Geek's Corner: The Future of Free Software

If you haven't read the interview post where Chris McCormick discusses his generative acid album Squeakyshoecore, check it out here.

As Chris is a champion of Free Software, I asked him what he thought will happen in the struggle between open-source ideals and existing corporate ideas about intellectual property. His answer was so interesting and well-put that I decided to lazily report it verbatim. He touches on a lot of issues within programming that I was unaware of, especially Apple's insidious coding strategies.

"I used to be very optimistic about Free Software and open source, but lately with the rise of the iPhone I have become less optimistic. It was easy to be optimistic when the largest corporation, Microsoft, was becoming irrelevant in areas where Free Software was succeeding. Now we have this weird situation where actually most of the software people use every day was compiled with [GCC], and often contains Free Software, not just on the desktop, but in microwaves, phones, servers, routers, TVs, operating systems, video game consoles, missiles, etc. You probably use things created with Free Software thousands of times per day. However most people don't realise this. The massive success of Free Software ismostly invisible to ordinary people. They don't realise what a profound and positive impact Richard Stallman has been on their lives.

If your readers want to read more about Free Software with a capital F, and Richard Stallman, they can check the wikipedia page.

So now we have the iPhone which is a deeply subversive device in the opposite direction to Free Software. It takes all the great stuff from the open world (including millions and millions of lines of code written by volunteers and Free Software coders), and closes it up with DRM into this beautiful, incredibly functional device that people go completely bonkers about. People become utterly infatuated with this gorgeous experience, even though it places such harsh restrictions and control over them. It reminds me of a sadomasochistic relationship, with Steve Jobs as the bondage queen, whipping you every time you touch an Apple product.

I always thought that it was impossible to subvert the open paradigms because they are so beautifully viral and appealing, and because they destroy the "tragedy of the commons" myth in such a pragmatic way, but now we have this great example of where it's very possible to subvert those ideas, and to use the power of Free Software against itself. It's possible to derive all of the benefits from that wonderful world and then turn around and not give anything significant back. This is the first big threat that I think Free Software and these open ideas face. A company like Apple can stand there and pretend to be all about "the good things" whilst simultaneously taking so much from the world and giving back only virtual prisons (of great beauty!) and broken promises (see Steve Jobs on DRM)."

More writings by Chris on his blog, including this Kurzweilian prediction for the coming decade. Although he seems optimistic about the coming of the singularity, I'm not gonna ditch my stockpile of baked beans and automatic weapons just yet.

Geek's Corner: Chris McCormick & Squeakyshoecore

Australian Chris mcCormick is a prolific talent - at the age of 8, driven by a desire to make video games, he began to learn programming and found his way into music in his mid teens. Since then he has made software instruments, computer games, iPhone apps and a variety of music-related software.

His recent album Squeakyshoecore reflects this multi-disciplinary approach - it's a collection of acid tunes made in GarageAcidLab, a custom patch he wrote for the open source visual-patching software Pure Data. These songs were produced algorithmically, with the software generating pleasing patterns and Chris manipulating various effects and controlling the overall mix.

He is keen to explore software interactivity, and has spent the last 3 years developing Infinite8BitPlatformer, "a persistent 2D multiplayer platformer universe where you can create your own levels and items, chat, explore levels, and collect items made by other people", which is now close to a final release. In the future Chris aims to meld algorithmic music and gaming into a "collaborative, distributed, real-time, loop-based, game-like, music making environment."

Chris cites IDM artists including Squarepusher and algorithmic devotees Autechre as influences, but has also been inspired by the DIY punk ethos of Fugazi and Perth's local music scene.

Pure Data's creator Miller S. Puckette influences the software side of Chris' work, as do Roman Haefeli and Frank Barknecht whom he met during his time working on the RJDJ iPhone app. If you don't know about this app, it's best described as an interactive music environment where the music changes according the iPhone's surroundings, reacting to sound and movement.

"Working for RjDj in London was a great experience too, and convinced me that one day music-as-software will be normal in the mainstream, although that day is probably a long way off. They didn't hire me to make algorithmic music (I was hired as a software developer), but I felt motivated to work on that stuff in my spare time while I was working there."

Another insight into algorithmic modeling came from videogames, specifically Eric Chahi's Another World.

"When I read an interview with him which described how the technology works, I realised something profound about it, which is that the technology he created was as functionally beautiful "under the hood" as the resulting game was. Code that looks and feels good is probably going to produce a better result than code which is ugly."

Chris describes his primary motivation for approaching music algorithmically as laziness:

"I don't have a lot of time to make music, so in order to spend my time more efficiently I found that if I wrote algorithms which mimicked my style I could spend more time doing the fun stuff (jamming) and less time doing the hard stuff (composing)."

"If you make your own tools, like I do, then I think the options can become close to limitless, sometimes paralyzingly so, and you need to restrict yourself in order to produce something sincere."

With Squeakyshoecore he resticted himself to acid and synthesized garage beats and will go on to apply the same philosophy to drum and bass.

Chris describes algorithmic music as being created in a similar way its conventional counterparts, albeit with a more rigorous mathematical structure imposed. In fact he uses the four steps of the hypothetico-deductive Scientific Method when creating algorithmic art:

1. Observe the way in which the piece of art is created manually.
2. Come up with a hypothesis about how it is created, e.g. find
patterns in the methods used.
3. Come up with a predictive, or algorithmic model which codifies those
same observed methods.
4. Test the model to see if it creates art similar to step 1.

"Then you iterate and recurse on these four steps and subsets of the
four steps, until you come up with something compelling."

In keeping with his roots in the DIY aesthetic, Chris hopes that algorithmic composition will democratise the role of the composer, and serve to enhance, rather than elide that role.