Endlesss Music Creation - Tim Exile

Hello and welcome to this Sound On Sound podcast about electronic music and all things synth. I'm Caro C and in this episode I'm talking with Tim Exile. Tim describes himself as a performance led musician and technologist. He's toured the world with his electronic music as well as being signed to the likes of Planet Mew and Warp Records. Being drawn to the more programming side of things, Tim has developed software, instruments, and tools for native instruments, and has dedicated his energies over the last few years on developing his own software called Endless. That's Endless with three S's, and we'll be telling you more about that imminently. Here's a taste of Tim Exile's Soundworld to get us started. This was created on an iPhone using the endless live music making app. Hello Tim Exile and welcome to this Sound on Sound podcast. It's very exciting to meet you after I think appreciating your music for many years on dance floors and festival fields. Amazing. Well, hi Caro. Uh, thank you very much for having me on the, on the podcast and taking the time to talk to me. Great. So yeah, you describe yourself as, well obviously, you're many things and one of the most recent things has been your Endless project, which we're going to talk about, but I wonder if you can give us a bit of a potted story of how you've got to this point. Yeah, well, I mean, it starts pretty young. So, you know, when I was four years old, I, uh, I picked up the violin. Um, I absolutely loved it. And what I loved about the violin is it's an instrument where you put your bow on the string, you move your body, music happens. And when you stop. Moving your body the music stops. So, uh, you know, my my framework for music for understanding music was as something that you do and something that happens in real time Then when I was a teenager, I fell in love with electronic music totally loved the sound world I knew that this this was the world that I wanted to operate in Well, at the time, in the mid 90s, it was the opposite of embodied. Um, it was music that was designed in studios. You know, at that time, it was just beginning to be designed on, on screens, where you'd lay out blocks and enter numbers and etc. Um, so, you know, I went with it though because I knew it was the sound world I wanted to operate with and You know, I taught myself to dj taught myself to produce started getting radio play and interest from record labels, uh, you know released quite a few 12 inch singles and then some eps and then released an album on planet mu and then another one and then um My kind of recording career culminated with signing to warp records actually signed a three album deal. I made one of the albums and then the urge for music to be embodied, music to be something that I do, uh, kind of won out in the end. So in parallel to producing all those records, I'd also been tinkering around with, uh, you know, trying to program my own instruments in node based, uh, digital modulars. I started out with this thing called SyncModular and then very quickly got into Native Instance Reaktor and then just went. Really deep into reactor and started building what culminated is an instrument called the flow machine, which is an instrument for doing exactly what I wanted to do, you know, for improvising electronic music live, for being embodied with electronic music. And then, you know, after that Warp album, I decided that that this was something I wanted to devote my creativity and energy to it. Well, firstly, trying to discover for myself what it meant to be an improvising electronic musician, you know, without leaning on the structures of the music industry in terms of, you know, releasing music and, um, you know, leaning on repertoire and doing gigs where you play the songs that people know. So I started to, um, turn some of the bits of the flow machine into products, plugin products. So I teamed up with Native Instruments to make firstly this plugin called The Finger, which was this kind of effects unit that you could play using a keyboard. And then it went on to create The Mouth, which is like a voice synthesizer slash vocoder, you know, a bunch of kind of synthetic vocal treatments. And that did really well. And then I went on and started to work on plug ins myself, but the thing I'd always wanted to do, you know, since I kind of abandoned my recording career, the thing I really wanted to do was basically reframe music as an activity that we do, rather than just a product that we kind of create as professionals and consume alone as sort of mass consumers. And then the ultimate part of this mission, I suppose, was then to reframe music as something that we do together. And that's where Endless comes in. So, you know, Endless. And this is a live collaborative music creation platform. We've got an iOS app and a macOS app. We've got a Windows app coming very soon. And it's, it's basically the same workflow as a flow machine. So you can create electronic music on the fly. You can do it alone and you can also do it together in these kind of jam. And yeah, so that's the kind of potted history as it stands. So this makes me all think of the right brain, left brain stuff. So, um, there's the mixing with your mind book, wasn't there? And he talks about how you should get all the left brain stuff out the way first. So set up your, set up your template, get everything ready, do all your left brain analytical sort of technical stuff. And then just. Then let yourself just swim in the right brain and it sounds like, is there something going on there with Endless? I think you've absolutely nailed it. In fact, I might even start, I might even start talking about that in, uh, when we're sort of pitching the company to investors, et cetera, because that's really, that's such a good way of thinking about it. Yeah, we, we basically wanted to minimize the amount of left brain stuff that you have to do before you dive in. And really. All the left brain stuff you have to do with Endless right now is basically just getting your head around some of the, there's, there's two or three core concepts that are different to Endless, which enable you to be very right brained once you've got your head around it. So your left brain tasks are pretty much a one shot at, you know, when you first get Endless, there's a few things that you need to, learn. It's like riding a bike. And once you, once you ride that, once you can ride a bike, you can, you can ride it for, for years. Um, and it's very, very straightforward how it works. Yeah. And it's, it's getting you to that point where it's intuitive and that's where you find new terrain creatively, especially collaboratively that adds beautiful dimension. So what are those? Could you explain those core concepts? Yeah. So, I mean, the, what I mentioned about these, uh, riffs, that's a, that's a really core concept right now, um, is that you have these undo histories and each riff is, well, it's kind of like a scene in the Ableton session view, but it's limited to these eight layers. So, that's one core concept to get your head around. Once you've got your head around it, it's very, very simple. Another one is what we call retrospective looping. So, the way Indus is set, you know, it's set up to be very live. So, The built in instruments we have, they use a live quantizer to keep you in time. That's another thing that sometimes, you know, people need to get used to for a bit, because you're literally, you know, when you're playing into endless, when you hit that retrospective looper and you commit a riff, that gets sent to our servers and then shared to everybody else who's in the jam with you live. So you don't have a chance to then go in and edit the quantizer of that, for example. So those are really the three main concepts. Like, you're playing everything in live. You're committing it to audio. You commit it to audio after you've done it, rather than before you did it. Because, you know, that's another thing. You know, like, record arming is probably responsible for the biggest loss of creativity in the entire history of the music industry, because, you know, there's a whole curse of like, Ah, did you get that? No, it wasn't recording. You know, in Endless, it's recording all the time. All you do is say, oh, that was good, hit the retrospective looper, it commits that loop, sends it to the jam, shares it with everyone else. Yeah, and the more you're talking about it, the more I'm thinking how, how technically I can understand it took four or five years because how do you manage the You know, the accessibility factor that you're on a phone, everyone's on their phone, you're relying on the internet at the same time as you've got the liveness, so the whole latency and that kind of aspect of it, but also the storage. Yeah, this is why no one's done this yet, because it's technically really hard. And, you know, there are three core components to what we're building at Endless. Overcome the whole problem of network latency in real time jamming and we do we do this with So it's not you don't actually stream audio up and down to each other. It's it's actually It's based on a fork of kind of Dropbox technology, basically, um, so we built it on that tech and then we just, you know, we soldered it in right at the metal, you know, so to speak, with this very fast interface for creation and the retrospective looper, so it's all so tightly kind of welded together that, that it feels like, you know, when, once you've got your head around the core concepts, and once you're in a jam with a bunch of other people on Endless, It feels like you're in the same room together. That's, that's what everyone says. It's like, oh my god, I never knew that it was possible to feel like you're in the same room jamming with people. And here it is. So, in terms of the technical heavy lifting, we, you know, we've, we've done that bit. The next component that we're currently fundraising to build out is the social network around that. I'd say a more kind of gaming like social network, where you really see who's online at the same time. If you've ever used Clubhouse, this new audio social network that everyone seems to be, uh, going crazy about these days. It's very much like that, you know, you have these rooms where you can go and see people speaking, um, you can follow people, you can see who, uh, you know, you can see from your contact list who else is on there, when they're on there, what they're talking about, etc. You know, that's what we're building next. And then the final component is to then build a, basically a marketplace, or at least, you know, In the broader sense, an economy around what people are creating on Endless and what, let's say, people who are more experienced at making music, you know, the value that they can bring to other people who maybe want to learn a little bit more about music. So, you know, we've made the first segment of Endless, which is probably the most technically challenging bit. Now we're about to start building a social network. And then I think, you know, next year we'll start to then look at how we can transform this into, uh, you know, a kind of an economy that, you know, a really well distributed economy that's, that's fair for, uh, fair for creators and fans. Yeah. And I guess also platforms and listening platforms, performing platforms in terms of sharing it as well. There's a whole ecology in there, isn't there? Absolutely. Yeah. Well, you know, one of the things that, uh, you know, if you look at. broader trends in, in media, music is quite far behind. So, um, you know, you look at video, you look at images, look at, um, you know, text, um, and now spoken audio. There are platforms nowadays where you can create, share, um, distribute, discover, and listen to, and, and consume the stuff that's being made, you know, just from one device. Whereas you look at music and, you know, the music creation industry, the music creation tools, it's a completely separate industry from the music distribution and consumption industry. I mean, literally separate industries that you have like this. You know, all the analysts, there's a whole bunch of different analysts, there's a whole bunch of different companies that are funding these things. I mean, it's insane. It's so outdated. So, that's where we see a massive opportunity is to, what we want to do at Endless is reframe music as an activity that we do together, rather than just this product that we consume alone that's created by a few very privileged and lucky people who've got the kit to do it. We want to be that platform. But Turns music into something that you can create, share, distribute, discover, and listen to in one platform on one device. I have to say, it feels like such an exciting time to be alive, because Music has always been about community. You know, the recorded music industry has been around for maybe 150 years. Uh, and that's just a tiny anomaly in the history of music, which is tens of thousands of years old. And it was always an activity that we came together to do, and it used, you know, there are some, some people say that it actually preceded language. So it's actually more fundamental to our communication than language itself. Yeah, tell me more about your team then. I imagine there's got to have been quite a few minds behind this, that's this development that took, I think you said four or five years. Well, I mean, for, you know, for most of the time there were basically like one and a half engineers working on this alongside me and, you know, a couple other people. Coming in to help out with various other bits of it, but yeah, it's it's just it's a really it's a really great team you know, very very talented very very committed and you know, they've undertaken a a herculean sort of research and development effort to enable communicative, collaborative, conversational music making. In the very near future we're going to be looking for more people to join the team. We've got a ton of stuff that we want to build and it's I mean, it's really, really exciting because, you know, we now have, we, you know, we launched the product about a year ago. We launched the iOS app any about anyway, about a year ago, and we launched the desktop app in December. And we've now got quite a lot of data and understanding what people do in Endless, particularly the sort of things that make people really stick around and really get a lot of value out of out of Endless. And those are. Very clearly the social features. So I think It's it's very very exciting knowing what we're about to start building and start shipping how that's going to change You know you you mentioned the word community earlier, and I think you know this trend towards creativity being something that people that only makes sense when people do it together, um, is one of the biggest shifts in our time. You know, it started with kind of social media, uh, you know, web 2. 0 stuff in the sort of mid, mid to late noughties. And, you know, sadly that business model kind of got co opted by basically capturing attention and selling it to advertisers. But what was at the core of their mission was to to turn media into something that we do creatively together. Um, they were on to the right thing, but it just, you know, it sort of took a bit of a left turn and, you know, well, the people who use the platforms ended up being the product. But nowadays, you know, we're seeing gaming is becoming much less of this. Gaming is not staying in its own lane. Gaming is kind of going everywhere. You know, you've got gigs happening in Fortnite. You've got, um, you've got music creation app games being built for Roblox. You know, Minecraft is the new Lego for kids. That's how they understand how the world is put together. That's how they learn how the world is put together. And, you know, now we're seeing people building VR experiences that are just aimed at More cultural experiences on that. You know, those platforms are all about community. It's all about. It's all about interaction rather than consumption. It's all about what you can do together and You know, with the advent of Discord, you know, all the YouTubers nowadays have their own Discord communities and, you know, they're not huge communities. They're not like hundreds of thousands or millions of followers that people try to get on social media. They're much more focused and there may be, you know, a big Discord community will have like one or two thousand active members, but they're super engaged and what they do with each other is intimate and valuable, not in just that kind of like, hey, I've got a million views on my video. You know, it's just like No, no, I had a conversation, um, with like a few hundred people and we, you know, everybody who was there had a really positive impact on everyone's lives and, um, you know, helping people navigate what they're doing. Community is, is the future and, you know, collaboration is the future and real time spontaneous. Conversations are the future, so it's just, I mean, it's really exciting to be bringing all those, well, I suppose, trends, if you like, to, uh, to a music making platform. Yeah, awesome, awesome. And what kind of, um, level of musicianship are most of the people who are using it? Do you know? So, right now, um, it's, we've got a, we've got this really, really passionate community of early adopters, and, They're generally, I would say, they're, they're people who have probably dedicated quite a lot, quite a lot of time in their lives to music making, but they've never decided like, right, I'm going to go for, um, I'm going to establish a career out of this and really try to kind of get ahead and forge, you know, do all that hustling. I think one of the really nice things about Endless is that it's, it's relatively sort of hustle free at the moment. But this is, I think this also, this has a lot to do with that we don't really have our social features in there. You know, you, our community all gather on our Discord server and, you know, there's quite a lot of friction between getting the Endless app and then going onto our Discord server and then making friends there and then figuring out who the people on Discord are on the Endless app, etc. So I think There's a really big artist actually who's made an entire album on Endless, which is coming out later this year, which is really, really exciting. And I wish I could say more about that now. We've got a lot of quite well known artists who've used Endless and have engaged with the community. Generally, what, what we find is that, um, the sticking point for. I guess artists who either have careers or want to build careers right now is that you can't really build an audience. You can't build your own community on Endless right now, which is, again, why we're building these social features. So yeah, it's like enthusiasts, I'd say, like music lovers or people who understand the just the importance of community in music, I think. And are there any, or are you looking towards any connectivity sort of, um, potential in terms of like interacting or connecting up with other, other software? I mean, obviously, I know there's a desktop version, but in terms of software or hardware? Absolutely. I mean, this is, this is where it gets really, really, really exciting, I think. So, I, you know, right now, even with the mobile version, you can plug in an iRig or you can plug in a Class compliant sound card and you can pipe in anything you want to, um, you know, whether you know, hardware synths or an instrument through a nice mic, or there's quite a few people who fire up an Ableton set and then set up a bunch of plugins there and then run that through an iRig into the, uh, the mobile version. And obviously now we've got the desktop app as well. You can either run that in standalone, or you can run that as a plugin in whatever your DAW is, and then pipe in anything there. So you can, it's, it's there. And in the next few months, we're going to be shipping a lot more features that make that a lot easier. And I think in the long run. The most cool thing about Endless is the workflow and, you know, we do have a bunch of built in sounds and that library is growing every day and there's, there's definitely a certain convenience to having those sounds there but, you know, we don't have to build out an entire sample library, you know, it makes sense to make Endless work with all the amazing plugins that have been built over the last like 25 years by some very talented people and to run those inside Endless and build up basically an entire DAW inside. But it's all about, you know, doing it now, doing it with people, sharing, building communities, etc. But how does that all manage to run on something like a phone and Wi Fi? Um, we've got a great team, I think is the best answer to that. We've got a really, really great team. And, you know, we've put a lot of work. Particularly, you know, the mobile app was the first thing that we launched, and we were in a kind of semi public beta for a whole year, 12 months, before we actually launched in the App Store, because we really wanted to get that core experience right, because You know, we knew that it could run on a phone, and we knew that, you know, there is, to some extent, there's like, the race is on to make a really great, uh, music creation app for a smartphone that then, uh, integrates seamlessly with desktop products and, and that whole, you know, the big world of music making where you've got big controllers, big mixing desks, big speakers, and it's all, you know, very kind of high end. We felt that, like, strategically, The most important thing to do first was to make it super light and portable Um and then grow out from there because I you know, I think we're we're endless is one of the first products that Has pretty much parity between a mobile app and a desktop app and complete interoperability as well. So, you know, I can be sitting on my sofa, just noodling around with some beats and endless. And then I can go to, you know. a huge studio with a big iMac running in the studio. I just log into my account and then everything that I did there on my phone is is there ready to go in the big studio. And I can also just send someone the link to that jam and then they can take that material. Add some, you know, really fancy synth line or, or whatever. We wanted to make it accessible everywhere and we wanted to start with mobile. You know, the next frontier is really building those integrations with all the amazing technology that you find in today's studios and making it more and more easy to integrate into those workflows. And even though you talk about obviously the core, one of the core concepts is the community. Imogen Heap, my last guest, she was showing me how she uses it. And that's very much to get ideas down or to to get ideas flowing. Um, so in a sense it can also have that. helpful, deleting, melting the barriers between creativity and getting them down. Yeah, that's absolutely it. And so, you know, to kind of to loop back to the whole idea of what music was before Edison recorded sound, um, you know, it always was this, this process. And it whenever communities came together to do music, it would be this relationship between folk music forms, um, that would then be sort of played with and iterated with. But, you know, the fun was. the play around these central ideas. Um, so actually, again, this separation between Composition and ideation is, is another, you know, it's quite a new thing and it's actually in the, in the long history, history of music, it's, it's an anomaly. So that's another thing that, that we're really focused on. You know, what we wanted to do was to make it a seamless experience to create ideas, but then also take those ideas and, and drag them into whatever piece of software you use to, um, then flesh those out into longer, uh, song formats. But, you know, in the long run, what we want to do is actually make that process of, let's say, highlighting the best bits of what you do, just make that a seamless part of just ideation. It feels to me quite counterintuitive that You can spend an hour coming up with some really great ideas and in that hour You'll have two or three really great ideas And then you pick one of those ideas and spend a week turning it into a song Which often involves a lot of hard work to maybe make it another 20 percent better To me that seems quite counterintuitive and I totally get it that this is the way that the music industry has evolved but you know as The way we interact with each other, the way that we, we think of media and what it's for and what it's worth to us. I think it makes sense for us to be finding ways for you to just, you know, just celebrate an idea. That's great. You know, you did an hour of jamming and you came up with a really nice hook. That's great. Share that with the world. Let that be. Your success. Why, why, like, spend, um, you know, two or three hundred times as much time making it 20 percent better, you know? Wow. And so where does the concept of ownership fit into all this in terms of the music? Well, so the way the license works on Endless right now is you retain the copyright in anything you do. You give Endless and everyone else on Endless a license to do whatever they want to do with it on Endless. So it's basically like an IP sandbox which allows people to sort of feel safe that they can put material in. They know that people aren't allowed to take it out and it's a, it's a real sort of free for all. Again, you know, we want to remove any kind of physical and emotional barriers to people taking creative risks. We also in, In the way that, that you, that you make riffs collaboratively, um, we store the authorship of every single layer that's made. So let's say there's a riff with, um, eight layers in it. Those layers can all be made by different people and we track that. Because, you know, the main thing about any, you know, licensing and IP issues is basically like, people, if someone made something, uh, they want it known that they made that thing. wherever that thing goes. And if that thing makes any money, they want to have a bit of that money. And it's actually, it's actually quite simple. The problem that IP causes nowadays is that, you know, IP is just not really tracked. That well, and if you, if you decide to collaborate with an artist, just like, well, uh, what are the splits? Who did what? The algorithm we've got in Endless is, is pretty good. We've got, we've got some, we've got a roadmap to improving that over the, in the coming months. But essentially, if someone decides that they want to take a riff out of Endless, they want to get permission from all the artists, we can say, okay, these are the splits. We know exactly who did what, at what point, and how much that contributes to the overall composition. So we can just like give you a bunch of splits. Again, it's like, you know, as I said, you know, removing as many kind of emotional barriers and headaches to collaboration. Yeah, ace, ace. I really hope, um, that this is something that can be embedded, really, within music education. I work within primary and secondary music education, electronic music education, and I can just really see how this could be a lovely platform, rather, more than a tool, really, for youngsters to start to, Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we get, we've had a ton of questions from academic and educational institutions who, who want to use endless, uh, you know, in their classrooms to where we most often get approached is about just teaching basic musicality. Really, it's when you get together in rooms that you learn that sort of basic musicality in the same way that you kind of learn. etiquette. You know, you learn how to be with people. You learn how to sort of metaphorically dance with people and enter conversations, you know, to listen and to speak. To know when not to play. And to know when not to play. Oh yeah, exactly, exactly. That's where I think Endless has a really, really bright future in terms of Uh, a music education. 'cause there aren't really any tools that, that do that. As, as, as, as far as I, I know the main thing is that this really restaurant is like, we, we are not on Windows yet, so we are gonna be on Windows, I think late summer. We're aiming to ship our Windows version. It's just, we had a bunch of. Text stack that we built on around the database stuff needs to be refactored, uh, to do that. But, as soon as we're on Windows, uh, I mean, I've got a long list of people who've been talking to us about like, When can we, when can we get Endless in our classroom? Can we do, like, can you do an education deal and stuff like that? And we're just like, Well, absolutely. But, you know, let's get on Windows and then there's some really exciting things to do there. Fab. Excellent. Yeah. Well, all the best with it. Is there anything else that you feel we haven't talked about that you'd like to talk about in relation to Endless or your work? Thank you. That's Endless with three S's. By the way, yeah, just, yeah, so the quick final plug, obviously, go to the App Store, the iOS App Store, search for Endless with three S's, you'll see it's called Endless Multiplayer Music, give it a go, you can also go to our website where you can download the macOS version, there's a trial period on that, and come and join the Discord server. Because that's where a lot of the real magic happens. Yeah, that's fantastic. Brilliant. Thanks a lot, Tim. Thanks for your time today. All the best with Endless and thank you. Thank you for listening and be sure to check out the show notes for further information as well as links and details. Of other episodes in the electronic music series. And just before you go, let me point you to soundonsound. com forward slash podcast. So you can check out what's on our other channels. This has been a Karo C production for Sound On Sound.