PERSPECTIVES ON COLLABORATIVE MUSIC Hello. Welcome everyone to our course's final conversation. After having discussed throughout the course's four modules different topics related to free software, free music, and free culture, we'll end this course talking with José MarÃa Serralde, who's been in this field for just about decades in matters related to music produced with free software. And, well, we wanted to finish this course talking with him given his experience, his career, the problems that he's had to face, and so we'll utilize this brief conversation to talk about this, about problems when using free and open code software for creating different types of music. So I wanted to start, Chema, by asking you to present yourself and to tell our course students how you've used free software in your career, if you started using it from the beginning or picked it up along the way, what challenges have you found, and what reasons have you found to keep using it. Yes, well, first of all, I want to start by saying that my education as a musician, meaning, and my work as a musician has been as a pianist for my entire career. So, as a pianist, well, of course I have my own plan, my life plan, which is in live music projects for archive films, with my ensemble of course, and also as a soloist. As well as this sort of transversal line that has to do with musical research, notation, etcetera. After all this, then, I must say that my general relationship with software was strictly, I mean... I wasn't using software to make music in the beginning, to make audio products. Rather, I was using software to make these things that musicians need now in the digital age on paper, notation, transcription, listening to recordings, and so on. That's how my connection to all of this began. And it began in the age of proprietary software, back when the Linux kernel, for example, wasn't even slightly developed for use with all its bugs and all the hardware components that made noise. I'm talking about a few decades ago. What happened was that, of course, my adolescent relationship with software had to do with the tools that I could get my hands on with unauthorized licenses, that in Mexico are so easy to find. Now worldwide it's easy to do online. But in Mexico it was easy with the black market in street markets. And with that fascination, well, I began to understand how computing worked, the computers that I would work with since I was seven or eight years old thanks to my father who's an engineer, so it was almost a trivial connection... - Natural. - Yes, it came naturally. And so computers felt very natural to me since I was little, especially coding. I learned to code with these computers, and computers back then, right? There was no choice but to code. They'd give you a machine, a manual, some keys, and an incomprehensible logic that you had to figure out yourself. So... this together with the experience of using proprietary tools there came a time when I realized that the software I was using, well... Firstly, they were giving me restrictions that I couldn't get passed, unlike before when I was little and I could see the source code of a program that I typed myself. And so, well, I short circuited. And secondly, there was a key moment when I needed to collaborate. And that was when, let's say, in the first decade of the 21st century, when I started working in the world alongside parallel creative processes, I realized, not just in music because I was also working in video editing, always for music, but also in video editing, in audio editing, and I realized that there was a crisis when people would ask me, "I want to do what you're doing for us, how can I start?" "Yeah, so, go and get an illegal copy of... No, wait, let me try that again. Look, go and buy... No, buying that is too expensive. Hold on. Okay, look, how about I go figure this out and then I'll get back to you?" Literally, I radically separated myself from artistic creation with digital tools for a few years. Why? Well, essentially, to try and find a sort of nomadic process to understand what we were going to do about digital tools. I came back about a decade later, this time not just creating with the aim of slowly abandoning proprietary software, but with an urgent, pressing, systematic, activist and political need, because I couldn't give these softwares to the community that I was trying to help, because the software was automatically chained to dooming the cultural object. As in over those ten years I realized that any product of the 20th or 21st centuries developed or created using proprietary software is doomed to lose its cultural flow sometime in the future. - No matter what. - It'll be privatized. It won't be privatized, we simply won't be able to know how it was built. Of course, some years from now, our great great great great great grandkids will discover that, like, they'll take this mysterious thing, made with a weird 20th or 21st century program, and our machine learning units that can hopefully be a sort of artificial intelligence will understand, "this was made like this or that". But meanwhile, meanwhile we're in a real pickle. Because many of these products are going to be made using a program, and when we want to reedit music from any of our composers we'll first have to understand how to decipher how such and such version of such and such program that made the sheet music worked. And that's a best case scenario. For things that are a bit more unclear like video creation, audio creation, every proprietary software has its own methods for storing information and for characterizing the creative process in completely obscure ways. Which means it's not enough for a software program to have a patent behind it so you can access it by just paying the license, "hey, can I use it? I'll pay a ton per month." Now with online licensing. Now there's a problem because that's not all, now the digital object that represents your creative process will be hidden behind a patent. Well, OK, this process can't be any more senseless. Why? Because essentially, when I need to discover my own creative process, me as an author, and with this I'll finish with your question, I need to know my, you know, my mistakes, how I got where, what things I changed. In a universe where proprietary software reigns, dictates, dominates over an uncritical society, the creative process is only known by the software developer. And now that all our systems can connect online to report who knows what, who knows what, and really I'm always very happy to say it because when we used to ask, "but what does the system report, we don't know," and then there's Wikileaks and Snowden's revelations, that myth, or not, sound deliciously conspiratorial. And I find it so funny, because us in the free software community said it, like, we'd talk about it over dinner all the time, right? And now it's in everybody's mouth. - We foresaw it. - Exactly. It was like, "it's a conspiracy theory, you're paranoid," and now I love that nobody say that to me. "It's true, right?" Or maybe not, but now it's out there. So, essentially, what happened? I've spent 22 years, 25 years working in musical creation with free software in things for sheet music, recording, registering, video editing, postproduction, and even servers and websites, all things related to performing arts in general, but very specifically focused on music, and, of course, integrating my career as an author. And so, well, it did end up being a very effective political stance. Really, now when people ask me that question from the beginning, "hey, what do I need?" "Okay. Take this disc, take this USB, load your operating system from here, and I'll teach you how to use it." That's it. "Oh, that's too much." "Great. You asked." So, well, I think that I radicalized, in a way, my roots. Radicalizing means changing at the root. The root of the stance essentially went back to this big problem of mine. And also, when I broke away brutally, because it was a violent process, from proprietary software it was when one of my most most dear life projects for cultural promotion of music, traditional music at that, was threatened because I couldn't collaborate with a team that was working, like, voluntarily. In that moment, I saw that proprietary software is not an instrument for a free society, for a society that allows equity, equality, or equal opportunity for all, right? Not only won't I use it. I will fight against the use of proprietary software. That's it. And so, evidently, free software becomes a sort of alternative for creators. It's always more defended, there's always more and more advanced distributions of GNU/Linux, they're easier to install. Creative software is always more developed. So, there came a point where perhaps this became a kind of threat to the creative cultural industry. Or what do you think? How does the cultural industry react to the spread of free software that's slowly winning out as far as development and ease of access, and that, well, is always a more tangible alternative for artists? Of course, that's a marvelous question, because I think that like any system, I mean, like any hegemonic system, the production system of digital creative objects or tools is totally mediated by this big cultural industry. Which is to say, they, more than, well... What I feel, well this is more of an opinion, let's not make this such an objective analysis, unlike everything else. But we have to say that something that happened to creative industries, like what happens, for example, let's go, let's remove ourselves from this space we were in, and see what the cloud industry did, or the text processing industry, the text processing or spreadsheet applications... Or, for example, what did, like, this company that's obsessed with putting fruits behind their computers do, right? Bitten fruits too. Like, it's all bitten. Anyway, the thing is, like, bitten fruit, for example, bitten fruit adopts for example this praxis of getting close to the object, understanding the code of a free software, sometimes, or of programs with a visible code, just visible codes, open codes, well, "it's open because..." Well, we'll get to that. I just hate the term open code, I try not to use it. So, the thing is that this code that can be accessible to them, they don't have a political stance because they don't feel threatened. To them, the competition is in exactly how much they spend to distribute, to mediate, to convince everyone that this is the tool they need, and in how many tools they sell, how many licenses they sell. So, really, the fruit brand doesn't necessarily care about competing with a concept, with a revolution, with an ideology. That's, like... They don't have that in mind. In the same way that a terribly, disgustingly, frighteningly monstrous brand that starts with an E and ends with a D, and only has two letters in between, went literally buying software developers who made software systems for audio, for example, with pro tools, right, like, you can edit your audios beautifully there, anything, and then those who made video editors, there was that gigantic company that started buying smaller companies. What's their stance? Are they afraid? Again, if it doesn't affect their market, it's all good. However, they are capable of taking the development of any visible code, absorbing it and building a real empire of knowhow, that is, what they have been diligent in doing is making your workflow dependent on them and their tools. They've made sure of that. So, it's fascinating how even from inside digital music creation like, the digital creation of music, of sound objects, of sound design, they're still passionate about the need to take open tools, appropriate them, and incorporate them into their creative process. That is they know perfectly well, since their tools report from lots of users, right? Some, we don't know if all, know your creative process very well, and they know that the more dependent you are on this creative process, not the tool, imagine that, on the creative process, the less you'll abandon the tool. Because if you ever use another tool, another brand, if you change the brand of the diaper, then you may not have the same security. "Oh, no, I don't want it to leak." It's exactly the same process, the same sensation, "I don't want to mess up my creative process, I know how to do this and that. Oh, where's this button? The mouse. Where is it? I don't have a mouse. This is bad. I can't create anything." That's scary. That's awful. Like, the panic of not having a computer with a fruit, of not having a super app with the super license that makes you a good musician. Like, any of that, "because all professionals need them." Like, that's awful. So, if you don't create with these tools, well... What they care about in relation to, relating to visible code software or free software, that is a term that I encourage because it means something different, is not a fear that they might lose the market, but that someone will come along and do something differently, because then the supremacy of their tools will be threatened. They were the first kids on the block and, therefore, they were able to impose a knowhow for digital tools. So, then, what happened? What happens to those of us who started creating years ago using free software? Well, we realized that the tool doesn't matter. Really, we're a bunch of people making small things, and some of us know how to code, and so they develop a small tool to do that small thing. Unix's ideology, for example. Of course, but I think this is fundamental because when we talk about free software, or visible code software, to use the term that you use, it's not just about technical matters. We're talking about social, cultural matters. And I think that it's a very adequate reflection to end our course with, to invite all of our students that have been following us over these four weeks to think about what's out there beyond technology in technology, and what's out there beyond expression in musical expression in this case, right? So, to finish off, José MarÃa, I wanted to ask you to say something to our students who've been following along, if you could share one tip with them that you're like, "this is the golden advice that I have to share, who over these four weeks have faced problems, doubts, rejections, acceptance, like, I'd give you this golden suggestion to motivate you to keep exploring the world of music with free software, of collaborative music, of community music", so that this course can be just the beginning of a long career like the one that you've had. Well, yeah. So, more than an invitation, as I'm not very good at giving advice. If you ever heard advice from me, ignore it, please. But that's not what matters, it's about sharing. As you said, I think it's great in any case. It's about, "yeah, I want to tell you that you can make a career, a career as a musician, in audiovisual creation, digital or not, definitely through open tools." If the collaborative side of it has to be that, collaborative, your guiding principle, then I think the only way, and I think this is immovable, is to do it with tools that save your creative process in digital objects that even a human can comprehend. I track my creative processes with a repository, with Git, you know? I go through my first version of a music sheet, then version two of the sheet in LilyPond, which is a wonderful project or community, my third version, then how I changed it, how I messed it up, deleted things that were good and ended up with garbage that I got rid of, and then started again from what worked, from what was good. These processes, of course, take a lot of time. They take a lot of work. But you have to understand that when you decide to produce, your technology should help you to understand yourself as an author. The process will be much harder. It's sort of like living a life without any kind of analysis or self reflection, or without psychoanalyzing, and carrying everything else. So, of course the process will be extremely painful. But I have to say that we will find ourselves the end. - Exactly. - And that's what'll be most rewarding. Well, we hope to find ourselves, we hope to find you through it all. - Of course. - And, well, thank you, Chema, for this interview. Thank you for your attention, and we'll see you in the next video to talk about our course's final activity. Translation: Tomas Daniel Chapman Smedley
