Cultural Asymmetry in Music Technology is Solvable

sometimes covered. The DNA that links most popular music tends to dominate and influence musical cultures around the world, even down to the very creation of new music and the tools and instruments used to make it. Ultimately, we're talking about the supremacy of Western music theory, and Western music theory essentially has at its source a very specific kind of music making was made and funded by a very

specific class in a specific period of time. It shouldn't be a surprise that even the music we hear in our heads and try to shepherd out into the world has already been colonized in many ways by Western influences. The very idea of what music is, who makes it, what are the classics are all questions that have been answered long before a creative sits down to make something new.

We won't be able to move forward into the future where we can actually explore different kinds of music, making things that might be transcultural, that represent our commonalities and our differences in different ways. Kaya Malami is a musician, composer and researcher based in Berlin. He just released new software Apotomy and Lima, which are expanding the pathways of music creation beyond the dominant sound palette. Creators are given the tools to compose music using non Western tunings. The

default settings are the act of choosing. It's just about that spark. If you can catch that spark and if you can let it have space to grow brighter, then you know people will automatically find themselves taking their own path and discovering the things that make them feel that magic. I'm Kayama Lami, and I believe that the cultural asymmetry

in music technology is a problem we can solve. Cultural asymmetry is the fact that music technologies and the way that music is presented and represented tends to lean towards a Western conception of what music is rather than be something that is balanced where all musical cultures are on an equal footing in an equally respectful. Way, tell me a little bit about your earliest music memories. My earliest musical memory is learning to play the violin in Damascus,

I think I had. I was seven or eight years old at the time, and then we moved to London when I was nine, and then I didn't really have any connection with my Arab identity per se, or at least the connections were tenuous at the time. But what I did notice was that the band Killing Joke released an album in the mid nineties called Pandemonium, on which a very famous Lebanese violinist his name is about Abdelaal

he played, and particularly there's a track called Communion. That sound of this really heavy industrial music with this violin, this beautiful levantine, you know, Arabic violin scattered all over. It really really really got me. It just hit It hit a place in my spirit that I wasn't really aware of. Was that a moment that kind of pushed you forward into the type of work you're doing in music now? I think so what it showed me was that these desparate worlds, or these these musical worlds that

I felt were desparate, could actually be pulled together. In some in some way could somehow combine together in a way that that didn't feel cheesy to me, and it didn't feel like exotic, you know, and that stayed with me, and I've been kind of searching for my own path along those lines for for many years since. So talk

to me a little bit. You use the word ex when you're saying that you're you're talking about I think the ways in which world music and non Western music is pulled into Western music as a kind of a way to add make it a little spicy, which I don't necessarily think is the best method of using that music. Tell me a little bit about how that makes you feel like when you hear instances of music being used

that way. I think it really depends on how For example, when you hear something like Big Pimpin by by Jay Z and Timberland, Big Pimpin, Baby Spin and Cheese, it feels really meaningful, right, yes, Whereas when you hear something when you hear something that like there was a band called Shakti by John McLaughlin and Zaki Hussein, it was more about the sound of those instruments rather than the feeling of that music. And that's what I always found

a little bit more tokenistic and somehow exoticized. They just never quite it just never quite felt real enough to me. And it's funny for me to say that that something like Big Pimpin feels more authentic, But I think the reason why it feels more authentic is because it uses a sample. Therefore, the sound and the feeling of that music is present within the sound of that recreation or

that or that reyear. Right, Whereas when you hear something like Shakti, all I hear is twelve ton equal temperament, jazz modalities, jazz tonalities with these very rigid time structures, but you have the sound of the tableau and the virtuosity of the tableau, which is never quite enough for me, you know you It's it's almost to be like when people take forward foods and they try to make like a taco out of stuff using using Indian ingredients, rather

than letting these things like stand on their own as their own foods. It's like, why are you trying to shape it into something that's more familiar to you rather than using it and letting it shine on its own. Absolutely, So let's talk about them though, So talk about the ways in which you think Western theories have kind of colonized music, Well, ultimately, I think the issue is not

that something has colonized something else. It's the remnants of colonialists and the supremacist mentality have maintained themselves and been inherited by the technologies that we use to make music today and the way that musics from around the world have been represented and marketed, and therefore that gaze or

that perspective has been imprinted in people's minds. So when we got to the early eighties and digital synthesizers came through, and then we get into the world of digital audio workstations and using computers to make music, they were also

based on these Western music series. One is the rhythmic grid, which you know divides a certain amount of time into equal divisions of time when dealing with digital instruments, but the same goes for tonality for pitch, where the octave is divided into twelve equal steps into twelve equal semitones

and it sounds like this, okay. And then the minor scale, so like, can you give me examples of what it's like to get outside of the major minor scale if we're talking about getting outside of this supremacist rigidity of music. If we want to get out of this simplicity and the rigidity of the major minor, oftentimes will think about different kinds of scales, but actually the tuning itself is

something that is really really powerful. So this is a Persian dust gar scale called Chahga, and the beauty of it is in these couple of intervals. That's really alien to yeah music in the world. Yeah, that sounds it sounds like you have a little bit more leeway, a little more latitude in that scale than there is in the traditional major scale. Can you give me another example of something else that's not so westernized? Yeah, sure, So let's have a listen to. This is an African idio.

It's a kind of xylophone called the Empire used by the Naki Bembe Xylophone group from Kampala and Uganda. And I analyze this tuning from a recording that they sent me and it sounds a bit like this. So that's a pentatonic scale that has really beautiful, beautiful character to it, and you imagine it when it's paid on something more percussive, especially lower down. Beautiful character. Oh that's amazing. I feel like I could listen to just you play different types

of scales on different types of instruments all day. So how do we solve that, How do we break out of the ideas of this of those Western minds that we have towards music, and how do we open it up and allow people to be more creative and more expressive and have more latitude to create unique music for

everyone to enjoy. One thing is to find a way for developers to be able to implement these things with ease and simplicity, which already exists, but it just needs a kind of It just needs tying up and being presented and represented in the right way. Along with that, we need to be able to reach out to those

developers and say to them that this is important. I don't think people really realize how much twelve tone equal temperament, like rigid digital twelve tone equal temperament, has really impacted and affected music all over the world. I mean, you listen to anything from the pop music of Latin America to the pop music of Central Asia. It's all mediated through this particular tuning system which represents a specific musical

culture from a very specific period of time. And I don't think people realize how how damaging that has been, not only on the music making, but also on audience's ears. You know, we've we've become so accustomed to hearing equal temperament now that that most people hear anything else as

either nostalgic or just weird and out of tune. And this is incredibly problematic because it's it's kind of like forcing the entire world to eat with the same spices, or to speak with the same language or with the

same dialect, you know. So we need to make people understand that this is an important issue and it needs to exist because without it existing, we won't be able to hear anything else, and we won't be able to move forward into the future where we can actually explore different kinds of music making, things that might be transcultural, that represent our commonalities and our differences in different ways. So we need these tools in order to be able

to imagine something else. That's one thing, and the other side of it is actually education. Aside from the fact that these capabilities don't exist in the technology, we also don't learn about them in music education, and information about

them is very scattered. It's very much a Western perspective, narrative, and trying to break that rigidity of Western music theory and Western music education, which is not only a present in you know, the West as a whole, but has also imposed itself on the rest of the world because of colonization, because of imperialism, because of cultural hegemony. We need to make sure that these musical ideas from all these different cultures are represented in a way that's equal

to how Western music Western composers have been. There's no reason why everybody has to learn about Bach and Mozart and doesn't get to learn about Paco de Lusia and ali akbar Khan. You know what I'm I think it's about valuing all of these musics from all over the world and their ability to enrich our lives, and to treat all of these musical traditions on equal ground, not that one is superior to another just because it has harmony and you know, a huge orchestra of instruments behind it.

I mean that still has a lot to do with the decision makers and who decides what is music or what is good music. Because I think that same type of that same type of oppression exists when we're just talking about different styles of music. You know, I've heard people say things like hip hop isn't real music, or this pop song isn't a real song, or so on and so forth. When it comes to the types of music that we're deciding is real and isn't real. I think you bringing up the example of hip hop is

really really important. It's taken years years for electronic music makers, beat makers, hip hop artists to be respected in the same way that you know, Western classical composers are respected. Again. It boils down to this supremacy, you know, we are always taught again or there's these ideas that are embedded in our minds from an early age that if you want to be a professional, capable musician, you need to be able to read music, you need to understand counterpoint

and harmony. Black musicians, whether they be African American jazz musicians or hip hop artists, have had to suffer this for a very long time too. And the parallel is there.

It's about the inequality. And I think what you brought up back in Mozart, what it made me think of is when we're talking about the music that we're teaching the children, what steps do you think that we can take to kind of unlock the possibilities with children, rather than kind of just teaching them four four time and back in Mozart and kind of bringing in an African drummer and say ooh, isn't this fun and thinking of

that as exotic? What can we do to actually make all of music more accessible across the world rather than just one view of it. You know, teaching a bunch of school kids how to bang on a gembe for an afternoon is just not good enough. It's tokenistic, it's exotic. It takes the boxes and that's all it does. It

doesn't get into the core. Whereas if you were to bring an African master musician and allow him the time and space to be able to talk about groove, to be able to talk about polyrhythms, to be able to talk about interlocking rhythms, to be able to talk about tonality and musicality and pitch and scales and tunings in a more in depth way, and then to be able to represent those ideas using modern sounds, using digital tools.

That sounds like I'm demanding a lot, or it's a bit of a utopian daydream, but I think that the technology is there to allow for that, and that we have plenty of musicians all over the globe who are more than capable of teaching those kind of ideas, and so marrying the two together for me, would be the first step. And I really don't think it's so difficult. I think it would be quite reasonable to expect something like that to exist. So tell me a little bit

how your software is solving that problem as well. In January, I released two browser based softwares in collaboration with the Creative Studio called Counterpoint. It's run by Tera Parvan and Samuel Diggins. One is called Lima and what's called Apotomy. Lima is a tool that allows very instant, intuitive access to tunings from all over the world, and it runs

in a web browser. So it's really really convenient for musicians, researchers, composers, educators to use because all you need is a computer and you can explore or create here immediately what these different tonalities sound like. So the examples I play to you earlier were me just switching through some different presets that are publicly available in this software. That was a major step towards trying to really make this information easier for people to engage with. Now, Apotomy is a slightly

different beast. It's more of a music making environment based on generative music, which essentially is music based on parameters and probabilities. But what differentiates it from any other kind of generative music software is that it's directly focused on these transcultural scales and different tunings from all over the world. I know we're on a podcast that nobody can see what I'm doing, but what I've done is I've launched

a browser with Apotomy running. I've selected Arabic tuning by Alpha Rabi from the tenth century, and I'm going to choose a very particular characteristic macam, which is a kind of mode called rajah. I love it. And so what you would do is choose a tuning system and a subset that you want to work in, and then you have a bunch of sliders and buttons and things that you press in order to change the probabilistic nature of the music that's going to come out. This is very

very simple. As a sound, I'm going to just craft it a little bit more, a little bit of delay and gives that a little bit more character. And now by just trying the sliders and changing some of the parameters. I can start to generate these different patterns, and then you use a couple of embedded web based synthesizers to create that music. That's just one track. I'm going to bring in a second track now, and I'm gonna make this run lower. And these are all options that are

available in the software exactly. It's it's a kind of modular framework. So I'm going to quickly change the sound now to something that might be a bit more interesting. Oh now I'm getting a very eighties movie, eighties action movie. Exactly. These synths are all quite eighties. So let's just add another guitar here on that on the other side. So it all feels about eighties at the moment because we're

just using these very simple rhythmic things structures. But I can also switch over to a different kind of rhythmic construction, which are called Euclidean rhythms. You can hear these beautiful poly rhythms. I'll stop there just otherwise we can really be here for hours. I could have never heard this kind of music using an Arabic macom being done so quickly, so easily, just in a web brow not even in

a web browser, in any kind of digital software environment before. So, even though it sounds a little bit cheesy and a bit dated in a bit eighties, what it does is it allows my imagination to go elsewhere, so that when I come to make my own music, I have this weird stuff in the back of my mind that allows me to think about my own music and my own musical culture in a different way, in a way that's a little bit more meaningful and a bit different, a

bit more progressive maybe. So let me let me add your professional musician obviously, and you know what you're doing jumping into the software. How do you think that this would work for a beginner like somebody that's just like trying to get acquaintance with these new tonalities and new rhythms. What would be the best method for them to use

this software. I've spoken to a lot of people who didn't know much about this subject and who were using these tools for the first time, and I think everybody found them intuitive enough for them to have their imagination stimulated. The beauty about both lima and apotomy is that rather than having presets and defaults that are biased in any way, or let's just say non neutral in some way. The

default settings are the act of choosing. That's something that's really important because it gives users a sense of agency. So what I would expect from and non professional users is for them to get excited about this and to just explore and discover by doing, and then hopefully be stimulated enough to take that interest further. It's just about

that spark. If you can catch that spark, and if you can let it have space to grow brighter, then you know people will automatically find themselves taking their own path and discovering the things that make them feel that magic. There's one thing I think the limitation is that this is free software, and it is browser based, and it's hard to you know, beat out software like ableton Live or fl Studio or other places bits of music making software that you can use and without marketing budgets with

those softwares. Are you ever concerned that maybe the word won't get out that things like this exist for people to use, And do you ever consider what the future looks like using this tool going forward? With those factors in mind, you're right to say that commercial software run by global companies with a lot of money for marketing and development is definitely not a beast that can be tackled with something like this that runs in the browser and it's for free. But this was a conscious decision.

I don't think that those technologies are are bad and need to be replaced by something else. I just think that they're missing a really crucial element which is imperative for non Anglo European musical cultures, and without them, music is poorer as a result. Matt and Robert's, a great American saxophonist, said during a panel discussion I participated in with her a while ago, she said that people of color need to have to work harder. That's just the

nature of the way that systems have been constructed. And what I love about these tools is that they actually make our lives much much easier, make it much easier to create and to develop ideas and to experiment and to explore than it was before. So they're great stimulants for the musical imagination, and I hope that that that in itself can be something that will lead to something else, whether that be more great music or more great tools, only time will tell. What are a few things that

listeners can do to help continue your work. Please just use the tools, tell your friends about them, and explore these ideas. Ultimately, I'm a fan of music, and a big part of making these tools is because I'm keen and desperate actually to hear more music that has these kind of energies and these kinds of tonalities. So please just make music, tell your friends and let me know so that I can hear it. Hi'm Alami as a musician, composer,

and researcher and creator of Apotomy and Lima. We included links to both at our show notes, so feel free to jump in there and play around and see what you could create. Next week, go Solvable, We're talking about a different set of digital tools that are solving problems. Able Gamers is an organization that is making gaming devices available and accessible for everyone. I hope you'll join us

for that conversation. Solvable Senior producer is Jocelyn Frank, Research by David Jah, Booking by Lisa Dunn, Our managing producer is Sasha Matthias, and our executive producer is Mio Lobel. Special thanks to Hiam Alami and his musical collaborators for sharing audio from the Apotomy live performance from CTM twenty twenty one. There's a link to their full performance in our show notes. I highly recommend that you check that out. Solvable is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like

the show, please remember to share, rate, and review. It helps us find our way to the ears of new listeners. You can find Pushkin Podcasts wherever you listen, including on the iHeartRadio app and Apple Podcasts. I'm Ronald Young Junior. Thanks for listening.