PERSPECTIVES ON COLLABORATIVE MUSIC What we just saw was the opening of the video series "Everything is a Remix", produced by Kirby Ferguson. As you saw, this project was made with snippets of various movies, and its main objective was to propose a remix-based esthetic to, in this way, question the idea that legitimate art must be original, authentic and exclusive. On the contrary, what this series states is that any human creation stems from shared creativity, meaning that copying, reappropriating and transforming other peoples' ideas are basic elements for the creation of one's own ideas. Although this applies to any kind of cultural production, remixing has been strengthened by the arrival of the internet and digital technologies. Just think, for example, about how memes work by remixing other peoples' images and discourses to get an idea of the impact of digital technologies in this sense. With this in mind, we can ask ourselves how is it possible to keep upholding this idea of exclusive, private, individualist art, that must be protected at all costs with copyright laws that stop art from being shared freely. Isn't it contradictory to have a copyright system as lasting and restrictive as what we have now next to the cultural circulation that we see online? This is precisely the point of view of various remix artists, and the topic of this video. Specifically talking about music, the practice of creating with preexisting content has existed for a very long time. An example of this is the medieval descant technique, consisting of adding one or more voices over a melodic base in Christian liturgy, known under the term "plainsong". A later technique that openly used reappropriation was called parody, and it was very common in Renaissance era masses that composed based on older music. Interestingly, many of the great composers of the 15th and 16th centuries, like Ockeghem or Giovanni Palestrina, would be condemned by our copyright laws. Then in the Baroque period it was common for composers to create using preexisting content. In fact, a very common way of studying composition in the 17th and 18th centuries was to copy the works and styles of previous artists. Even in the Classic and Romantic periods, when the modern figure of the author takes shape and the first copyright laws appear, there were genres explicitly dedicated to using and transforming musical themes, sometimes themes created by the composer themselves, but in many other cases they were borrowed from other musicians. The theme of variations is perhaps the best example of this. By the 20th century, remixing techniques were strongly pushed by vanguard movements like surrealism and dadaism that opposed the figure of the individual artist and the notion of a finished piece. Techniques like collage, montage, and the exquisite corpse are clear examples of this. Getting back to music, in the mid-20th century lots of esthetic trends emerged that, from different perspectives, pushed for composing by remixing sounds that the rising technologies allowed to be borrowed from different places. John Cage, for example, composed in 1956 his piece called "Radio Music", wherein the interpreters would handle radio devices that played random sounds being projected from different radio frequencies. As playback and sound recording technologies started developing, different genres emerged based on remixing previous musical content, such as "dub" music. And so, we arrive at the late 20th century, to the arrival of personal computers, and, soon after, the internet and social networks. We already discussed the impact of digital technologies on cultural production in the late 20th century. And obviously this is something that made a lot of opportunity for musical remixing or what we could even call remix music. An especially exemplary case of this is mashups, which consist of combining multiple musical tracks to create a new one. If you're interested in learning more about these kinds of practices, I suggest watching the documentary in the link on screen, which is about popular mashup artist Girl Talk. Another modern example of musical remixing are the covers that go around on platforms like YouTube. To illustrate this, we can search this platform for French duo Daft Punk's song "Get Lucky", to see the huge number of versions that exist, and the huge amount of views that some of them have. We can add to these examples any case of reappropriation and redistribution of music in social media. However, what I'm interested in highlighting in this video is the existence of musical projects that propose a conscious, explicit and deliberate use of remixing as a central part of their discourse. So let's end this video by talking about three remix music projects that can help to illustrate this esthetic. Firstly, I want to mention the "NIN Remixes" project, which uploaded several tracks from various songs by American band Nine Inch Nails, in order to publish remixes sent in by the users. It's worth noting that the available songs were uploaded years ago by Trent Reznor, the band's leader and only permanent member. In fact, until 2016 Nine Inch Nails' official website had a page where you could download the tracks and also view published remixed versions. Another interesting project that I'd like to show you is called "Remix Theory", developed by artist and researcher Eduardo Navas. As part of the research that resulted in this book, Navas proposed a series of pieces that can be listened to in this website that explore the creative potential of remix music from different angles. Lastly, I'd like to share with you a project that I started myself in 2014 called "Códigos Obsesos". It's a platform for publishing a series of audios and sheet music with the goal of producing pieces derived from the original to then be published in the same website. In the sidebar there are the different versions that the project has produced over the years. Some of these versions even include their own audios, codes or sheet music that can be remixed again. These three projects are just a small sample of how remixing can be applied to contemporary musical practices. What other projects can you think of? Do you know any projects that follow this same way of thinking? What project can you imagine making with the ideas of remixing and of freely sharing the content that exists online? I'll leave these questions open for you to answer in this week's project.
