Diffusing Music: Inside Ben Neill’s Vision of Sonic Democratization [Book Excerpt]
Composer/performer and professor Ben Neill is the inventor of the Mutantrumpet, a hybrid electro-acoustic instrument, and recognized as a musical innovator who, as Wired Magazine said, “uses a schizophrenic trumpet to create art music for the people.” His book “Diffusing Music: Trajectories of Sonic Democratization” has just been released.
Neill’s first book “Diffusing Music: Trajectories of Sonic Democratization” has just been released by Bloomsbury Academic Press. In this engaging book, Neill explores how technology is reshaping music, enabling unprecedented levels of creativity and transforming how we share and experience sound.
From digital tools that let anyone become a music maker to AI systems that write, mix, and master songs, Neill breaks down how these advancements empower creators and reshape the relationship between artists and audiences. Part history, part personal story, and part look at what’s next, “Diffusing Music” is a must-read for anyone curious about the future of music.
[Hypebot readers get an exclusive 35% discount on the hardcover edition. Details below.]
From the Introduction to Diffusing Music: Trajectories of Sonic Democratization
This book explores the diffusion and democratization of music in our current era through the proliferation of digital technologies and investigates the historical trajectories that helped to spawn and foster these seismic and dramatic changes to the musical art form. While the transformations that have occurred in music over the last twenty-five years have been radical and far-reaching, they have not appeared out of thin air. Diffusing Music surveys the aesthetics and technologies that are redefining musical expression and demonstrates how they were shaped by the practices of innovative musicians over previous decades. This approach can inform new modalities of musical thinking in the wake of the changes being actualized by artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies. In my own career as a composer, performer, inventor, and educator, I have been an active participant in the scenes and movements that gave rise to musical democratization and diffusion. My personal reflections and documentation of my interactions with important figures in the progression toward our current state are woven into the fabric of the book.
“democratization, superabundance, and participation”
Each era of music-making creates its own specific social, technological, and aesthetic output, and ours is no different. Democratization, superabundance, and participation are the defining characteristics of music in our time. Jacques Attali predicted this situation in his seminal text Noise, written nearly fifty years ago:
“Composition thus appears as a negation of the division of roles and labor as constructed by the old codes. Therefore, in the final analysis, to listen to music in the network of composition is to rewrite it . . . The listener is the operator. (1985, 135)“
Digital technologies have been essential to the reshaping of music, so presciently foreseen by Attali. Music has always had a close relationship with technological development (Latonero 2003); virtual reality pioneer and musician Jaron Lanier has pointed out that musical instruments have been even more technologically advanced than weapons throughout history (2005). Today, music has become ubiquitous and increasingly intertwined with everyday life, rendering previous models of creation, performance, monetization, and consumption obsolete.
Anyone with access to a smartphone or personal computer and an internet connection can create, distribute, and promote music with minimal effort. Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly accelerating sonic democratization, further diffusing both the art and business of music. The musical experience is moving away from passive listening toward a participatory activity in which previous distinctions between composer, performer, audience, professional, and amateur are completely erased. As AI systems for music-making and distribution are rapidly proliferating, there is a great deal of fear and consternation about their ultimate effects.
“there are aspects to these emerging technologies that we should be concerned about”
This book asserts that while there are aspects to these emerging technologies that we should be concerned about, history affirms the crucial importance of creative innovators who embrace new systems in their nascent stages in order to play active roles in defining and shaping paradigms for their broader usage.
Both the creative and business aspects of music have been disrupted through the diffusion process, and today the boundary between those components of musical expression is becoming increasingly blurred. While the current condition of music was foreshadowed in the works of artists over the last century, some of the effects of democratization and decentralization have been unexpected. At the time of this writing, 120,000 tracks are now being released on Spotify every day (Luminate 2023), and 100 million are already available (Spotify 2023). Recent data shows listeners gravitating to older music in the face of such an abundance of content (Dredge 2023), perhaps due to what economist Swati Bhatt calls “cognitive apathy” or “mental paralysis” (2019). The dramatic increase in musical production afforded by new creative tools and channels of diffusion seems to be having an inverse effect in which interest in new content is diminished. Listenership continues to fragment into smaller and smaller micro-niches, and online streaming services organize music according to its functionality as background for other activities rather than focusing on musical artists and creators. In the wake of such overabundance, music risks becoming disposable or interchangeable, and potentially ends up being relegated to general social communication.
Responses to the drastic shifts in the art and business of music are wide-ranging. Some celebrate the potential for empowerment through diffusion, while others view the developments as dystopian, signaling the demise of the musical art and the music industry. The profusion of musical production that has resulted from democratization has completely upended the economics of the music business as it had functioned since the 1960s. Numerous authors have written about the negative financial impact on the livelihoods of professional musicians (Rogers 2013; Eriksson et al. 2019; Deresiewicz 2020; Taylor 2015). The “value gap” is a term now commonly used to describe “the growing mismatch between the value that user upload services such as YouTube extract from music and the revenue returned to the music community—those who are creating and investing in music” (Mazierska, Gillon, and Rigg 2018). Many of the ideas advanced by artists who are profiled in this book became so successful that they ultimately were self-undermining; the systems that supported their creative experimentation were victimized by the democratization that they championed and cultivated. This phenomenon applies to my personal story as well as the larger narrative. While Diffusing Music interrogates both the positive and negative views of musical democratization, it emphasizes how historical trajectories can point toward new strategies for generating musical meaning and value, rather than analysis of the lost economic models of the twentieth-century music business. The paradoxical outcomes are investigated throughout the book, reflected through my personal experiences as an active contributor to the establishment of our new musical reality.
As both a creator and a chronicler of music’s ongoing transformation, Neill brings unparalleled expertise to this timely exploration of the art form. Diffusing Music provides a valuable resource for those seeking to understand and navigate the industry with a clear and informed perspective and offers an accurate consideration of this field’s present and future.
Neill has recorded thirteen albums on labels including Universal/Verve, Thirsty Ear, Astralwerks, Six Degrees, and his own Blue Math label distributed by AWAL/Sony. His most recent recording, Prana Cantos, was released on Six Degrees Records in 2023 as part of their Soundbalm series of music and meditation albums. He will release new music in early 2025 on his Blue Math label distributed by AWAL.
Special Discount
Diffusing Music is being released in hardcover and ebook formats and is priced for libraries and other institutional sales. Hypebot readers get an exclusive 35% discount on the hardcover edition.
Just use the discount code GLR AT8 at this link: Diffusing Music on Bloomsbury.com.
Connect With Ben
- Website: https://www.benneill.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mutantrumpet
