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Ubiquitous Music is a new area of research that encompasses ubiquitous computing, mobile and networked music, eco-composition and cooperative composition. Victor Lazzarini and Damián Keller are two of the fathers of this new movement, which has not only artistic and technological applications, but social implications, and educational ambitions. 

This is the only interview in Technoculture with two guests. And it was indeed special! Victor was sitting with me - or I shall say I was sitting with him - in his office at Maynooth University in Ireland, and Damián was connected over Skype from the middle of the Amazon! Two worlds coming together.

I hope you will enjoy the high social content of UbiMus, which is a lot about technology, but even more about people.

Victor Lazzarini was awarded a BMus in Composition at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP) in Brazil. He completed his doctorate at the University of Nottingham, UK. His interests include musical signal processing and sound synthesis; computer music languages; electroacoustic and instrumental composition. He currently leads the Sound and Digital Music Research Group at the NUIM, and he is active as a composer of computer and instrumental music.
More about Victor: https://www.maynoothuniversity.ie/people/victor-lazzarini

Damián Keller teaches music and computing at the Federal University of Acre (UFAC), Brazil. Member and co-founder of the Ubiquitous Music Group (g-ubimus), his research focuses on everyday creativity, software design and ecocomposition within the context of ubiquitous music making. His work at the Amazon Center for Music Research - NAP (2003) has been acknowledged by the CNPq with a research productivity grant (2008-2012). He received his training at Stanford University and Simon Fraser University.
More about Damián: https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~dkeller/

Pictures and information on Palafito, the installation mentioned by Damián: http://capassokellertinajero.squarespace.com/portfolio#/palafitos

Go to interactive wordcloud (you can choose the number of words and see how many times they occur).

Episode transcript

Download full transcript in PDF (112.35 kB).

Host: Federica Bressan [Federica]
Guests: Victor Lazzarini [Victor] and Damián Keller [Damián]

[Federica]: Welcome to a new episode of Technoculture. I'm your host, Federica Bressan, and today my guests are Victor Lazzarini, Professor of Music at Maynooth University in Ireland, and Damián Keller, Associate Professor at the Federal University of Acre in Brazil and member and co-founder of the Amazon Center for Music Research. Together with their colleague Marcelo Pimenta, Victor and Damián are co-editors of a volume issued by Springer in 2014 on ubiquitous music, which is today's topic. First of all, welcome to both. Thank you for being on Technoculture.

[Damián]: Thank you.

[Victor]: Thank you.

[Federica]: It seems fair to begin with the question, what is ubiquitous music? I have been reading this volume that you edited together, and I liked one of the possible definition of this new field of research and practice, which is something that combines ubiquitous computing, computer music, and human-computer interaction. So if that's okay with Victor, who is sitting here with me at Maynooth University in Ireland, I would like to give the floor for this first question to Damián, and I would also like to take the opportunity to thank Damián for speaking with us from the Amazon, from Brazil. So Damián, what is ubiquitous music?

[Damián]: Yeah. Well, you see, that's a question that we ask ourselves, you know, within the group. It's something that we've been discussing since the beginning in 2007. What would it be to do ubiquitous music? And then after a while, we started to tune into three perspectives, basically. One, it's very much related to computing and ubiquitous computing and technological advances, mobile computing, and so on. It's a sort of an engineering-based perspective, and that's part of the proposal, but it actually doesn't address all the issues. Another part of the proposal is the idea of very intense social interaction. And strangely, we see a very strong component in Brazilian education movements, and there is one of our partners, Helena Lima, who works at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, south of Brazil. She's been doing great work with teenagers, and she was very much influenced by a figure of the educational movement, Brazilian educational movement, called Paulo Freire, and this idea, or his idea and the idea that Helena has been developing, is the idea of a dialogue or a dialogical approach. So that part of the component, that component of the ubimus approaches, it's kind of centered on educational applications. But there is still a third component, which is related to artistic practice, and we've been mostly dealing with that actually before the start of ubimus, and we call that, with Victor, ecologically grounded creative practices, which relate to an idea of a very strong relationship between local resources, environmental (like environmental cues, environmental elements), and what people do in their aesthetic decision-making. And this also ties into the idea of everyday creativity or the idea of using what there is actually in the environment and around us to do creative stuff in music. So I would say that there are these three basic lines, but of course, it's something that's it's dynamic, so we don't really have a final answer to what ubimus means.

[Federica]: Victor, do you have anything to add to that, and also, are you all in agreement in your group on what ubiquitous music is, or there are divergent views?

[Victor]: Yeah, I think for the very nature that the question of ubiquitous music is open and it's not, I say, close to a certain set of definitions, there's no way of disagreeing with the position of the group. I mean, there are a number of things that come into play in this. I think one of the things that it's important to consider within this picture of aspects that we look at is also, which ties in with the ecological side and ties in with the educational side as well, is the emergence of a sort of return, giving back the power to people to make things. Because if you think about computer music and electronic music, for a long time it was something that was limited to a certain number of centers, a certain number of composers, a certain number of very limited, you know, places in the world where you could do these things. I mean, the resources that you needed to employ to make electronic music were quite considerable, so it wasn't for everyone, and the access to it was quite limited. So with the emergence first of the microcomputer and then the technology becoming more approachable by sort of ordinary people, you start seeing this process of this becoming a little bit more available and approachable by a number of people, and I think this continued. I mean, this is something that happened maybe thirty years ago, but this continued on to what we have here, which is kind of what we can describe as the make movement, the DIY approach to making music, to making, just sort of repurposing technology for the needs that you might have. And this is, give even another level of possibilities for people to make music. It gave very interesting possibilities for people to make different types of music, which they couldn't do in the past, and the whole concept of instrumentality has completely been turned on its head. So there is a constant expansion of the concept of instrumentality, so [unclear 00:06:55] guess it started off with electronic music, the idea of the studio becoming an instrument, and then, you know, with computers becoming instruments, musical instruments, and being able to use microcomputers to make music, and now you just make music with any small devices that you can make yourself and purpose yourself for this. And this then becomes part of the environment that you are trying to work with. And then in addition to this, you have then the ubiquitous nature of networks, for instance the internet, being present, and then being able to have non-local connections not through very complex setups, but very simple setups. You might have a little device that connects you to somewhere far away, and that allows you to do some sort of interaction over the distance. So I think that's one of the important points about the concepts of ubiquitous music is this democratization of technology and of ways of music-making, so it's not limited to the very few who can have access to it and the ones who have training in music, you know. It starts becoming approachable by a much greater range of people, allowing a much greater range of possibilities.

[Federica]: Because ubiquitous music doesn't just have a social aspect, but there's this concept of lowering the threshold or even breaking the barrier that keeps more people from doing music. Speaking of this, Victor, can you talk a little bit about transparent user interaction?

[Victor]: Yes, so what you want [unclear 00:08:38] means in which the user technology is not a barrier to making music so that it becomes quite a natural way to approach making music, that you don't feel that there's anything special, in fact, that you're using, you know, a computer or using a little device or that you're not using it at all. And that sort of neutralized the technology to make it transparent, and by doing that, then you start allowing much more expressive and less sort of an, less [stuttery 00:09:11] approach to it, because, you know, one of the things that technology does to people is just to direct their focus in one way in a number of ways, but in sort of very definite ways, and that might not be natural for their expression. So the possibility that exists now with the different ways that we can interact with devices, and you can talk about touchscreens, but we even can talk about no-touch surfaces or no-touch interfaces, but not only that, the fact that these things are much more flexible and [unclear 00:09:50] and they weren't before.

[Federica]: Is it fair, Damián, to say that ubiquitous music is not about the sonic output? I mean, not only about that. It's not that I hear music and I say, 'Aha, that's ubiquitous music,' like it's a genre with a specific sound. This is more about an approach to music-making.

[Damián]: Yes, definitely. I think the common thread of the different approaches that we have within the field is that people are worried about how to enable music-making, not only whether we solved this... [We saw this important 00:10:30], and a good artistic result is something that we, every one of us has in mind when we deal with this stuff, even... Actually, there is a huge criticism going around, like people, for example, like Barry Truax that say that we are kind of lowering our standards of listening by sharing bad-quality files on the internet and so on and so forth. Right? So that's one issue. It's one aspect, but I think the most important aspect that we can, but not the most important, but a common aspect, the common thread is actually how to enable people to make music, and then after that, after we solve part of the problem, which is a huge problem and it's not possible to solve completely, then we start asking, 'Okay, so did you like the experience? Did you like what you got? Is this good enough?' And then we get into the creative or the creativity assessment aspect of the proposals. That's why many of our projects have a very strong empirical component. We are not only interested in actually implementing tools or dealing with tools, but also knowing how these tools impact daily life, like what people do everyday and how they deal with music everyday.

[Federica]: Which is where research meets practice in ubiquitous music. Speaking of which, do you design new hardware, like new devices, or you mostly use existing devices like the smartphone, and do you design new software interfaces for these devices or others?

[Damián]: Okay, so many, many of us are building new ways of dealing with musical interaction. As Victor said, musical interaction was — and it's still being taught as something for musician exclusively, for very good musicians, and that's something that we would like to break down, expand, something that we would like to get away from. So musical interaction is one aspect, and therefore we end up dealing with new approaches not only to come up with the musical products, but also with ways of deciding, making static decisions. And one way of doing that is dealing with what we call metaphors for creative action, which are actually ways of dealing with musical and social issues in interaction that can be applied to many different contexts, devices, implementations, and so on and so forth. So we've been carrying out these proposals for like several years and doing different sessions with people with different profiles and characteristics and trying to come up with data on what these people say, how do people feel, and what the musical results are. So implementing newer stuff, it's one part of the deal, but also knowing how this new stuff impacts the musical activities and the musical approaches that people take. That's another part of the deal.

[Victor]: Yeah, metaphors are very important. In fact, it's something I've been using forever, you know. Whenever you speak about music, you always use metaphors to try to explain something for which you don't have words. So, you know, to give you a very, a simple example, you know, whenever you talk about notes or pitch or scales, it's always talking about going up or going down, but there's no up or down. I mean, this is, it's a spatial metaphor. There's no up and down in sound. I mean, you invent the metaphor and you say, 'Oh, up is high up on the notes, and then, you know, the higher notes in the piano are high, and the lower notes are lower,' but it's just a metaphor. It's not really based on reality. There might be, of course, some synesthetic basis to these metaphors, but it's still a metaphor when you're talking [to it 00:14:55]. So we extend that to other things, and we extend that to [so 00:14:59] the way you interact with devices, you can [think with 00:15:01] different, you know, metaphors with interacting with the devices, different... So if you take a tablet, for instance, the way you might develop the user interface for an app there, you have to take into account the types of metaphors that you can develop and then that you'd be able to create a vocabulary of useful terms for making the music, for describing the music, or for talking about the way you do that. But all that (and I think it is very important to go back to Damián said), all that's not targeting the person who's, has all the big package of music education, but also people who might be approaching this afresh, you know, they want to make music. Here is a device that can allow them to make music, and let's go and make music. Because, of course, if you think about it, that's a really common thing today. I mean, if you look around, this is what a lot of the musical instrument, so-called music instrument industry, or music equipment industry, it's based in their sales, or so people who, 'Oh, here's a gadget, device. You can make music with it. You know, it doesn't matter that you learn the piano or the guitar or something. You just pick up that and play around with this.' And people are doing that, so it's a very important thing, and I think it's part of our experience today in how music is made, but the most important thing also is to consider the questions around it, for instance, so when someone designs a device for a musician to make music, there's a lot of things that go into a device that channel their, the way the music's made, towards a certain narrow path. So, you know, you design a drum machine, so you have drum patterns, and you have to, you know, decide on the meter, and there you are. You already decided what the music's going to be from there. So part of what we discuss within ubiquitous music is how user interfaces, or devices, or things can channel, you know, people into certain narrow paths and how to make it less so, so that device can, you know, provide more transparent which allow people to make music but not being thrown into a way of making music that was the designer's idea of music. So whoever designed the device has imbued in that device an idea of music, so we would like to aim for a device should be a little bit more flexible, that doesn't build in a single way of making music or a set, limited ways of making music.

[Federica]: I like how ubimus tries to challenge some notions that have been around for a long time in the Western world — for example, that music is only for musicians. Now, I don't know if that's true in absolute terms, but I would definitely agree with you that music training is a thing in the Western world, and we have very specific ways in which it should be carried out and a very specific idea of what it means to be a musician. So I think we could also agree, though, that you need to know the basics of music to make music. So can you explain what you mean when you say that you don't need training to make music?

[Victor]: Yeah, but you're assuming that you know the knowledge of music is something that is limited to a set of things that you learn, for instance, in your music education, but there are many approaches to making music that exclude that completely, and we should never impose what, or concepts of making music, or what should be music, into someone who just wants to make music and has a drive towards to discover that, and that person discovered that through the device or through the instrument. If the device or the instrument or the means of making music that the person has found is flexible enough, is rich enough, then that person will be able to find a way through that, a route through that that may be completely independent from the way we have learned music in the past. So I think that's definitely learning to make music, but it's not necessarily all learning, you know, or the way we were educated. A person should have the ability or means of going through, treading a path for their own. And you also have to think about the different levels of attainment. I mean, if you want to be a concert pianist, there's a certain level [unclear 00:19:32] that is expected within that very limited, very narrow way of making music, and, you know, and then you have to put in, you know, a lot of time dedicated to do that and then possibly not be successful because it's such a limited way of making things. But someone who wants to make music, but [wants to 00:19:55] make music in a certain way doesn't necessarily need to put in all that time, or maybe it will eventually accumulate to become part of their life of, you know, the daily activities, and that will build up, amount to quite a bit of music-making, quite a bit of practice, but we don't know. Maybe Damián has something else to say about this.

[Damián]: Yeah, it's actually the availability of means and technologies and ways of dealing with sound, they bring to the plate the possibility of coming up with different ways of thinking in music and of understanding what music means. Right? So what we are dealing with is actually a potential for creativity. We are dealing with something that's actually not already done, but something that might happen during the experimentation and during the dealing with the tools or dealing with the interaction and dealing with the activities, there will be moments in which people doing the stuff find out ways of coming up with solutions for specific problems that we didn't think of. That happened to me, for example, when doing this metaphor called time tagging. Actually, we used cell phones and tablets, and the idea was that you can press these stripes that you have on the tablet, and then you trigger sounds and then you choose the sounds that you want to deal with, and you do that at the moment, like real time. So the usage that we thought was, 'Okay, one user, one tablet.' That was the intention, but then we gave it to a group of non-musicians, and they started sharing the tablets and doing stuff while they were doing the music, they were sharing the devices, so that changed completely the relationship with the tool and the actual result of the activity. So this is a very simple example, but it's something that we need to keep in mind. As you said, Victor, we cannot really find a way that people will make music. People will decide on their own how they want to deal with sound and so on.

[Federica]: Damián, I know that besides being a scholar, you're also a creative artist, and you make performances and installations. How do the elements of ubiquitous music come together, manifest themselves in one of these works that you do?

[Damián]: So, yeah, I've been doing some stuff, some music for a couple of years, and something that, common idea, that something very common to the stuff I do is collaboration. I usually deal with artists, sometimes musicians, but also with artists that are not musicians, and we have this small collective with Ariadna and Patricia that we've been doing stuff for some 20 years now. And the basic idea that we deal with is how to integrate elements among modalities. So Patricia is a sculpture, Ariadna is a visual artist, and I'm the musician of the group, so when we come up with proposal for installations and for artworks, what we do generally is bring stuff to a place, change the way the place behaves sonically, visually, and in tactile terms, because we are dealing with the sculptural elements too, and let people play with that. So the proposal is not to make a piece a closed, finished work, but actually put this stuff in the place and then let people move around and deal with these sounds and with the visuals, and with the tactile elements with the piece at the Museum of Latin American Art in Denver a few years ago, and it's called Palafito. And related to what we were discussing before, the process and all that, creative process, Palafito was actually, the materials for the piece were actually collected during a 5,000-kilometer that we did through the whole Amazon River. So we started from Ecuador, and then we took canoes and took all our $20,000 equipment in the canoe, these very little unstable canoes, and then we went through the whole Amazon course. And meanwhile, we collected the images and sounds, and that was sort of the raw material for the installations that we did afterwards. So it [for us 00:25:15] is the actual being in the place, in specific places, and bringing into the materials of the place is one of the key ideas, the key artistic proposals that we have, and that was sort of translated into ubimus into the idea that we could use local resources for aesthetic decisions. So in the example that I was giving before of time tagging, the idea of time tagging is actually using environmental cues to decide where you want to put your sound or how you want to deal with your sound. So there is a very close relationship between the local moment, the local materials, and the aesthetic decisions. And going back to the installation, to the Palafito proposal, there is also the idea that people participate, they walk around the installation, they deal with the sounds, they deal with the space, and they actually create their own experience of the work. Right? So we are not here masters of anything. We just give the people the opportunity to make their own. That would be the [objective 00:26:36].

[Federica]: And we can listen to an excerpt from the sonic output of Palafito. Is that what you have prepared for us today?

[Damián]: Okay. As I just explained, the work is an installation. It has several elements, visual elements, sculpture, tactile elements, so this will be just one kind of excerpt from the more complete experience. So what I did was basically make a mix of some of the sonic elements that are in the piece, and then that's what you'll hear, but there are a few technical aspects of this that I want to express. One is that these are not recordings of sounds. There are some elements of recordings and elements, local elements, but what we are dealing here with is sort of an approach to synthesis, to synthesizing sounds that model what happens in nature in actual environments. And that's what we called ecological modeling, one way of producing the sounds. So what you hear are not just straightforward recordings, but actually sounds that have been synthesized or processed through these techniques, and that's where Victor's software comes handy, the Csound environment. We've been using that for a while to deal with sonic processes and so on.

[Federica]: Just a clarification. You just told us about this 5,000-kilometers trip where you recorded sounds and how Palafito is the artistic output of that trip, but you also said that all the sounds that we're going to listen to from the installation are synthetic sounds, so I don't understand the connection between recordings and the synthesis.

[Damián]: Yes, the idea is that we are using those recordings, and I would say not only the recording, but we are using the experience of being in the place as our starting point to make decisions on how we deal with sound, and how we deal with video, and how we deal with the sculptural element. So the recording served as raw material, as I said before, as a starting point, but they are not the final product. Right? I want to stress this because there is a very strong tradition in electroacoustics for dealing with sound unprocessed and trying to come up with a picture of the place as a soundscape approach. Right? Some of my friends, they do that. They deal with sound directly and they try to represent the place that they were at and their experience directly by not dealing with any processing or any work. Ariadna, Patricia, and I don't deal with that. We don't work that way. We think that the proposal or the idea is that we can use the materials as a starting point, but not as the final product.

[Federica]: So what we are about to listen to is a possible sonic output of the installation, which uses synthetic sounds inspired by the trip, both the sounds and the experience of being there.

[Damián]: Exactly.

[Federica]: Very well. So here is the excerpt from Palafito. The duration of the excerpt is 3 minutes and 48 seconds.

[sounds: Palafito]

[Federica]: Victor, what makes you passionate about ubiquitous music? What is the exciting thing about it for you? What keeps you motivated to engage with it?

[Victor]: So there's a number of things. One of the things I've already mentioned to you is the fact that we're trying to reach out a larger number of people than you would normally reach out with just an ordinary sort of music education approach so that we are trying to involve getting more people excited about making music and making music in their own way rather than the way that we teach them, we tell them. So that's one of the things I feel that's really important, and I think that's also very important from a social point of view, because you may be able to use this approach to rescue people from certain situations. This might be a kind of a part of an education approach whereby by getting people involved in this stable sort of a, move away from other [unclear 00:35:18] that may be harmful to them. So, for instance, think about people who, you know, teenagers who might have been lost by the educational system. If you are able to use, you know, new approaches to music-making, you might able to get them excited enough to start thinking of things that we constructed for their lives and that they would be able to use not only to learn skills, but also to be able to reeducate themselves and possibly to rejoin, you know, society in a more productive way. So that's a way of, it's one of the things that, kind of a, I think it's very important about it. So this is the education approach, but also there is, more generally, there's the idea that we have very powerful means of making music today and finding ways of approaching these means and utilizing these means for making music in different ways and, you know, in very flexible and original ways. This is very, very exciting. So that's another thing that motivates me. The idea of programming, programming computers to make music, it's really exciting because, you know, it is a way in which you can formalize certain things in kind of quite novel ways and have a certain relationship to making music that [unclear 00:36:41] really different from just pen and paper, music, or just improvisation or performance, and I think it's nice enough area to explore.

[Federica]: Does ubiquitous music break with tradition, or is it one of the possible natural continuation of the tradition, even the one you are rooted in, with your expertise in programming languages for music, electroacoustic and instrumental composition?

[Victor]: There are ways in which it breaks tradition and ways in which it continues the tradition. You know, it continues the tradition of inquiry about music, which, you know, is very long, so to understand what music is and it's part of what we do to understand what, ways that music is making. So this is a long tradition that stretches far back to the Greeks, [in our Western world 00:37:40] and, you know, in the wider world, to other traditions, but in other ways in which we break the tradition is by providing a wider reach to music-making that possibly wasn't there before. It was in some ways. If you think about folk traditions, you know, people will have been more easily approachable to do that music-making within kind of folk traditions, although, you know, that was the instrumental approach which is not here. Like if you're a folk musician, in order for you to practice your folk music, mostly you will have to develop, you know, some skills in a given instrument and so on, that the instrumental approach is not here really so strongly placed because the instrument is not one. The instruments, there are many ways of making instruments, and the instrument doesn't exist as a single unit.

[Federica]: Damián, what makes you passionate about ubiquitous music? What do you find exciting, and can you put that in the context of the activities of the Amazon Center for Music Research?

[Damián]: Well, when we started the idea, concept, or a proposal for alternative ways of doing music back in 2007, the initial groups were NAP at the Amazon Center and the LCM, computing music center of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Marcelo Pimenta specifically. So when we started, it wasn't really clear, the path that we will take and it wasn't... We didn't start with the kind of an agenda, "Okay, let's do this," but we started discussing possible ways and possible ideas. And afterwards, the group started to grow, and we start having these workshops, sort of get together, but the idea of the workshops were just getting together and discussing among ourselves, not really public congresses or events or anything like that. After a while, the thing grew, and then we saw that it was actually possible to apply some of the concepts and ideas that we were discussing to very different contexts. Here in Acre in the Amazon, it's a really nice opportunity for development for alternative and to come up with solutions for specific problems, but there is very little support for research, so that meant we had to come up with solutions and ideas and proposals to deal with very basic problems. One issue, for example, is, what do you do if you don't have an electroacoustic music studio? So one possibility that we dealt with was doing our experiments anywhere: in the mall, the street, and so on and so forth. So you'll actually see, if you take up the initial papers, that there are several proposals and ideas that were implemented outside, and the idea of dealing with music-making in contexts that are not for music, that's something that's intriguing. And also, dealing with the progress regarding the different profiles of the participants. For example, some of my students decided to go into a place for people that have deficiencies, very serious cognitive deficiencies, and strangely, they came up with very interesting results and very engaged activities and results. So those are things that I think that have very strong potential. I'm curious to know what will happen when we start applying this to several different contexts and so on.

[Federica]: Is it fair to say that we are at the dawn of a new era not just for music-making but more in general for ubiquitous computing and smart materials, like a new way for humans to interact with their environment where also they design their environment precisely with new technologies with some intelligence built into them? So if you agree with this statement, Victor, could you give a vision for the future in ubiquitous music in music-making in ten years from now?

[Victor]: Well, I don't think that we're at the beginning. We are in the process that we already have come a long way within this field. I mean, and as I keep stressing that this has a long tradition in some ways and there's a break, there's constant break in traditions as things develop. But it's really hard to say what's going to happen. One of the things that we are very concerned about is, you know, what is the impact on the environment of all these things that we have been doing? So there is a concern that by making music with electronic devices and making music with certain devices that we are not, you know, contributing in a sustainable way to the environment globally. So there is a concern there, but I think that, taking that aside, there is a limit to miniaturization. We will have more and more miniaturization, but there is a limit to that, but what I think will continue to happen is that we will continue up to a certain point to have a democratization of means of making music, and the best we can hope is that we are able to contribute to educating people about the environmental concerns, but also about, you know, ways in which people can interact with these new devices in which, make them more active rather than passive, so instead of being receivers about these things, but they are also people who can also shape the way they interact with music-making devices and also interact with devices in general.

[Federica]: And you, Damián, where would you like this field to be in 10 years from now or so?

[Damián]: Yeah, that's a hard question. I think Victor had it right on. I mean, I think there are certainly issues that we have to be careful with, and I think there are lots of excellent opportunities, and I like the way that the group as a whole is moving on and changing the way that we discuss stuff and the way that we tackle problems and solutions, but my feeling is that there is not only a cultural and technological, educational aspect to this, but also there is a geopolitical aspect, which is, we are trying to come up with technological solutions or with social solutions to music problems, how do these solutions impact different places? And the fact that we have people working on these issues not only in Europe or in North America, but also in remote places like my own place and also in Australia, New Zealand, and other contexts, that gives us an opportunity to deal with issues are not specific, for example, for one highly developed environment. And what Victor was talking about the impact on the environment, there is also the aspect of the impact on the social context and the activities of people music-making and so on, and this impact is very different, and I think it's very different if you are doing music in the Amazon or if you are doing music in Sydney or different places. So this cultural dynamic, that's something that interests me very much, and that's something that we might be dealing with for the next couple of years. I don't know if ten years, but yeah, a few years.

[Federica]: I know that you organized some events on ubiquitous music. Is there anything coming up that we can put in our calendars?

[Damián]: Yes. We have two events coming up. The closest one is in Marseilles, France, and it's a very small ubimus workshop that we'll do there on the 18th of October, and we want to invite everybody that's listening to your program here, we would like to invite everybody to come and share with us the ideas and proposals. So it will be something very informal, very easygoing, and we have music too being played at the event. This is in the context of the CMMR, the Computer Music Multidisciplinary Research Conference, and it's a very small worship. That's one. And the next one, the big one, it's in Porto Seguro, Bahia, here in Brazil in 2020. We will have people from Europe, North America, and of course, many people from Brazil.

[Federica]: Okay. I will add the details of these events to the description of this podcast episode, and thank you so much, Damián and Victor, for being on Technoculture.

[Victor]: Thank you.

[Damián]: Thank you.

[Federica]: Thank you for listening to Technoculture. Check out more episodes at technoculture-podcast.com, or visit our Facebook page @technoculturepodcast and our Twitter account, hashtag Technoculturepodcast.

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Page created: March 2019
Update: July 2021