On Rock Band Network

Those of you who either read this blog - or my own non-professional one - regularly, or know me personally, will be unsurprised to learn that one of my daily Google alerts is for "Meshuggah". For those not in either of the categories above, Meshuggah are a death/math metal outfit from Sweden and pretty much my favourite thing on the planet.

Anyway, Meshuggah are a pretty unprolific bunch so most days the alerts aren't too interesting: links to illegal download sites (bad, bad people) or to an off-Broadway show called "The Meshuggah Nuns" (mad, mad people). Granted, the last couple of weeks have been rather more active, what with a new Meshuggah album and UK tour announced in the spring (don't expect much sense from me in April, by the way).

Anyhow, in among the announcements and the piracy and nun-based comedy, last week up popped this little video:

My first thought was to fire off an email to the rest of the UC team: "This is all our theses come at once." Less concisely: it struck me that the video combined two things we very often demonstrate and discuss in our various seminars and workshops, namely bedroom shred guitarists and music-based gaming. For more on the former, see mine and Justin's essay in the anthology Creativity, Money, Love.

But my second thought, on looking more closely was: actually, what the hell is this?! I mean, yes, it's clearly a video of three people playing some music game version of Mehuggah's 'Bleed', but er, how? That is, how did it come to be that 'Bleed' was part of some video game in the first place? A few more clicks and I had even more questions. What is an FBFC? What's Elite Rhythm Gaming? What's a full combo? What's a full screen? And on and on.

Now for anyone properly familiar with Rock Band Network: read no further, write me off as a latecomer. But I mean really familiar. If, like me, you've kind of heard of RBN and think you know enough about it to delve no further, think again.

Here's a little precis of the network's origins and development and some thoughts it's prompted in me.

Games developer Harmonix Music Systems launched Rock Band in 2007. The game essentially followed in the footsteps of Guitar Hero, but added drums and bass guitar. The accepted story runs something like this: the first game came at the height of the rhythm game boom, which you might recall was blowing up massively at the time, but sales of subsequent releases dropped as the bottom fell out of the market, or at least as the mainstream games playing public moved on to new pastures, social games in particular.

Well, yes, to a point. But the journalists writing about the death of music games were of the same ilk as those who'd said they were the saviour of the music industry in the first place. The record industry is always being promised salvation, from ringtones to Spotify, but to my mind the real story here is rather more interesting: it's another step in the wholesale reinvention of the entertainment industry. Because somewhere in this muddled history Harmonix launched Rock Band Network.

The initial idea was straightforward enough and one well-tried in games as diverse as Singstar, or Little Big Planet: the distribution of new in-game components and features over the network (in this case, as in Singstar's, those features being songs), allowing fans to play new material without having to wait for a new physical release. In marketing terms: a neat way to retain brand loyalty.

So yes, simple enough, conceptually; tough technologically, however. In fact, Harmonix teamed up with Microsoft in order to deliver new content over various networks (and it's worth noting that RBN is still rather more successful on XBox than Playstation).

But it was evident pretty quickly that Harmonix couldn't cope with the demand they'd created. One sure sign of that: pirate sites were filling the gap: the invisible hand, nature abhorring a vacuum and all that. So Harmonix came up with a new strategy. For a start they did a deal with two of the communities creating pirate games (ScoreHero and CustomHero) and next opened up the development platform to third parties, effectively allowing bands, managers and labels to create their own RB versions of their songs and distribute them through the network - all with full QA procedures in place, of course.

And this is when it gets interesting. An entire subculture of Rock Band Network devotees springs up, with its own language, rules and informal distribution networks. For an example of the last list look no further than the Elite Rhythm Gaming Network on You Tube.

Oh, and if you're still wondering about the lingo I cited above, a combo is a correct combination of notes and therefore a full combo, or FC, is a complete play-through of a song without making a single mistake; an FBFC is a "full band full combo", that is, a complete run through of a song by all three players without a single mistake from any of them; a "full screen" of one of these is a video which captures all three players' "playing". OK?

Meanwhile specialist music blogs are as breathless in their anticipation of new RBN song releases as they are about actual, well, new songs (take this headline from Metal Underground: "New Metal Songs Come To The Rock Band Network This Week.")

So…. what to make of all this? And why am I so fascinated by it, excited even? Well, the answer is multi-faceted but I think I would break my brief observations out around the following themes:

New Business Models
What's in it for the labels, and bands, for the record industry people that get involved? Well, there's "brand extension", of course, spreading the word, reaching potential audiences. And of course there's cementing existing fan loyalties. But there's something more tangible here, too: the artist or label takes 30% of the sale price of the song. That might not sustain a career, but it could be a significant part of a portfolio income strategy - which is, let's face it, pretty much the only one a musical artist can meaningfully pursue right now.

It's yet another meganiche
I've written elsewhere about what Justin and I have called meganiches: areas of cultural activity which are apparently so specialist as to elude all but the most fleeting (and often scathing) of mainstream press coverage, yet which have passionate active participants numbering their millions.

Interestingly, there's a big crossover between RBN and at least one of my other hobby horses: metal - after all, we came in on Meshuggah. I'd warrant that there's something of a natural fit: a certain nerdy, overwhelmingly male, detail-obsessed, self-consciously countercultural personality.

But it goes beyond metal. Take Umphrey's McGee, for example. Chances are you've never heard of them; they're a US psych-rock jam band that come on like a mash up of Frank Zappa and the Police (really) and that have an utterly devoted fanbase who attend their hundreds of gigs a year. The band's Kevin Browning wrote interestingly recently about the role of technology and building the band's career. It's unsurprising then, that the band, I gather, have considered releasing their new album in its entirety as RBN songs.

This stuff is HARD!
A couple of years back, Clay Shirky coined the term "cognitive surplus" to denote the vast swathes of time people in the developed world could get back in their lives to do interesting stuff if they only gave up TV (I'm boiling things down here, to be sure). Now it's a moot point as to whether mastering a song on RBN is creative in any way, but it sure is active. Check out commentaries from posters on the Elite Rhythm Gaming YT pages for evidence of that!

Creative or not, this is passionate, engaged and vital activity.

Could we harness this for other ends?
It strikes me that rhythm gaming is edging ever closer to the act of playing music - for real. In the early days of Guitar Hero it was often pointed out that the controllers bore no resemblance to a guitar in anything other than cosmetic terms, and that being good at the game did nothing for your musical ability, beyond perhaps a vague notion of engaging with the basic concept of rhythm and timing (I can certainly report that as a - I hope - proficient guitar player I showed zero aptitude for the game - zero). But the guitar controllers are getting closer (and indeed, instrument manufacturers like Fender are endorsing them) and when it comes to the drums, with due respect to drummers, drumming's just hitting stuff in time, right? In all seriousness, the RBN "drum kit" is not significantly different from the practice pads many drummers use.

Is it possible then, that at some point, rhythm gaming will use, effectively, real instruments? I think it is, and indeed, some prototyping has already been done. At that point, rhythm gaming will become, to all intents and purposes, no different from bedroom shredding - which is mostly covers-based in any case - only perhaps with a little more structure. We've argued that the flaunting of one's musical prowess through posting clips on YT should be seen as a potential pointer for educationalists. The coming together of rhythm gaming and bedroom shredding I posit here is a fine example of what has been termed (rather inelegantly, to be sure) the gamification of learning.

I've got a few other things to say at some point about how some of these RBN performances are being built into dubstep remixes - really - but that's probably enough from me on the subject for now. A couple of final things. If anyone stumbles across this post who's actually an RBN user I'd really appreciate your responses and thoughts. And for a sense of just how big this really is, just take a look at this list on Wikipedia of all the songs currently available on RBN. Like I say: meganiche.

UPDATE: Jeff Webster - @weffjebster - has pointed out something of an error in my quick history of RBN, and that's that the original version of Rock Band also added vocals as part of the group. Thanks for the correction, Jeff.

More on Creativity, Money, Love

We've already posted our essay for the recently published anthology "Creativty, Money, Love". The publishers made a video to publicise the book, and Justin and I were asked to contribute. We touch briefly on the importance of showing off in education.

Bedroom shredders: Learning as circus and bear pit

This essay first appeared in the book "Creativity, Money, Love - Learning for the 21st Century", which can be downloaded as a PDF here. Thanks to the book's editors, Shelagh Wright, John Holden, John Kieffer and John Newbigin for inviting us to contribute alongside such luminaries as John Tusa, Trevor Phillips and Camila Batmanghelidjh.

Over the last three years we've been showing clients like Glyndebourne, the Barbican and the English National Opera YouTube clips of a young Spanish man, Achokarlos, sitting alone in his bedroom playing along to extreme heavy metal by the likes of Meshuggah and Deicide. Now really, why would we do that?

We think that the approach to learning that the 14 year-old Achokarlos embarked upon three or four years ago tells us a lot about how we should approach our learning-based work.

Great learning environments have a feedback loop at the heart of them; powerful personal motivators such as the desire to improve oneself or the curiosity to discover new ideas kick start the process. These motivations are then amplified if a social space exists in which that new-found knowledge or advanced technique can be shared. In turn, the responses garnered from that ‘audience’ to one’s sharing can help the learner quickly assess their thinking or playing style; the ‘student’ makes improvements, which of course gives rise to the possibility of sharing that improved expression all over again.

A major benefit to this circular style of learning is that it not only allows failure and imperfection into the process, it makes that failure a positive and instructive lesson.

Pay attention to the comments thread on any given shred clip. OK, so the language is somewhat robust, not to mention profane, but look closely and you'll see that there's a real encouragement going on, albeit a challenging, competitive one. Do the ‘dudes’ in this ad hoc community consider themselves peer mentors? Of course not, but the results of their commenting are compelling; we've watched kids progress at a rapid pace in this environment - faster than many of them would have done in a conventional learning environment. What teacher would possibly use the kind of language being used here? But then what teacher would endorse showing off so enthusiastically?

Showing off is often shunned in our culture as a selfish act, an essential practice of ‘me’ culture, but we think its role needs reconsidering. We think that the best kind of showing off is the social activity that can amplify our own desire to learn, and that the right kind of showing off allows us to convert our private pleasure, curiosity and desire for self-improvement into a powerful social currency.

Achokarlos' mission is to advance his shredding technique. For those out of that particular loop, shredding is the art of extreme showing off in guitar music. While it has antecedents in music as diverse as bluegrass and Hindustani raga, it is now most closely associated with metal, itself the most exacting, precise and virtuosic music ever conceived in the name of entertainment. Shredding is more circus than art. As such, shredding on one's own is pointless; it requires an audience. And YouTube has provided an international platform for bedroom shredders.

Learning as circus; learning as bear pit. It may not suit everyone, but then neither does school. For what it's worth, we've seen Achokarlos progress exponentially through the last three or four years. He’s moved from proficient covers through to online collaboration with peers, creating his own material, embracing his own role as online teacher, and finally forming a band characterised by his own staggeringly virtuosic, exuberant and very personal style.

This style of learning uses much more of ourselves than the solitary reading of a text on a given subject. It often happens in the format of a conversation or collaboration. It is often referred to as embodied learning; it works best when the body and brain become part learner, part teacher, part analytical tool, part emotional response system.

Instead of learning from a source that doesn’t require interaction, embodied learning requires us to use all that we have in order to develop, pay attention to others, learn from our mistakes, filter feedback and create constructive responses.

Achokarlos’ videos work as a documentary of embodied learning; they form a public conversation in sound, music, physical technique and text. They require the critical assessment of the audience and call for useful responses that will be responded to - not necessarily in text but often with a new practice video.

It used to be that the web, by dint of the constraining effects of bandwidth, was a place only for the written part of our thinking. To learn from the web one had to read; that wouldn’t help bedroom shredders much. In a highly textual culture like ours it is easy for us to forget just how inappropriate the written word can be for many learning experiences.

But now that bandwidth has opened right up, so also has the web’s facility to become the storehouse and connective tissue of non-written expression. We need to make use of that full capability when we plan to use the web as a learning tool that can do something entirely different and often in parallel with formal learning.

OK, so how can we make use of any of this? Well, the lessons learned from Achokarlos and his fellow travellers have led us to ask some of the following questions when interrogating the learning projects and strategies on which we work:

• How can we build on the natural pleasures this learning situation presents?
• How can we facilitate an enjoyable platform for showing off?
• What is the quickest route to learning in this situation?
• How can we make failure a very useful feature for all?
• How can we make use of competitive motivations to strengthen ideas exchange?
• How can we make use of non-written thinking and expression in this project?
• How can we make participants’ own curiosity and desire for self-improvement the driving forces of the project?
• How can we convert private curiosity into something that can be publicly traded?
• How can we create an environment in which it’s socially acceptable to improve each other’s ideas?

Meditation on memory and data

Let me start with an embarrassing admission. In all the months I have been turning over in my mind the relationship between memory and structured data, it occurred to me only for the first time the other day that the word "memory" has a very specific meaning in the field of computing, and one so closely connected to data as to be almost synonymous. More precisely, memory is a measure of the amount of room for data, and data is everything that populates memory.

So we have - in barely the space of a generation - grown so used to this elision that it has become invisible (at least to me). But on closer examination it is really peculiar. Memory - of the traditional human variety - is slippery and organic, as any legal expert will testify. It inhabits a dimension of vast, multifaceted complexity, where the storage of facts is tightly wound together with the senses and the emotions, so that the first wintry day or the famous bite of a madeleine can unlock access to recall of events and feelings otherwise completely out of reach to the rational mind. Computer memory, on the other hand, is binary (like all else computerish). The data is either there or it isn't. At its most coy, it might hide in a disk partition that is invisible to a standard search routine, but it isn't going to wait for the appearance of a lost chord to show its face. And when corrupted, it gets corrupted in straight lines and blocks, like this picture.

When human memory gets corrupted (as it does all the time), it does so in the way the mind dreams - in a way that is probably irreducible to verbal explanation or digital representation.

So what? Words evolve, and it's natural that technologies that transform our understanding of culture and human experience will call forth new vocabulary and forge new meanings out of old words. Memory is just one of a long list (icon, avatar, bug, application, folder, browse, to cite a few random examples) of words that have been transformed, revived, debased or ennobled in the crucible of new technology. But the significance of this change is what it tells us about the human experience of memory, our habits and expectations of it, and how they have been changed by computers. What are the implications?

1. "The data is either there or it isn't." We have grown used to trusting the fidelity of computer memory over our own, and so we entrust our information to it with great confidence. To some extent we have always done this with documentary technology, ever since we moved from the oral to the written. But we don't expect computer memory to yellow, rot or burn. We know that computers break and get lost or stolen - but we also know that we can hedge against this by backing up.

2. Because we trust the relative robustness and fidelity of computer memory, we have become more blasé about the challenges of filtering and retrieval. We breathe a subconscious sigh of relief and hand over the heavy lifting of our own personal knowledge economies to the machines. We're in danger of losing sight of the fact that memory is not the same thing as remembering. It is still up to us to know where and how to look (crafting the right search term, navigating our folder structures). Even if the data is there, we still need to know it's there in order for it to be useful.

3. What is true for private memory is doubly so for the public kind - the inherited knowledge of our societies and cultures. The Internet is our new global memory, a collective consciousness that throws up wonders like Wikipedia or the Khan Academy, each testifying the inspiring power of visionaries and networks, but also the commodification of mere knowledge.

I've blogged before about the treacherousness of these first two points (and Justin has picked up the related problem of the many ways not to know). But let's have a drill down to some of the problems around that last point. True, we are building up an astonishingly comprehensive and reliable databank that is increasingly accessible any time and anywhere ("martini knowledge" if you like, to adapt Ashley Highfield's unfortunate coinage). And we are also finding all kinds of useful ways through it, via algorithmic or social search. Our digital remembering increasingly blurs the private with the public, as we outsource the storage and filtering of our memories to friends and acquaintances on social networks. Not only the storage but also the processing of knowledge and memory are getting digitised apace.

But there's the rub: what seems to be, and is sometimes said to be, our global brain has nowhere near the sophistication and power of our apparently puny individual brains to connect and analyse. We are tempted to trust to the cloud to do our knowing for us so we can get on with the more glamorous business of commentary, discussion and mashup. But if our brains don't have the facts they can't process them. Having access to a computer that knows what happened in Afghanistan over a century ago does not give you the vital historical perspective that simply knowing those stories yourself gives you. And that matters because it is still human beings, with their onboard knowing and processing, that make the decisions.

I haven't yet figured out what all this tells me - all comments gratefully received. But here are a couple of tentative, and hopefully complementary, conclusions:

1. We need to be a bit careful in how we re-evaluate what it means to learn. Knowing facts feels like a lower order of intellectual activity to processing them. Having pretty much ubiquitous access to calculators (on our computers and phones) means that you will never again need to do long division. It's tempting to leap by analogy to the idea that having access to the "global brain" means that you will never again need to commit a fact to your own memory. Why use valuable time and mental energy for this that could be spent on analysis? But learning how to think about things is still nowhere near a substitute for knowing them, as individuals. More than that - you need to know things in order to form the context to think about other things.

2. That said, we needn't retreat from the enterprise of making the machines help us think. This is where semantic technologies such as dbpedia should help supplement the current emphasis on folksonomy, term extraction and facial recognition. For example, tagging stories of events present and past in Afghanistan with "adventure" and "failure", situating those concepts in intellectual and emotional contexts that connect them with similar and opposite concepts and making such connections readily available as links wherever stories appear, should act as a valuable supplement to the vital but hazardous and selective business of human remembering, retrieval and reflection. (For starters, I still like a lot what Paul Rissen had to say a year ago about the potential for application of linked data to the production of news, and I'm waiting to see who's going to pick this up and run with it.)

So I suppose I am arguing for a more examined relationship between memory and data. The precise conclusions are less important than the act of paying attention to our assumptions as they evolve, and keeping an eye out for unintended consequences. 

UK arts: the place of Digital in the wake of funding cuts (2): Education

I started this thread a couple of months back; I apologised then for it being a little after-the-dust-settled, and now? Well, what can I say - we've been busy. In any case, I think this stuff still has real currency, so here goes with number two...

Pretty much every arts body has its education strategy, albeit that another term might be thought desirable (outreach, learning, creative learning... take your pick). I'll leave to one side the broader question of why these programmes exist, and whether education is sometimes oversold as a justification for public arts funding; let's just take it as read that education is a central delivery priority in the public arts world. The reasons for a commitment to digital here are clear, I think. Certainly if we're talking about teaching children and youth then, yes, it's a truism, but digital media is where they are. Digital tech is so pervasive in the lives of young people that to ignore it as an educator is, at the very least, to be missing a trick, and at worst to lose them altogether. But like I say, that is something of a truism; there are other compelling and frankly more interesting reasons teaching needs to take advantage of digital. For me, they include:

Iteration and instant feedback
The real wonder of digital interactive learning, in my book, this one. Not that it's easy to do well, but when digital systems are designed so that the student can receive instant feedback on, say, a musical performance, the speed at which they can learn is potentially staggering. Compare and contrast with the way that you very possibly learned a musical instrument as a child (certainly the way I did): a lesson, an assignment or two, then at least a week to find out how you were getting along - potentially disastrous. An awful lot can go wrong in a week: mistakes become reinforced through repetition, the student can become frustrated, truly able ones can - no will - become bored. And what an opportunity cost - no fast learner is going to want to wait a week for feedback and new stuff.

Scale

Pretty straightforward, really. No, there's no substitute for a one-on-one teacher-pupil relationship, or for small-group learning. But they sure are difficult to scale. In many ways the trail has been blazed by iTunes U on this, although in fairness this was something grasped decades before the web by the Open University in the UK and other distance learning organisations around the globe. The opportunity to reach a vastly larger (and by implication more diverse and geographically disparate) student base via the web is something to be seized upon by an educator with an interest in widening impact.

Peer-mentoring
Over the years we've been fond of showing many of our clients YouTube clips of young musicians trying to master the combination of polyrhythmic complexity, tonal savagery and absolute accuracy which defines the work of Swedish math metal band Meshuggah. Clips like this:

We could have chosen any number of artists or genres, of course, but the difficulty of Meshuggah's music illustrates our point graphically. What we've always drawn attention to is the comments threads. Now anyone who's  spent any time at all looking at YouTube will know that the language in the comments threads is somewhat, well, robust. Reading these threads when they're at their worst can make you despair for the species, but look closely and you'll see that there's a definite kind of encouragement going on, albeit a challenging and competitive one. Do the "dudes" in this ad hoc community consider themselves peer mentors? I very much doubt it, but the results are compelling; I've watched kids progress at  a rapid pace in this environment - faster, I warrant, than many of them would have done in a conventional learning environment. Apart from anything else, what kind of teacher would use that kind of language? 

Social rewards

This relates closely to the point on peer mentoring, in truth; the kids showing off their shred* guitar prowess on those clips are doing so for complex and various reasons, but among them are undoubtedly what we might term social rewards. Justin and I were discussing this very issue recently and pondered: why are exams considered a kind of hell on earth which plague our panic-striken dreams years after the fact... and yet people pay to enter pub quizzes? Well, obviously, it's partly because our schooling system insists that our entire lives depend on exam results, but there's something else: that many of us enjoy showing off our knowledge, no matter how trivial, and pub quizzes provide an environment in which it's acceptable to do this. And so does the web. I'm not suggesting that all the best learning should be competitive - and in any case, the pub quiz is as much about collaboration as competition (no one enters on their own). But the kind of shared public spaces the web does so well provide the perfect environment for a socially-driven kind of learning experience.

The disguising of educational purpose
I would hazard that much of the best, most profound learning we ever do we do without thinking about it as "learning" at all, and certainly not education or schooling. We learn when we try out a new recipe, when we're gaming, and yes, when we nail that insane guitar lick. The digital arena is a rich and potent learning environment without ever necessarily being explicit (and I didn't pick the examples of cookery, games and shred by accident). Canny educators can use this aspect of the web to their advantage: Trojan Horse teaching.

Richness of assets
Finally... I'll be saying a word in a later post about arts archives, but I want to note here that arts bodies sit on treasure troves of content: performances, lectures, interviews and of course all that metadata embedded in listings. Where so much teaching around the arts in the past has been somewhat abstracted from the arts themselves (certainly based on the experience of my own education in the 70s and 80s) arts organisations are in a unique position to aggregate learning around real examples of art in practice.

In my next post then, I'll look at some of the issues around the arts and archives.

* As much circus as art, 'shred' is the practice of absurdly difficult musical technique, most especially (although not exclusively) performed on the electric guitar. With antecedents in Hindustani raga, bebop, klezmer and bluegrass, it is now widely understood to be a subset of metal and hard rock. Just so you know.