00:00:00:

00:00:00: Hi there, my name's Usheenuddy and welcome to Audio Talks presented to you by Harman.

00:00:05: Now this is the podcast where music, technology and culture collide and on New Year's Day we are looking into the future with somebody who is fighting to make sure it is as good as it can possibly be.

00:00:16: Now from Manchester to the Bristol scene, from working with Massive Attack to Bjork to exploring spatial audio, our very special guest Andrew Melchior has spent his career at the Edges of Change.

00:00:26: In this episode we're going to talk about what happens when the ground keeps shifting beneath music and culture when machines can imitate creativity, when shared rituals begin to fray and attention becomes our rarest and most precious resource.

00:00:39: We're going to explore why music still matters, the risks and possibilities of synthetic media, and what it means to build tools for the future without losing our humanity.

00:00:48: So this is going to be a conversation about where we've been and where we might still choose to go.

00:00:52: Andrew Melchior, welcome to the podcast.

00:00:54: Thank you so much for joining us.

00:00:56: Well, thanks very much for having me.

00:00:58: Very good intro and it's a great pleasure to be here at the end of twenty twenty five looking forward to the next year with you.

00:01:04: Absolutely.

00:01:05: Well, we're building this as the new year in brackets are evolution.

00:01:09: So it could be a revolution.

00:01:10: It could be an evolution and it's really up to the listeners to decide.

00:01:14: So listen, let's just dive right into it.

00:01:16: You have such a fascinating backstory.

00:01:19: I was catching up on a bit of it before we hit the record button there.

00:01:22: And you've lived in some very interesting places.

00:01:24: You're joining us from Poland right now.

00:01:26: Could you

00:01:27: take us through a bit of your backstory, your journey from Manchester to Bristol to working as massive attack CTO to working with Bjork.

00:01:36: There's so much interesting stuff in there, in the timeline.

00:01:40: Talk to us a bit about where you've been and what are the threads that have held together this fascinating career and life.

00:01:46: That's very kind of you to say so.

00:01:47: It's interesting because the thread is just music.

00:01:49: So the reason you and I know each other, the reason we're here and I'm doing this is because of my lifelong relationship to music.

00:01:56: So I was born in West Germany in two long, long time ago now.

00:02:00: I had a very great fortune of having a grandfather who was a classically trained pianist.

00:02:05: And he was also a medical doctor.

00:02:06: And when I was a kid, he took a pair of headphones.

00:02:10: I think they were Prince, P-R-I-N-Z headphones.

00:02:14: Stuck them on my head.

00:02:15: When I was like, it must have been about four or five years old.

00:02:18: And he played me Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on a Deutsche Grammophone label.

00:02:23: And it was Raphael Kubelig, the conductor, bill of philharmonic.

00:02:27: And it came in this beautiful boxed vinyl set.

00:02:29: And they had a booklet.

00:02:30: And in the booklet was Schiller's Oh to Joy, which is obviously Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

00:02:35: And it had English and German translation either side.

00:02:38: And I was a precocious bilingual kid, my father's German mother's English.

00:02:42: And he stuck this thing on my head and went, listen to this.

00:02:45: And as I listened, he said, he sort of moved the headphones like this one side.

00:02:48: And as things were coming in, he was going, that is a cello.

00:02:51: This is a violin.

00:02:52: This is French horns.

00:02:54: This is a trumpet.

00:02:56: This is, and I was like... And I vividly remember this, because on Sunday afternoon at my grandparents, we'd had lunch or something, even though I was really little.

00:03:03: And as I was talking, I was looking at these words, and I only sort of fused them because I was a sprogg, right?

00:03:07: But that was the thing that started everything.

00:03:09: So, Erich Melchior, my granddad in Germany, who's been gone a long time now, lit the fire with that.

00:03:17: And from that point on, I don't know, it all just sort of cascaded.

00:03:21: So I moved, I was in West Germany, and then my parents divorced in the late seventies, and I moved to the UK.

00:03:26: and lived it in a bit of a culture shock, because West Germany versus North Manchester, which is where I landed, heat park with coronation street terraces and cobble streets and stuff.

00:03:38: But the music carried on, and my mother was very fastidious.

00:03:41: She was also a piano player, but she was into music as well.

00:03:45: A great record collection used to rifle through.

00:03:47: I started playing these, one Christmas, you got this little bon tempi organ, these little air powered organs.

00:03:52: And on the left hand side, like... chord keys, you know, like C, D, E, F, G, A, B. And on the right side, the keyboard, but walled numbers.

00:03:58: It's like one plus two, plus three, plus four.

00:04:01: She bought me this beautiful songbook.

00:04:03: It was bright yellow, and it was designed for this organ, right?

00:04:07: And what could happen is, I remember Penny Lane was the first one I tried, and you could basically play the Beatles by numbers, right?

00:04:13: So I think I was like seven when she got that.

00:04:16: So I started learning to play keyboards very early on by paint by numbers version of Bunt MP with the Beatles.

00:04:22: I did that so much, she got me a bigger one the following year, these air-powered one-tempery things.

00:04:26: And I did that so much, she went, if I buy you a piano, will you have lessons?

00:04:31: And I went, yeah.

00:04:32: Not knowing what that meant, unfortunately.

00:04:34: I went, yeah, that sounds good.

00:04:35: But unfortunately, the torture and the agony layer on was like, oh, it's possibly a bad idea.

00:04:39: But she got me the second hand Kimball piano.

00:04:42: and stuck in the kitchen of all places, and I started learning to play the piano from the age of eight.

00:04:47: So that's where the journey got going.

00:04:49: The classical music was ye olde grandad with Beethoven, into bontempe organs, and into little pianos.

00:04:56: Through school, I did all my grades.

00:04:58: I had a great piano teacher, eventually called Lysia Fidekiewicz, who was a Polish classical pianist, who was the head of piano at... Cheetham's music school in Manchester, which is quite a big deal.

00:05:09: And she took me on as a pupil, which is also quite a big deal.

00:05:11: I didn't realise at the time, but she was brilliant.

00:05:13: She taught me brilliant technique and took me through my grades.

00:05:16: Unfortunately for my mother, though, around the age of fifteen, I discovered synthesizers.

00:05:23: When I was eleven, twelve, I've been listening to Jean-Michel Jarre.

00:05:26: And then I think Howard Jones had come out with his version of synths and things and depeche mode, obviously.

00:05:31: In nineteen eighty-three, MIDI was invented.

00:05:33: It was very important tech.

00:05:34: for tech, for music.

00:05:36: And MIDI was a way of joining musical instruments together.

00:05:40: You could layer synthesizers, you could synchronize with drum machines, you know, and it was this super combined, and interestingly, for our times to discuss later, a way of combining lots of manufacturers like Roland and Kurtzweil and you name them, they all came together and they agreed, a standard, oh my God, you know, as manufacturers.

00:05:59: could allow keyboards to touch each other.

00:06:00: I was aware of MIDI and then these shops were opening up in Manchester selling synths that were like MIDI synths.

00:06:06: And so over weekend, instead of going around hanging around bus stops and loitering and smoking, I would be a massive nerd and go down to A-One Music in Manchester and go and fondle these expensive keyboards I couldn't afford.

00:06:19: and dream dreams about being in bands and things.

00:06:21: Eventually, as in all good stories, I think Kanye's got the same story, whatever we think of Kanye, but his grandmother changed his life by buying him, I think, a multi-track recorder or something.

00:06:31: My grandmother, my little North Manchester grandmother, Peggy Smith, a fantastic lady, she should see my eyes bouldering at the thoughts of these like synthesizers, and she bought me a synthesizer for Christmas, and that was like, it changed my wife, so little granny.

00:06:46: Brownie Smith, who had no idea about any of it, just went, oh, Andrew seems like he really wants to do this.

00:06:51: And so my mother was like, oh, it's too expensive.

00:06:53: But, lo and behold, instead of playing Bach and Mozart and, you know, all the old favorites, suddenly I was out and I had this polyphonic, bit-ninety-nine, it was called, by this Italian company, by Krumo, polyphonic midi synthesizer.

00:07:07: And I remember, it was just like, orgy for the ears.

00:07:10: I remember sitting there for hours with this thing, and I would just sit there and I would just like make these.

00:07:14: My favourite thing was like string sounds like long attack and mournful decay and I would just sit there for bloody hours like playing these string sounds on this synth and eventually got into programming.

00:07:24: I think that's where my everything started.

00:07:26: So without getting into war and peace about it all, that's how it all got going.

00:07:30: I then joined a bunch of bands, started playing keyboards in bands, much of my mother's distress, but actually did quite well very quickly.

00:07:36: Manchester was bouncing with music in the mid to late eighties.

00:07:40: There was people like Graham Massey doing A.O.A.

00:07:42: State, there was a Stone Roses, there was a Hacienda Nightclub, there was Tony Wilson, there was Factory Records, it was all going off.

00:07:49: And that was a very exciting place to be a young musician, because you not only were musical, but you also thought, wow, right, Nick's daughter, me, there's Tony Wilson, there's Factory, there's New Order, they're inspirational.

00:07:59: I joined a band called Robinson, and we actually got a publishing deal with BMG.

00:08:04: They gave us twenty grand, the idiots.

00:08:06: We recorded a single.

00:08:07: bought this old crosstown bus and converted it into this gypsy shower bank where you could sleep on the bus as well as travel around, right?

00:08:15: So we did a UK tour of this single that we recorded, which went really well actually.

00:08:20: And bizarrely, we ended up on the word.

00:08:23: And to miracle, his first ever UK performance was on the word when he just got signed to Sony.

00:08:28: He turned up in this open top Mercedes with loads of hot ladies around him.

00:08:32: We turned up in this knackered old crosstown bus with like its own wood stove boiler in it.

00:08:38: And we played on the word.

00:08:39: And that recording actually resurfaced this year.

00:08:43: If you go on my Instagram, there's some guy going through Terry Christian's archive at the moment.

00:08:47: And you can see a clip of yours truly at the edge.

00:08:49: tender age of eighteen on the word with implausible long hair, playing this little snippet of the song that we did.

00:08:55: Unfortunately, that was very addictive because because within minutes of going, I'm in a band, I was in a band on telly and my mum was going, what was on telly?

00:09:02: You know, there was like, God, I'm hooked now, I'm done, you know.

00:09:06: And the first really interesting thing though that happened was while I was doing that, I was still lurking around my old college and a guy who happened to be in my orbit was a young gentleman called Guy Garvey.

00:09:17: And Guy Garvey was in this band called Soft.

00:09:19: Terrible bloody name, but they were called Soft.

00:09:21: And they were doing, at the time, they were quite funky.

00:09:23: They were kind of like trying to do Stereo M. C's and like funky, hammered-org-y stuff, right?

00:09:28: And they were all sixteen, seventeen, and clueless, but very ambitious and nice.

00:09:33: Made friends with Guy, and basically, as I was learning things in the studio, like recording, like, you know, with budgets and proper computers and reel-to-reel, I was passing down this info to Guy going, this is what we need to do, actually get a tape, go to a studio, record it, you know, make duplicates on it.

00:09:47: And so I ended up mentoring Albo.

00:09:49: before they were elbow, basically, when there was still a bunch of spotty herbards in North Manchester.

00:09:53: I wasn't really that manager.

00:09:55: I was that sort of sidekick friend.

00:09:56: I lent them some keyboards.

00:09:58: I gave them encouraging pep talks.

00:09:59: I used to turn up to rehearsals and help them produce songs, recording stuff.

00:10:03: And then eventually I ended up helping them produce the Noisebox EP.

00:10:06: So a very good friend of mine, who's unfortunately died quite a few years ago now, Steve Lloyd, used to run a studio in Manchester called Noisebox.

00:10:13: He was a bass player in my band.

00:10:14: And we took Guy in the band in.

00:10:16: And the first thing they did as elbow, because they changed the name from soft, thank God, was this Noisebox EP, which had a track called Powder Blue on it.

00:10:24: I played Selena Strings on that track as a friend.

00:10:27: We made CD-ROM duplicates of it, because everybody was sending tapes.

00:10:30: We were like, oh, everybody does tapes.

00:10:32: I had a PC, and my mate Sonny Basta had a PC with a CD burner on it.

00:10:37: And so what we did is, very precociously, I taught Ghani into turning into his production line where we made a hundred of these Noisebox EPs as CD-ROMs.

00:10:45: And he gave one to Mark Radcliffe in Manchester and the rest is history.

00:10:49: Yeah, it was good, right?

00:10:50: And that was a good trick.

00:10:51: And so he chatted off and got signed to V-II and then not signed to V-II, unfortunately for them.

00:10:56: And they got asked around by V-II Records.

00:10:58: And I found myself weirdly... Having traversed the boards as a musician, I got a day job because it wasn't paying, my music was not paying the bills.

00:11:05: I got a day job at City Life Magazine in Manchester, which was like time out at the time.

00:11:10: And they got me on board as the online marketing manager because at Manchester University, I'd been using the internet a lot and the internet pre-worldwide web.

00:11:20: The university had to be thanked for that because they very enlightened.

00:11:23: Even in the lots of humanities department where I had, they put computers in.

00:11:27: And so everybody was on these Mac, LCs and quadras in these clusters in a super old school.

00:11:32: And you were using like Gopher and a Telnet and then NCSA Mosaic and stuff like, you know, it's super old steam powered internet stuff.

00:11:39: I had an email address and it was like, what's that?

00:11:41: And what's the dot?

00:11:42: And what's the umpazandre?

00:11:43: And there were only fifty thousand email addresses in the world when I had an email address the first time around.

00:11:48: I mean, can you believe that, right?

00:11:50: That this was true, right?

00:11:51: Anyways, I got a foisted into this, actually I didn't even use a city life gig.

00:11:55: And then the phone started ringing because everybody needed people with internet skills.

00:11:59: And it was like massive feasts or famine, you know, and in London, they were screaming for people.

00:12:03: So I got headhunted, it was ugly.

00:12:05: And the headhunter said, you've got to come to London immediately.

00:12:08: So I went from this cheap, very poorly paid job in Manchester to literally overnight tripling my wage, going working in this startup in London called Answer Think, which was in Grazing Road and Teebles Road, becoming much more involved in the internet.

00:12:23: And then a year went by and that job, I had already, you know, it was too cool for school.

00:12:27: I got another call, this time it was for major players saying, we've got a record label who would like to talk to you.

00:12:32: And I was like, really?

00:12:34: And it turns out it was EMI.

00:12:37: And EMI were looking for new media people.

00:12:39: EMI were looking for new media people who had experience with music, who had experience with the internet.

00:12:43: And without even trying or machinating or doing anything, I was just in the right place at the right time.

00:12:51: And I went through my interview at EMLI and got the gig.

00:12:54: And within three months, I was working with David Bowie's team on BowieNet, launching now that's what I call music online.

00:13:00: So George Martin, web chat, Sir Paul McCartney, auctions on dot music, blah, blah, blah, blah.

00:13:05: You couldn't make it up, really.

00:13:07: And that was another stage of the journey.

00:13:08: Every

00:13:09: piece of the jigsaw there, it's very condensed, but it makes complete sense because of your passion for this overlap between culture and technology, because of your background in music, your love for the internet.

00:13:19: When I read about you becoming the CTO of Massive Attack, this was such a statement in terms of a band actually having that direct relationship with technology.

00:13:29: Could you talk a bit about your life from EMI and working with all these legends of the industry to working with Massive Attack, the pioneers in this new digital world?

00:13:38: It's related because at EMI in ninety-nine they were the first band because Virgin was bought by EMI Records back in the old days and they were on Virgin on Circa and my old mentor Ray Cooper had signed them on Circa Records with Ashley who ended up with Sony.

00:13:53: They were the first band to stream a full album in its entirety in ninety-nine which was mezzanine.

00:13:57: It was interesting because I wasn't really, I didn't know them then.

00:14:00: My friend Danny Van Emden used to manage their online stuff for Virgin.

00:14:04: So they were pioneers, really, like Superfast, like Bowie, because David had done this website with a fan-only access in the mid-nineties already, like mid-late-nineties, BowieNet, and he'd also done this avatar-chat-based web interface called Bowie World, where you could download it and become this three-D avatar and walk around, like VRChat now, but twenty-five years ago, walk around the side of VR World with Bowie GIFs and artwork on the walls.

00:14:29: And Massive Attack on Bowie and also Peter Gabriel were three of the most innovative people at the time in that scene, I think.

00:14:37: Anyway, after EMI, I went and ran off and had some wilderness years with a really amazing guy called Mick Rock.

00:14:43: And I met Mick Rock through David Bowie.

00:14:46: So Mick Rock was the photographer for Bowie who did all the classic Ziggy and then he took Lou Reed, Transformer, Iggy Pop, Rob Power, Queen Two.

00:14:55: You know, he was like super photographer.

00:14:57: And at the time, I kind of got a bit disillusioned with the internet because it was kind of a nightmare after Napster.

00:15:02: It got quite litigious and it wasn't as much fun, especially online.

00:15:06: So Mick sort of got me to join the circus and said, oh, come on, work with me.

00:15:10: And we'll do photography and bands and run around the world doing books and exhibitions.

00:15:14: I went, yeah, all right.

00:15:15: So I did that for a while.

00:15:17: And that was interesting because I met a lot of interesting characters doing that.

00:15:20: But what led me squarely to the door of massive attack was after that, I started working with Mick.

00:15:24: after four or five years, I got really interested in this thing that had turned up in the year called Second Life.

00:15:31: And Second Life was a virtual world.

00:15:33: Yes.

00:15:34: And Suzanne Vega, interestingly, was a musician.

00:15:37: She was the first musician to play a gig in Second Life as an avatar of herself in two thousand and eight.

00:15:43: And I was like, wow, because I love Suzanne Vega.

00:15:45: I was like, wow, and she was like this avatar and people could throw money, literally throw money out at the gigs as avatars, right?

00:15:51: And you could have like custom guitars and clothes and houses.

00:15:55: They even did a sort of progenitor of Bitcoin called Linden's.

00:15:58: And you could basically buy Linden's because the company that made.

00:16:01: it was called Linden Lab.

00:16:02: And you could convert real money into Linden's and use virtual currency, right?

00:16:07: Which I think was where a lot of Bitcoin thinking came from, to be honest.

00:16:10: Anyway, because I got into virtual worlds, I got into game engines as well.

00:16:13: So what was slowly appearing were these three-D game engines which were like these physics-based virtual three-D modeled engines with animation.

00:16:23: You could basically create worlds like Second Life.

00:16:26: You could apply the audio.

00:16:28: You could create avatars and things.

00:16:30: My interests and my tastes sort of became converged.

00:16:33: We'd done music.

00:16:34: We'd done electronic music.

00:16:36: We'd done electronic production and music production.

00:16:38: Then we'd done record labels on the internet.

00:16:41: Then we did analog photography, but I did do a lot of digital photography with Mick for the first time around.

00:16:46: And then we did Game Engine, Three D Immersive Worlds.

00:16:49: And that's where I was sat by two thousand nine ten.

00:16:52: So basically the virtual worlds led me to the door of Ray Koopo's an old mentor of mine at EMI Virgin.

00:16:58: Ray had retired and one of his friends Tony Michaelides, Tony the Greek, had moved to Florida.

00:17:03: Tony the Greek used to be a radio DJ in Manchester in the late eighties actually.

00:17:07: One of the first guys to play the Stone Roses on the National Radio.

00:17:10: Tony had gone to retire and he'd met this guy called Ronnie Abavitz.

00:17:13: And Ronnie was a founder of a company called Magic Leap.

00:17:16: And Magic Leap were making augmented reality glasses.

00:17:19: Seriously, I got press ganged into, come and work with Magic Leap because you're a nerd and you know what they're talking about and we don't.

00:17:26: So I came along and I was basically the fluffer for everyone to try and talk to music label people.

00:17:32: who were going, what?

00:17:34: And I was going, mixed reality.

00:17:35: They were going, what?

00:17:35: They were going, game engines, you know, motion capture, spatial sound.

00:17:39: And they were going, what?

00:17:41: And I was constantly sort of evangelizing for this stuff.

00:17:44: And whilst heavily evangelizing, Ray introduced me to two people, very key.

00:17:49: One was Mark Pickin, Massive Attacks Manager, and the other one was Derek Burkitt, Buick's manager.

00:17:54: And basically, both of those men foolishly allowed me to speak to their artists about mixed reality and immersive media.

00:18:01: And Buick totally got it, and she was already interested in VR.

00:18:04: And then Robert Del Nire, Daddy G wasn't particularly interested in tech, Daddy G likes his music, but he's not as much of a nerd as Rob is.

00:18:12: So Rob and I became friends and started exchanging riffs and licks and ideas about tech.

00:18:17: And this was twenty fourteen.

00:18:19: quite a long time ago now.

00:18:20: Initially we were looking at how could you use Magic Leap Tech and how would music work on Magic Leap Tech and what would it be and blah blah blah.

00:18:26: But quickly moved around.

00:18:29: We're quite similar in some ways and since he's got like raging ADHD like I have, he likes his stuff but he also likes lots of diverse broad stuff and he funnels it all in and out.

00:18:39: And I think that's the parable of our times to be honest.

00:18:42: Be more ADHD, you know.

00:18:43: We started talking about procedural game environments because of the game engine narrative.

00:18:48: We were like saying, well, if music comes into these glasses, how does that work?

00:18:52: And where's the convergence?

00:18:53: Well, the convergence is that to make these worlds work, you have to have a game engine and the game engine controls the glasses, right?

00:18:58: And so what do game engines do?

00:19:00: Well, at the moment, games have these soundtracks like Grand Theft Auto and things like that, where based on the mood and the tempo of the game, The soundtrack can change and the song reflects the vibe or the antithesis of the vibe to try and calm you down or speed you up, right?

00:19:14: And we looked at that and so we did a few experiments and one of them was there was this game jam called Ludum Dare and it still goes and it's basically a connected independent group of game developers or indeed game developers and Ludum Dare is kind of like, you know, who does wins vibe.

00:19:30: and what they do is they vote on a monthly basis for a theme for a game and so the entire community vote and they pick a theme.

00:19:38: And then, at the end of that month, they have a game jam.

00:19:42: And for forty-eight hours, they have to make a game, a wireframe of a demo of a game, based on the theme that they're all voted for, right?

00:19:48: And the idea is you've got forty-eight hours, lots of pressure, to come up with a playable demo of your game idea.

00:19:54: So I've been looking at this anyway, because I was thinking in Majolet was, we need some nerds.

00:19:58: We can all just deal with music people.

00:20:00: We have to have the new voice in the room as to be people who know how to make video games and soundtracks for games and things like that.

00:20:06: So, Rob, very enlightened.

00:20:08: We took a bunch of unused audio stems from massive attack sessions that had not made the grade for songs.

00:20:16: We bundled them up under a Creative Commons attribution license, a CC-III.

00:20:21: We said to the Ludum Dare organiser, give this to your game, people.

00:20:26: Because the one thing that they're not doing, we noticed, is they're not doing any music for their demo games.

00:20:31: They've not got anything to use.

00:20:32: So we're going to give you all these Creative Commons massive attack pieces, and they can slot them in if they fit into their game.

00:20:39: And that went down a storm.

00:20:40: I mean, a notch, interesting.

00:20:41: The guy at Programme Minecraft even gave us a thumbs up for that one on Twitter at the time.

00:20:45: And that was the beginning of Rob and I starting to really mess around with the idea of composition in a game engine environment for mixed reality, really.

00:20:53: As a result of that, we built this app called Phantom.

00:20:56: Johnny Ive, for it is he, is a mate of Rob Del Nages, obviously, because they both like Bauhaus, obviously.

00:21:05: In twenty fifteen, the band were in San Francisco and we got Johnny and his team of engineers turned up from Apple to the gig.

00:21:11: We had a lovely time with them and ended up with a raucous wild of San Francisco night, which ended up in Russian Hill.

00:21:18: But the day after, nursing some substantial hangovers, myself You and the keyboard player from Massive Attack and a couple of others, we were invited to the infinite loop Apple headquarters, which was the old headquarters where Steve had been.

00:21:31: And Johnny and his engineers basically went, oh, look at this new thing we've got.

00:21:37: And it was the watch.

00:21:38: It was before the watch came out.

00:21:40: And it was like, oh, this is an Apple watch.

00:21:41: And it's real like, oh, super hangover anyway, but it was funny.

00:21:44: But what was really amazing was watching all the engineers and how Apple worked.

00:21:47: It's like being inside the Wizard of Oz kind of thing.

00:21:50: He came up with this thing saying, we'd really like to do something that's not a fitness with a watch.

00:21:55: Can you have a think about what that could be?

00:21:58: Rob being Rob and me being me, we went off and thought about what that could be.

00:22:01: And what we realised was that if you could hold somebody's heart rate on the watch, you've got a beat and you've got a tempo.

00:22:09: And so if you've got a beat and a tempo, what else can you do?

00:22:12: Well, you can start making some rules to say that if my heartbeat goes, see here, play this, and if my heartbeat goes to there, play that.

00:22:19: So we ended up concocting this app called Phantom, and I found a developer and also a guy called Robert Thomas to help us think this through.

00:22:27: A bit of a lot of help from Apple, actually.

00:22:28: They gave us some watches and various other things.

00:22:31: We built a prototype of this app called Phantom.

00:22:34: The first thing he did was we used Massive Attack and Young Fathers, who are friends of the band, and another band called Young Fathers.

00:22:40: And we built the first version of this app, and the app was basically supposed to be a synthesis of what these glasses were going to be, because the glasses didn't exist.

00:22:48: We write, well, what's the nearest thing to a pair of glasses?

00:22:51: It's the iPhone with a watch.

00:22:54: And so we took the heart rate off from the watch and the wrist movement because it's got compass in it, axis accelerometer.

00:23:00: We took the time of day.

00:23:02: Time of flight, emotion.

00:23:03: We took the camera signal, what you were doing on the screen, we had a touchscreen face and the camera, and we embedded all those data points into an app and fused them into this app called Phantom.

00:23:14: And the idea we had to build a rule kit, and the rule kit was, if it's this time of day and the heart rate is this, then play this string sound.

00:23:21: If it's this, then do that.

00:23:22: If it's that, we had to build a bunch of rules to basically start.

00:23:25: playing back these stems of massive attack songs in a way that still sounded like massive attack.

00:23:31: So we would have some cute things like when an AR kit came out, if you look to the camera phone and smiled, Liz would start singing.

00:23:38: And if you didn't smile, Liz would stop singing.

00:23:40: And you know, some little cute things where basically the person using the app was remixing the songs using all the sensors off the phone and the watch.

00:23:50: But we also obviously did some things with emotion and triggering feedback loops, which but pleasing and interesting, you know, using AR and things like that.

00:23:57: And so that was one of the things we did with Massive Attack, and that kind of broke the mold in some ways, because everybody's sort of looked to me, well, what is that even?

00:24:05: And to be honest, interestingly, even now, ten years after the effect, I think Phantom will probably come back in some way or another.

00:24:13: At the time, it was very much an art house.

00:24:15: This could be the future kind of experiment, but there was no way to make any money out of it because For instance, none of the music companies knew how to monetize stems at the time.

00:24:24: This is a twenty fifteen.

00:24:25: It just looked at us as if you'd shown a dog a card trick.

00:24:27: You're like, well, you know, so we didn't bother with that one.

00:24:31: And then the complexity of Massive Attack was so deep in the sense of that album that we couldn't charge for it because they just the publishing was a nightmare because they were a collective, right?

00:24:39: So we had to do it as a free of charge thing.

00:24:42: And Universal gave us, you know, the go ahead to do that.

00:24:45: That was one of the experiments.

00:24:46: And then the other thing with Massive Attack was that around the same time.

00:24:49: We came up to this twentieth anniversary of Rob and the band having launched mezzanine.

00:24:53: The label were going, oh, let's repackage, remaster, you know, re-remix.

00:24:57: All the usual stuff the labels do.

00:24:59: And he was like, oh, God, you know, let's do something a bit more interesting than that, can we?

00:25:03: So I've been looking around, because of our interesting climate change, off things are all word, ameliorating is a better word, the impacts of climate change.

00:25:11: We were looking at things like low carbon touring, low carbon events.

00:25:15: We were looking at how does the band reduce emissions.

00:25:18: How can we promote, you know, the agenda of trying to reduce the impacts of music industry on the world and do our bit?

00:25:26: Part of that led me to do a bunch of research into data storage, obviously.

00:25:31: And data storage takes up energy at the moment, and you need to burn things to spin wheels, to make steam, to create electricity, to power servers.

00:25:40: So I'd been looking at these inert data storage media types, and there was a couple.

00:25:45: of candidates.

00:25:46: One was this little silica disc.

00:25:48: So, silica, obviously, made out of sand, glass disc.

00:25:51: University of Southampton, the guy called, I think, Peter Kazanski, he was his name.

00:25:55: He'd been taught by the godfather of lasers.

00:25:58: The Russian guy invented lasers, whose name escapes me, unfortunately.

00:26:00: Anyway, he created this process for writing data onto these little discs.

00:26:04: You would use a femto laser to create these lattices inside the disc, and it would create a very high density storage medium that was passive.

00:26:12: It didn't need to be spun all the time.

00:26:14: It could be archived.

00:26:15: And everybody was going, well, that's good because you don't need to use loads of energies for the memory banks of the internet, which is growing daily, daily, daily, you know, etc.

00:26:22: So I looked at that.

00:26:24: But then this other thing caught my eye and it was storing data and synthetic DNA.

00:26:29: So DNA stores a lot of data, right?

00:26:31: I mean, you and I, for instance, we are the products of the data that DNA can store.

00:26:35: As is everybody listening to this, and this is any non-humans listening to this.

00:26:40: In which case, I thought, well, that's interesting.

00:26:42: So I went and approached the guys doing it.

00:26:44: They were ETH Zurich, the research-led institution there in Zurich.

00:26:48: A guy called Professor Robert Grass was running this company called Turbo Beads.

00:26:52: His game-end was to really authenticate, bizarrely, things like Parmesan cheese and wine and all these products that are getting bootlegged, right?

00:27:01: He was going to inject synthetic DNA into them to go proof of origin, right?

00:27:06: By the time, I came to him and I said, well, could we put an album into DNA?

00:27:09: And he went, yeah, I think we could do that in a kind of Swiss German accent.

00:27:14: So what we did is we, implausibly, we took the Stereo Full Fat Master, Forty-Four K Master of mezzanine, we compressed it, the hell out of it, down to about twenty megs, using an old Dolby codec.

00:27:27: Still sounding good enough.

00:27:28: It's like a Dolby Audio Telephonic codec.

00:27:30: They still sounded good enough for twenty mags to give them, and then they sequenced the binary audio into the GATC sequence for DNA and created a synthetic DNA molecule of the audio, as you do.

00:27:43: Then they cloned it millions and millions of times, and then inserted into these little glass beads, since the turbo beads thing, because DNA degenerates over time, right?

00:27:53: It's an organic compound.

00:27:55: Then Robert, being Robert, decided, hmm.

00:27:58: The final piece of the puzzle is to inject the millions of copies of the album into two packs spray paint.

00:28:06: So Robert Del Nalle, in the eighties, was a hip-hop DJ, graffiti artist, hanging out with people like Banksy and Rosalinders in Bristol.

00:28:16: And obviously, a lot of his invective in his artworks is based around... spray paint, and he thought it was jolly funny to use DNA of the band's album inside spray paint.

00:28:27: because when you use spray paint, you'd be leaving behind a bit like a dog leaving a message behind and it's sucking a leg.

00:28:34: You'd be able to leave millions of copies of mezzanine everywhere by spraying all the walls and on his artworks.

00:28:39: So we did that.

00:28:40: Tom Hingston who designed the mezzanine album artwork did a can, really lovely design can, one in black and one in white.

00:28:45: We got a wallpaper award for Best Hand Album.

00:28:47: So these are some of the adventures that a CTO of massive attack does.

00:28:50: We basically were just trying to find new ways to tell the same stories, which is instead of some sort of mystical thing, we were trying to find ways to illustrate systems thinking around sustainability, around how can you sustain human agency?

00:29:05: How can you merge technology in a humanist way with music and arts?

00:29:10: and try and find the ghosts in the machine or the heart inside the Tin Man, if you like, because for all of the rampant tech innovation at the heart of it, there's still those fleshy meat puppets that we are, and, you know, with all our hopes, dreams and desires.

00:29:24: And so my job, I suppose, has been at this inflection point between the technology and the art and the music, really.

00:29:30: which I've also then taken forward into my own work.

00:29:33: So one of the things is beyond massive name dropping of massive attack on Björk and Bowie, being a man of a certain age and my own ideas, I've recently been synthesizing some of these things into some of my own work, which interestingly, next year is going to evolve into a capital of culture in Oulu in Northern Finland, commissioned me to do a piece of sound art, which I've called the Logos.

00:29:55: And again, at this inflection point between tech and art, I'm going to be sonifying billions of year old radio bursts from the other side of the universe, into audio playback, into sonifications.

00:30:09: They're going to play every day at the same time inside this huge, beautiful, eighteenth century cathedral in Oluf, northern Finland.

00:30:17: And we are going to get the philosophy of Timothy Morton, do some meditations and some words.

00:30:24: We're going to get Professor of Astrophysics at MIT, Kiyoshi Masui, to write some new words about physics and our place in the universe.

00:30:32: And then the Dean of the Cathedral, a lady called Satu Sone, is going to write some theologically inspired narratives around this idea of these very, very weak signals coming from incredibly far away that are still perceptible by humans.

00:30:50: So the inspiration of people I've worked with is now fermenting itself into doing my own stuff more vociferously.

00:30:56: And it's been interesting because just to manifest those things and to be inspired those people, you can be very intimidated by those people in some ways, but you can also be very inspired by them.

00:31:06: And the latter is true.

00:31:07: The former was true at first, and then the latter is true now.

00:31:11: And I suppose with regard to this conversation we're having, this new year's revolution, evolution.

00:31:17: One of the things I feel at the Logos and also the works of the people I've been fortunate to work with is you're just trying to define what is to be human and to keep that signal and reduce the noise.

00:31:29: And the signal to noise ratio is a good nerdy narrative arc to talk about because I'm all about maintaining the signal because especially now with AI and generative AI and you know the to be or not to be of what it is to be human when everything's written for you and everything's played for you and everything's filmed for you.

00:31:49: How do you maintain the human spark in that?

00:31:52: And how do you keep a sense of our culture identity alive when it's been so rapidly ingested and exported and ingested and exported?

00:32:02: Yeah, you open up a whole can of worms there.

00:32:05: Thank you for taking us through all of those different scenarios, man.

00:32:07: It's like the stuff at Massive Attack utterly mind-blowing.

00:32:10: My goodness.

00:32:11: And the project with Logos next year, I think a lot of people are going to be tuning into that.

00:32:14: It's such a kind of poignant metaphor for where we kind of find ourselves as humanity.

00:32:18: You mentioned climate change there earlier.

00:32:20: We had Claire O'Neill from AGF on the podcast talking about the Massive Attack collaboration.

00:32:25: in great detail.

00:32:26: so we will link to that in the show notes.

00:32:28: but I love the way that you're actually looking at this potentially this inflection point in human history where you know you've been a part of all of these technology revolutions leading up from now.

00:32:39: you've seen the most inspiring the most impactful and now you're actually looking at it in this age of generator of AI as actually this could be something entirely different.

00:32:50: could you take us through your view on where we stand now with Generative AI?

00:32:55: because I know you're actually kind of, you know, charting a different course.

00:32:59: You're not just taking it all on the chin.

00:33:01: You're not taking it for granted.

00:33:02: You're actually seeing what's happening and you are charting a course to the futures.

00:33:06: Talk to us a bit about the world in twenty twenty six and this New Year's Revolution.

00:33:11: I think what occurred to me this year as I had the great fortune to go to a bunch of music events to travel around Europe.

00:33:18: So I went to Reaper Barn Festival.

00:33:20: in Hamburg where they all talk about dance music a lot.

00:33:22: And then I went to Amsterdam dance event where they all talk about dance music a lot.

00:33:26: Similar to in the city in Manchester in the eighties and nineties in which Tony Wilson coined to get the industry to talk about issues of the day.

00:33:35: to have, you know, wizened people discuss things on panels and come to some conclusions, hopefully some conclusions at some point mixed with live music and bands playing and all that kind of good stuff.

00:33:44: I went to a couple of these things and I also joined the Association for Electronic Music this year, so I'm now a member of the AFEM.

00:33:50: Last year, I made some good friends at the Association for Electronic Music and Finley and Jay, who are my main homeboys there, basically were introducing me to these narratives that I'd kind of been on the fringes of.

00:34:03: Because to be very candid, in twenty seventeen, eighteen, I was already looking at AI, I was Rob, and we looked at AI and we looked at DeepDream initially, and we did a bunch of artworks based on DeepDream imagining massive attack artwork.

00:34:15: And we also did some work, we chatted to a bunch of people, like DeepMind, about what they were doing and also Google, what they were doing about AI.

00:34:24: And we were aware of a couple of things like Magenta, which is a project by Google, Google Magenta, which is all about composition.

00:34:31: and style transfer and composition and MIDI.

00:34:34: And we were also aware of DeepMind doing projects on things like WaveNet with Google.

00:34:40: And WaveNet now seems to have been what Eleven Labs has turned into.

00:34:43: WaveNet was giving me a minute of audio and I can make a clone of your voice.

00:34:48: And at the time, that was seen as fairly nuclear, sensitively coordinated to not be released software.

00:34:53: because they all went, we're not ready for it, right?

00:34:56: But now it appears we are.

00:34:57: I don't know what changed.

00:34:58: But we were already aware of what was going on then.

00:35:00: And Rob and I kind of steered away from it a bit because whilst making mezzanine in the Phantom app, it became fairly obvious that what we were starting to discuss was the it-ness of an artist.

00:35:11: Because while we were creating these rules to pull these stems together at runtime in this app, we were having to say, This bass line and this string section should never not play together.

00:35:21: This vocal always needs to happen with his drum.

00:35:24: Otherwise, it doesn't sound enough like the song, you know?

00:35:28: And so we realised what we were building was a pattern language description, a canonical descriptor, if you like, mathematically of massive attack.

00:35:38: it-ness, right?

00:35:40: As a formula.

00:35:41: And I said to Rob, you know, obviously, where this lead is, you end up with building a model of massive attack.

00:35:47: is an AI.

00:35:48: And what happens then is that AI can then be sequenced to just play massive attack songs all day long without you guys being involved.

00:35:55: And we kind of went, whoa, I don't know if we're ready for that one.

00:35:58: And we peddled furiously away from that because it was, you know, to bin the, what do they call it?

00:36:03: The Judas sheep.

00:36:04: Basically, when the lambs go to slaughter, right, there's one of them that is trained by the shepherd to be the one that leads them all to slaughter.

00:36:12: And it's called the Judas sheep.

00:36:14: Anyway.

00:36:15: And what we didn't want to be was be this character that's going to go, hey, everyone, let's all put all our audio onto AI so that AI can just generate music without you.

00:36:25: So we went, no, we're not going to do that.

00:36:27: So I pedalled furiously, and so did Rob, and we didn't think about it much more.

00:36:31: And then the whole cryptosing out, we were like, oh, we're definitely not doing that.

00:36:34: I was hanging around with these quite down.

00:36:37: Chod and Mopee Germans in the Reaper Barn Festival.

00:36:40: And a couple of them were working for Fraunhofer Institute, which is this nerdy audio industrial thing that reinvented MP-III, interestingly.

00:36:48: But they were all going, oh, we're all doomed.

00:36:50: And I was like, going, what?

00:36:51: Yeah, you know, everybody's already had their catalog scraped and all the models are done.

00:36:56: You might as well just close the shop and go home because the music industry is knackered because of the the AI.

00:37:03: And I was like, what?

00:37:04: I was like, yeah, well, if you've not been scraped by now, are you even relevant?

00:37:08: So I was like, oh, this is a bit downbeat.

00:37:10: And the thing is, you can't do anything to protect your music, because if you put any protections on, the AI learns the protection and strips it off.

00:37:18: And I was like, oh, bloody hell, this is a bit grim.

00:37:21: Ever-decreasing circles.

00:37:22: Anyway, unaccustomed as I am to being a pain in the backside, I said, I'm not accepting this, saying, no.

00:37:28: I was saying, we need to just regroup and come back and be stronger.

00:37:32: So I then went to ADE, and I heard the same invective, which was like, oh, there's all these deep fakes on DSPs, on Spotify, and everybody's, yeah, diesel's taking down as many deep fakes in a day as I've had on dinners in my life, et cetera.

00:37:46: And I was like, oh, God.

00:37:47: So I started doing some work and researching what the opportunities may be.

00:37:51: Now, in my early days at EMI, They brought in various demos of how to stop people file sharing.

00:37:58: So in the days of Napster and Linewire, the music industry's response was, right, how do we stop this?

00:38:04: How do we stop piracy?

00:38:05: So one of the ways to do it was, I think, called DRM, Digital Rights Management.

00:38:09: DRM, in its first wave, was quite brutal.

00:38:11: What Steve Jobs did, and I remember this very well, was in two thousand, he did a huge poster campaign around London, which had rip, mix, burn.

00:38:23: written across the top of the poster.

00:38:25: And what he was possibly suggesting was that you might want to use your night new iMac with its CD drive to rep your CD collection and put them onto his new shiny iPod.

00:38:36: Unfortunately, the terms and conditions of you having a CD didn't include you making copies of that CD beyond a fair use, right?

00:38:43: And so everybody was ripping their CDs, but they weren't just making CDs, they were putting them on file sharing programs, right?

00:38:48: And then suddenly there was this huge existential morass.

00:38:52: And the music industry was going, oh my god, we're all knackered because no one's buying CDs.

00:38:55: They're all sharing files, all the teenagers.

00:38:57: And so there was this huge reargound action to put digital rights management on things.

00:39:00: Anyway, to a greater or lesser extent, that didn't really work.

00:39:03: And the only thing that did sort of save the music industry in avert commerce, I think, was streaming became more of an option as bandwidth increased.

00:39:12: So bandwidth increased.

00:39:14: domestic internet.

00:39:15: boring but important plumbing.

00:39:17: It became easier to stream music and also easier to download music.

00:39:20: So Apple very quickly stole a march on all the major labels, came up with iTunes and managed within two clicks.

00:39:25: I want the song, I download the song, I want the song, I do it really easy, super low friction.

00:39:29: So that kind of saved the first wave of disappointment that the internet gave to the rights owners.

00:39:34: And then streaming came along and Universal, Lucian Grange and a guy who used to be my peer at Universal called Rob Wells, did a deal with this company that only a few people had heard of called Spotify.

00:39:45: And they did a deal with Spotify.

00:39:46: And I started using Spotify pretty early, I have to say.

00:39:48: And I thought, wow, this is amazing.

00:39:49: It's like the celestial jukebox.

00:39:51: And do you want to hear about celestial jukebox?

00:39:53: Oh yeah, definitely.

00:39:54: My second interview at EMLI with a guy called Fergal Gaara and a guy called Mike McNally.

00:39:59: I remember them well.

00:40:00: Yes,

00:40:01: yeah.

00:40:01: Dave sat there and they said, oh, we want you to present your ideas on the future of the internet and music.

00:40:05: And I was like, oh, okay.

00:40:07: So I'd been reading New Media Age, which is like the Bible at the time for all the nerds in London.

00:40:12: And I'd been on mpthree.com and I'd used real player and built some websites for elbow and various things using real networks, which was like a four on a streaming standard.

00:40:20: And my hypothesis was there's going to be this thing called the celestial jukebox.

00:40:26: and this is in nineteen ninety nine and in a few years time you'll have all of the music ever recorded available for you on demand from the celestial jukebox.

00:40:34: and they all look to me as if say you are off your rocker but anyway we're gonna take you on and see where it leads.

00:40:41: and I was like okay anyway fast forward to the future.

00:40:44: this celestial jukebox has been very effective because let's zoom right to present day.

00:40:48: my research led me to the understanding that what's been happening is that these companies like Suno and Udio have been using Chrome.

00:40:56: The browser is a headless version of Chrome.

00:40:58: So you turn into an engineering unit rather than the browser, right?

00:41:02: And the headless version of Chrome has been programmed to scrape YouTube en masse.

00:41:08: And they created a program to basically just... In volumes, where you just set the computer running to, I don't know, two months straight or whatever, and it just goes through all of the different versions of everything and sticks them on a hard drive.

00:41:22: So they basically scraped.

00:41:23: It's equivalent of YouTube, some guy at YouTube coming home one day going, hey, this is all of YouTube on a hard drive because you can't buy one of those things.

00:41:30: Imagine if you could buy one of those things.

00:41:31: We'd all be done, right?

00:41:32: The job done.

00:41:34: What these guys have done, these, you know, and Udio guys have done is they've written a software that's basically compromised Chrome.

00:41:41: didn't have enough defences against this activity to stop them doing it.

00:41:45: So they've scraped all of YouTube, built these models without any consent or copyright and not worrying about that.

00:41:51: The models they've started using to generate music, then something strange has happened.

00:41:55: Now we'll go into this only delicately because I think it's a massive kind of wormsis.

00:42:00: But certain organisations, shall we say, and also financial institutions and also individuals seem to have thought at some point that it'd be worth funding these challengers who these criminals basically have stolen music, funding them very well to go off and make a business.

00:42:18: And I think the trouble is they use the same model as YouTube used in the first place.

00:42:23: YouTube amassed a billion-dollar war chest and they said, right, we know that copyright is going to be infringed.

00:42:28: People are going to upload stuff to YouTube.

00:42:30: There's not that.

00:42:31: So what we'll do is we'll have a moat.

00:42:32: And the defensive mode for us will be we can pay for lawyers to go, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry forever in a day with a billion dollars.

00:42:42: And by the time everybody's lost their legal action, we'll just go, Ipso facto, we are YouTube and we've won.

00:42:49: It was the same thing Uber did, right?

00:42:50: It's a very standard business model for certain companies.

00:42:52: And OpenAI have done the same thing.

00:42:54: OpenAI casually funded through the bad teeth by Microsoft, interestingly.

00:42:59: So when everybody talks about OpenAI, OpenAI are actually Microsoft, because Microsoft went, here, have all these as your tokens to do your stuff, right?

00:43:06: And this is very in-depth for your audience, I think.

00:43:08: But anyway, the point being is that, unlike the poor guy who came up with naps to have no money, Sean Fanning, these guys are all on to the teeth with acres of cash, right?

00:43:20: What's happening is the old industry is being undermined and Suno and Udio are doing to the music industry what they think Napster and also iTunes, Apple Music did to the old music industry.

00:43:30: It was a massive shakedown, you know?

00:43:32: You aren't doing this well enough, so we'll do it.

00:43:34: And we'll become the new kings of always today, right?

00:43:37: So I was there going, well, that's fine, but what you're in doing?

00:43:39: there is the fundamental tenor of copyright as a creative person.

00:43:44: You're saying that doesn't matter.

00:43:47: you're saying that it's okay.

00:43:49: And everybody's guilty.

00:43:49: This meta have been found to have been downloading all these jailbroken books from Anna's archive, which has made the llama model.

00:43:56: The only people who really suck at AI are Apple, and that's because they don't go around breaching everybody's copyright, right?

00:44:03: So that's why their AI sucks, because they don't go around breaching everybody's copyright.

00:44:06: Because AI to work needs you to basically say, suspend any disbelief you've got in copyright, and go, you know, have all my books, have all my films, have all my music, feel free, fill your boots.

00:44:16: And maybe I'll get some scrap thrown to me from the table when you're breaking it in, you know, which is a terrible occasion.

00:44:24: So I set my brain working to try to find a solution.

00:44:27: So I said this company called Genotone.

00:44:29: And it comes from the word genotype from the idea of DNA, a genotype, your genes.

00:44:33: And my proviso, my hypothesis is thus, just in music, because I can't deal with anything else, because it's bad enough for me as it is, right?

00:44:40: But there's only one life.

00:44:43: Anyway, what can we do?

00:44:44: What can we do?

00:44:44: What can we do?

00:44:45: So, because of my interest in audio, I am aware of a thing called watermarking.

00:44:51: So, the first time I came across watermarks was posh paper.

00:44:54: So, dazzled and bond paper, you know, bonded writing paper.

00:44:57: You hold it up to the light and there's the BB sign going on posh.

00:45:01: I've got posh paper, right?

00:45:02: That's watermark.

00:45:03: Watermark is an ancient art form as a result of printing where people were able to authenticate the paper stuff was printed on.

00:45:10: Very interesting.

00:45:10: So, watermarking technology has also been embedded in videos.

00:45:14: There's a company called DigiMark was doing it in the nineties for VHS and DVDs for their watermark stop piracy.

00:45:20: And so you could tell where something came from, right?

00:45:22: And audio has also got its form of watermarking.

00:45:25: Now, watermarking and audio, originally very interestingly for me, in the old days, when radio was king, there was a thing called the chart return system.

00:45:33: And when you released a single, when a DJ played a song on the radio, Raja, which was the company that monitored the chart returns, They would have a system in place where at the radio station, they would monitor how many plays of record were done by that radio station.

00:45:47: And all those plays would go into the hat at the end of the week, and it would give you a relative chart position based on sales of vinyl, CD, whatever, and then plays, right?

00:45:55: To enable this in the nineties, because I was in a band, I knew about this, what you did at mastering with your dad is you had to embed an audio chirp into the song.

00:46:06: And so when the song was played by the DJ, this little chip would go like a little sonic blip.

00:46:11: And that little sonic blip was your identification.

00:46:14: It was to say that this is your song.

00:46:15: It's been played today by the BBC at two minutes plus three, and it goes into the hat for the chart returns.

00:46:21: So having remembered that, I went, hmm, I wonder if we could do something similar for music in this era of AI.

00:46:28: But instead of it being like a... to the chart return service, it's a watermark that's embedded into your audio, but you can't hear it.

00:46:35: And there's a technical term for that.

00:46:36: It's psychoacoustic embedding.

00:46:38: So you psychoacoustically embed the audio.

00:46:42: And what that means is a computer looks at the waveform of the audio, a bit like Shazam, right?

00:46:46: And it goes, Where can I stuff this audio so you're not going to hear it?

00:46:50: In here, up here, down there.

00:46:52: Where am I going to put it?

00:46:53: And fold it, a bit like weaving.

00:46:54: Can I fold it into the audio so you can't hear it, right?

00:46:57: So I was looking around and there's a bunch of tech that's done that for twenty years, right?

00:47:00: And to great lesser degrees of success.

00:47:03: But now because of the speed of computing and also the evolution of maths and computing, it's now a lot better than it used to be.

00:47:08: So you can hide this audio very effectively in relatively real time.

00:47:12: So I've set this company called Genotown.

00:47:14: I applied for some mad professor patents that I dreamt up one night in a fever dream.

00:47:18: Those include some of the things I learned from Massive Attacks DNA project.

00:47:22: They also include some things I learned from Massive Attacks Phantom project.

00:47:26: And they also include some things I learned from signal processing.

00:47:29: So the idea, the big idea at the moment is that companies like Deezer and Apple Music are dealing with millions of tracks of deep fake and also generative AI music.

00:47:40: And they have no provenance.

00:47:41: So, there's all problems with that, which is organized crime is using them, spotty herbits passing themselves off are using them, and they're monetizing them, right?

00:47:50: So, what I've proposed with genotone is that we create an embedded audio cryptographically secure data layer into your music that is referenced with an ID that is only you, like your passport.

00:48:04: And when you upload some music to a DSP, Spotify, Deezer, Apple Music, that audio signifier has to be present.

00:48:12: And if it's not present, it just doesn't go in.

00:48:16: And what you do by doing that in one fast loop is you get rid of all the slop because the slop is unattributable and it's got no provenance.

00:48:25: So I've set up this... project called Genotome.

00:48:27: As an open standard for musicians, not for record labels or tech companies or Spotify and Deezer, a musician owns their own identity.

00:48:35: It's not sold to them or licensed to them or rented to them.

00:48:38: It's free.

00:48:40: The person distributing the music has to pay a license to use the software we develop to prove that the artist's song is theirs because they are constitutionally obliged now legally next year from next year to show that artists and music have provenance before going into their system.

00:48:56: So I'm now sitting bizarrely, I'm sitting on this committee in Whitehall, being convened by DCMS, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, to talk about standards for AI.

00:49:08: And it would appear, the lone voice at the table representing a bunch of people in the UK, about thirty thousand musicians at the moment, through the people I'm working with, to try and bring this in as a standard where artists will be able to get their ID similar protocols to banking.

00:49:24: You know, when you do the passport and your three-D face thing you do, it's locked into you.

00:49:27: You've got your own ID, the only unit have the key for, and nobody else knows your key.

00:49:31: That is embedded in your music and it goes into the machine.

00:49:34: And if it hasn't got that, then the machine will not accept it.

00:49:37: That is not the only answer to this.

00:49:39: And it's definitely not a silver bullet, but that stops all the AI's slop.

00:49:44: So that's what I've been doing.

00:49:45: And interestingly, all of these things have convened together because The final piece of the pudding is that this bizarre pattern that I've applied for is informed by my work on working on fast radio bursts.

00:49:57: So fast radio bursts are incredibly faint audio signals that are sub-five milliseconds and have originally the power of a million nuclear explosions, but they've traveled for nine billion years across interstellar space and radio telescope on the planet can still Get a signal right.

00:50:19: so I thought well if you can travel across nine billion years of interstellar space And I can still hear your little radio signal go beep.

00:50:27: then we can figure out how to defeat

00:50:29: AI.

00:50:29: Phenomenal.

00:50:30: Well, thank you for fighting the good fight.

00:50:32: We will of course be linking to all of your projects in the show notes for the podcast.

00:50:36: So if you're listening, if you'd like to get involved, if you can support Andrew and his team and their amazing work, please do reach out and get in touch.

00:50:44: But listen, Andrew, I think it'd be informative just to rewind a little bit.

00:50:48: And, you know, you're talking about all this AI slot, generative AI, you know, one of the biggest thefts of copyright material in human history.

00:50:58: What do you think is currently at stake for humanity with this generative AI tsunami?

00:51:06: It's just Blade Runner.

00:51:07: Blade Runner is the answer.

00:51:09: Basically, how do you prove you're a human?

00:51:11: And how do you prove we even existed?

00:51:13: So what was interesting with the DNA project was that I gave an interview to Wired and my parting shot was, if all of this stops tomorrow, all of it, maybe because Rob has sprayed his DNA paint everywhere, if an alien species was to land on the planet in two thousand years time, they might just uncover a little bit of something and it might be DNA of mezzanine music, right?

00:51:35: There may be else alive.

00:51:37: I feel that we're in an era where there's a couple of things going on here and You have to be culturally sensitive to what's going on and also politically sensitive to what's going on.

00:51:46: I would argue the thing that really moved Western culture in the twentieth century in music was a protest song.

00:51:53: And it was, I like to say, Audie Guthrie, this machine kills fascists, you know, and talking about workers' rights.

00:51:59: Then it was Dylan talking about nuclear war and racism.

00:52:03: And then it was all the protest songs of the sixties, peace and love, hippie movement.

00:52:07: Then it was the punk protest songs in the seventies about racism and political violence.

00:52:11: Then in the eighties, it was about live aid and Nelson Mandela.

00:52:15: all these topics of our time which were evoked very strongly and clearly by musicians as the troubadours talking about our cares and the things we should think about.

00:52:26: I remember you too being the first band in the eighties to put Amnesty International on their artwork.

00:52:32: Joshua Tree had a link to become a member of Amnesty International and Bono was like, you know... Let's do that.

00:52:38: That's cool, right?

00:52:39: And him and Billy Bride together were doing these some remarkable things about awareness around political refugees and all these kind of things.

00:52:46: And the thing that happens if you homogenize culture through a hose pipe, of mediated, mediocre, nonsensical gibberish, and you then denigrate what has been made by humans to the bottom of the pile of all the gibberish that's been squirted at you, is that you lose your cultural connection and your sense of community, your sense of ethics and values, all mediated by this hosepipe of cynical, I think, exhaust fumes from a tech sector that is all about money and hardware and an uroboros of finance.

00:53:23: Not about what it is to be alive in a planet that's being divided and suffering from the climate change, suffering from inequality and poverty and injustice.

00:53:33: You end up with this brave new world machine music that's just designed to pacify you and to stop you asking all good questions.

00:53:42: So that's what AI music can do, I think.

00:53:46: If we're not cast.

00:53:46: That's a dystopian warning right there.

00:53:49: But listen, I'd love to get your thoughts on the kind of role of shared rituals and community and people coming together in this age.

00:53:57: Like you say, everyone's at their phones for very splintered and divided and separated.

00:54:03: Talk about coming together as humans celebrating our shared humanity.

00:54:06: How important is this?

00:54:07: And what can we do to protect these things?

00:54:10: It's plowshares into swords and swords into plowshares.

00:54:13: I think tech is good, right?

00:54:15: A technology is as old as we are and you don't want to run away from it and become a Luddite and live in caves because you know things like polio come back and things like tuberculosis come back and so there's something to be said for the noble savage living in a cave and going back to basics.

00:54:29: but I also think that that's possibly a reverse engineering going on.

00:54:33: I don't know if you want all of that.

00:54:34: you know we all want to go back in time but we want to have things like electric blind kits and a pair of slippers and a toaster and a kettle.

00:54:41: you know you want to go back in time but you don't want to go back to the ruggedness, I believe.

00:54:46: The thing with music is it's always been a great combination and a great accelerator and catalyst.

00:54:52: And for my life, it's single-handedly, without any shadow of a doubt, led me to meet everybody I've met and do everything I've done.

00:54:59: Music is at the core, fundamentally.

00:55:01: If my grandfather hadn't had their grandfatherly wisdom to melt my brain with Beethoven when I was four, what have any of this happened?

00:55:09: Who knows?

00:55:09: It's the same with any Itch.

00:55:10: You Can't Scratch dances.

00:55:12: painters, poets, writers, any kind of art form that takes you and metastases you out of the humdrum to get away from Maslow's hierarchy of eating, sleeping and shelter and doing the finesse thing of expressing yourself in the joy of creation and also the communal practice of creation, right?

00:55:30: So community is a bit of a vague idea in some ways.

00:55:34: But the idea of using technology to take away central authority and to come together as a community, I think that's an interesting prospect.

00:55:42: Now, a lot of people say, oh, that's socialism, and communism is not.

00:55:45: The idea of disintermediation and reducing friction so that you and I can have this common... You know, you and I have never physically met.

00:55:52: We met because of the intermediary of the internet, amazing invention, that allows us to be aware of each other's work, to be allowed to understand.

00:55:59: we have certain common connected ideas and thoughts and hopes and narratives, and appreciation of music, specifically, obviously, and your appreciation of audio, which is why we're here.

00:56:09: I feel that those tools used in the right way are still incredibly powerful.

00:56:13: and making music together, bringing people together to make music, from my perspective, because you can do other things, you know, to make music and do sports, you can do whatever the hell you want.

00:56:21: The idea of using devices and software to collectively bring together an empathetic union of people is very powerful.

00:56:28: And in times of crisis like we're living in, whether real or imagined, whether manufactured or accidental, who's to say, but my pay grade to say, but to bring ourselves together and to share stories and to share narratives, to create things together collectively, to identify and to work through one another's problems through it, to meet new people, to galvanize ourselves.

00:56:49: Those are really vital human things to do.

00:56:51: And in an era where we're all running around, you know, because God is dead, because we live in a world full of rational science, but is God dead?

00:56:58: Don't know, to be discussed.

00:57:00: community spirit though which was engendered by churches and all those kind of things we had for a thousand years and then booted out the window in the last eighty years because of Einstein and radio telescopes and nuclear bombs.

00:57:12: Those things have been removed but the requirement for them is still there.

00:57:15: We still need to find a way to come together and share and contribute and to feel like we're part of something bigger than ourselves.

00:57:23: So I would say that AI and tech and those kind of things have used in the correct way are very useful.

00:57:31: I think a good analogy is gunpowder.

00:57:33: You can use it for blowing people up.

00:57:35: We can also use it for making very nice fireworks.

00:57:37: That's

00:57:37: fantastic.

00:57:38: My goodness, fireworks.

00:57:39: Well, fireworks, we couldn't have a better metaphor.

00:57:41: We're here on New Year's Day, twenty twenty six.

00:57:43: The theme of the podcast is, you know, not New Year's resolutions.

00:57:46: It's New Year's evolution.

00:57:47: It's New Year's revolution.

00:57:49: So listen, my final question for you now, Andrew, is talk to us a bit about your hopes for the future.

00:57:54: What would you love to see happening in twenty twenty

00:57:58: six?

00:57:58: There are some really good things happening and it will hopefully be evoked and evolved by twenty twenty six.

00:58:03: I think everybody is realising from a musical perspective we need to have a collective agreement.

00:58:08: So the reason I set up Genotone wasn't so I could have the statue on horseback of myself in the town square.

00:58:15: Andrew saved the music industry.

00:58:17: That's not the gig.

00:58:18: The gig was that all I saw was lots of people having separate conversations and that's no use.

00:58:24: So I'm doing it as a provocation because I've got a proposal.

00:58:28: But what's yours?

00:58:29: You probably think yours is better.

00:58:31: You think mine's rubbish.

00:58:32: But I don't care because I'm going to be in competition with you.

00:58:34: And if you don't tell me what your idea is, we won't get any further than me winning.

00:58:39: So you don't want me to win.

00:58:40: So you come on board as well and we'll have a joined up conversation that creates dynamism and competition to solve a problem.

00:58:48: And I think what's happening and what I'm trying to do with genotone and lots of other people trying to do with standards and politicians are politicians are a mere.

00:58:55: It's three to five years behind, but it doesn't matter.

00:58:58: I'm trying to legislate to bring in protections for musicians and artists, things like that.

00:59:02: I feel that next year I would hope to see a strong framework from a political, boring but important, plumbing perspective.

00:59:08: that legislation comes in to stop people.

00:59:11: loading deep fakes onto networks, legislation comes in to stop AI companies without paying anybody's copyright fees to stop them in their trucks from distributing their product until we've sorted it all out.

00:59:22: At the moment, we're just letting them do it whilst trying to sort it out at the same time.

00:59:25: Seems weird to me.

00:59:27: I would put a moratorium on them.

00:59:28: And I would hope also that with regards to climate, and I know you were talking to Claire about this, the wheels have been set in motion by Massive Attack for the Act One Point Five initiative, reducing emissions from events, looking at the whole supply chain and holistic experience of attending events and how we consume culture.

00:59:46: I think there's lots of movement going on to try and effectively not force people to do that, but to make it attractive for them to do that and easy for them to do that.

00:59:55: And beyond that, I think I'm just hoping that beyond all of the nonsense and the noise that's going on in the media.

01:00:02: There seems to be a general purpose emotion now that people are realising a bit like when you've smoked too many cigarettes after a party and you've drunk too many drinks.

01:00:12: You for a while think, I should probably stop smoking and I should probably stop drinking just for a bit because I feel really bad.

01:00:19: And I think that phones and the perpetual addiction and dopamine hit of phones, finally the hangover is occurring.

01:00:26: and people are going back to these devices going, I'd like to use the camera and I'd like to read the news, but I don't think I need to be scrolling for six hours a day because I don't feel very well after doing that.

01:00:37: Obviously there's moves afoot to put phones in people's pockets at schools and not bring them out, very good.

01:00:42: I think that as a parent or concerned parent, I see that as an opportunity to change the narrative for children.

01:00:47: And I think there are a lot of exciting things happening with regard to ecology and... trying to change the narrative around that.

01:00:55: I'm over the doomsterism of it, because I think instead of feeling oppressed, you know, Timothy Morton, a friend of mine, came up with this concept of hyper-objects.

01:01:03: And hyper-objects being these immovable, massive things that weigh you down.

01:01:06: They're too big for you to deal with, right?

01:01:08: You can't deal with climate change on your own.

01:01:11: But the way to avoid depression is to feel like you have some agency.

01:01:14: And the thing that I've left my son with who's now turning fifteen in less than a week's time is that, although you can't change the world of climate change on your own, but you can be useful and learn skills that make you helpful to people who are dealing with the consequences and by being useful and having a toolkit of things you can do.

01:01:34: to make it easier to live through the consequences of something that's much bigger than all of us that we have to collectively deal with.

01:01:40: At least you're not going to sit there hiding under a rock worrying about it.

01:01:44: You'll have some agency to do something that feels constructive and positive and helpful and be useful.

01:01:51: So I suppose my message for the new year is try and be useful and try to help people.

01:01:55: And, you know, there's no revolution without evolution, as they say.

01:01:59: Fantastic.

01:02:00: Those are New Year's evolutionary, revolutionary resolutions to live by.

01:02:03: Thank you so much, Andrew.

01:02:05: That's absolutely brilliant.

01:02:06: And now I do have one final question for you.

01:02:08: And it's one that we ask all of our VIP guests, everyone from Claire O'Neill to Carl Cox to Suzanne Shani to everybody who's been on the show.

01:02:15: And that

01:02:15: is

01:02:16: to nominate a musical track that you love to add to our infinite VIP title playlist.

01:02:24: I have selected the Yellow Magic Orchestra, Rio Chisakamoto's band from the seventies, RIP, Rio Chi, and he did an album with them called Technodellic in one of my favourite records.

01:02:39: There is a track, track number seven, Gradated Grey, which is the order of the day, and that's my track, Gradated Grey by Yellow Magic Orchestra.

01:02:50: Phenomenal choice.

01:02:51: Thank you so much, Andrew.

01:02:52: I'm going to be a bit more obvious in my choice.

01:02:55: The track is Protection.

01:02:56: The band is Massive Attack, but it's the Eno remix because it's just gorgeous.

01:03:00: It's like ten minutes long.

01:03:01: It's got all these storm recordings.

01:03:03: And like your good self, Andrew, is one of these amazing visionaries that overlaps music and culture and technology in a way that kind of enlightens the rest of the world.

01:03:12: So, Andrew, thank you.

01:03:13: so, so much for joining us.

01:03:14: A great

01:03:14: pleasure.

01:03:15: Okay, folks, that was the great Andrew Melchior.

01:03:18: I really hope you enjoyed the discussion.

01:03:20: We talked about the long arc of music and technology, what it all means, all about creativity in an age of machines.

01:03:27: Why collective creation and collective meaning still matters and exactly what's at stake in twenty twenty six and beyond.

01:03:34: If this conversation resonated with you, feel free to share it.

01:03:37: Feel free to recommend it to your friends.

01:03:40: And by all means, join us as a subscriber.

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01:03:51: It does help more people get to know our amazing guests like Andrew Melchior.

01:03:56: Four, more exclusive content, some behind the scenes goodies and maybe even some competitions.

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01:04:06: Thanks so much for joining us.

01:04:07: My name is Usheen Lani.

01:04:08: Happy New Year.

01:04:09: Whatever you do, let's be useful and let's be part of a better future.

01:04:13: We will see you in in the next series.