As part of my ‘other life’ as a music composer/producer, about a year ago I was invited to give a workshop at the Banff Centre for the Arts in studio production.  To teach my approach to mixing, I decided to bring the individual tracks from a recent piece I had done - almost 30 discrete sound files with one instrument or part on each, that together made up the piece as a whole.  These were then remixed by the students during the workshop while I coached the sessions - not only a great way to demonstrate my personal production and mixing methodologies, but (somewhat unexpectedly) it was also very interesting to see how others approached and altered the material.

Now consider the Web 2.0 model, in which there’s no longer just that one-way street running from server to client - instead, communication occurs in a more reciprocal and viral manner.   Well, as it happens, there’s a near-perfectly analogous phenomenon going on with recorded music: much as I had done, artists are making the individual elements (or “stems”) that taken together comprise their finished recordings freely available online - to to be freely downloaded, deconstructed, altered, and remixed by anyone who cares to.  The power of today’s personal computer and the ubiquity of multitrack digital audio applications such as Apple’s included-with-the-OS  Garage Band make this possibility for everyone, not just us recording studio types.

It appears Thomas Friedman was right, the world is getting flatter….

A few examples:

• Easily 20 years ahead of its time, David Byrne and Brian Eno’s 1981 release “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts” was, at the risk of understatement, a groundbreaking record (just ask Moby, who built a career on his 1999 homage, “Play”).  Concurrent with a 2006 Bush of Ghosts re-release, Byrne and Eno made stems of several tracks available to the public and hosted an online remix competition, in which remixes could be uploaded back to the site and then voted on - results of which can be heard here.

• Kudus to Warner Music Group for going along with Byrne and Eno on the open licensing.   Radiohead, on the other hand, having had abandoned their traditional major label to release their latest album “In Rainbows” online themselves this year, could do whatever they pleased with the material - which was to simultaneously give away stems of the track “Nude” online for a similar remix competition.  The response from both professional DJs and producers as well as the general public was described by the band as ‘overwhelming’ - so much so, in fact,  that another track (”Reckoner“) was subsequently given away for remix as well.

Think of it as “open source music” (in fact, Byrne and Eno used the same Creative Commons license well-known in the open source software community to make the stems available).

I’m not a gamer - for me, though, (and maybe you?) this is a great way to have some fun with your computer. Try it out sometime… a little bit of creative playing around is good for you.