Steve then displayed his version of this on his phone, using music from The Player's Lounge - a music collective he is a member of. Later in the meeting he showed a Matterport capture of The Player's Lounge, which is a VR representation of where they have played for over a decade.
Then Bob Moses wrapped up the presentation from the perspective of an audio hardware engineer, with the understanding that these days hardware is trivial, so he is interested in seeing how these new technologies play out.
The rest of the meeting was an interesting conversation among the speakers and attendees regarding this future, which lasted for around 45 minutes.
After the group discussion, the meeting was called to a close by Section Chair Dan Mortensen.
About Our Presenters:
Steve Turnidge -
Meet Steve Turnidge
I used to think I had to save up for retirement - and I was stressed about actually doing that. Then, I realized that I love what I do so much that if I retired, I'd still be doing it! At that point I came to understand that I was already retired and working on what I love to do - and getting paid for it. This is an example of a complete life with vocation and avocation aligned. If you love what you do, why would you stop? And if you don't love what you're doing, why would you continue? We have such a limited time here on earth, there is no reason not to find and follow your heart's desire.
I allow the universe to make the set list - my definition of freedom is an empty calendar and a full life. I live to work, not work to live... both the living and the working improves me, my clients and the world around us.
Dianne Krouse -
www.jamgalaxy.com
Dianne is the CEO of Jam Galaxy - a subsidiary of singularitynet.io These two companies are building processes powered by A.I. and Blockchain technologies, providing the tools to master the future horizons of Music Decentralized. Dianne is also the saxophonist with The Jam Galaxy Band; created by the founders of Jam Galaxy. Desdemona robot (from Hanson Robotics) is their lead vocalist, reciting AI generated spoken word poetry based on prompts fed into a natural language processing deep learning model. The band is a working model of the Jam Galaxy philosophy.
See them at NAMM in 2022.
Bob Moses -
Bob Moses on Linkdin
Bob is well known to our AES membership, serving as AES Executive Director for six years, a program manager at THAT Corporation, putting audio onto FireWire at Digital Harmony and the first digital engineer at Rane Corporation. He now works as a Principal Engineer at brincdrones.com
Bob and Steve have been staking out the future for over three decades together, and it is all leading to Music Decentralized.
Northwest CyberArtist Documentary
from MTV
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