I was invited to join a panel about Open Source and Music in Loop, an slightly unusual (for my “standards”) event. It wasn’t a conference per se, although there were talks. Most of the sessions were panels and workshops, there were very little “individual” talk tracks. Lots of demos, unusual hardware to play with in the hall, relaxed atmosphere, and very little commercialism—really cool!

Before I agreed to join them, I spoke to Juanpe Bolivar, the host of my panel, and made sure he was aware of why I didn’t actually want to join a panel, because I had been in a few so far and they were always horrendous due to the power dynamics in place. I explained all my concerns to him, and suggested tons of ideas to make things better, and he listened and put them in practice! So that was really good, and made me feel good about the event. It also helped that I knew some people who work for Ableton or who were connected to them, so I trusted them. Also they mentioned the code of conduct early on and they mentioned it during the opening event as well—with the room full of people.

Their organisation for booking travel and accommodation was super great as well: they helped me be time efficient by booking the most convenient flights, and the hotel they reserved was very good! Which I super greatly appreciated after having been travelling so much recently… the last thing you want is being placed on a crappy hotel!

When I was waiting for the flight to Berlin I noticed that James Holden was on the same flight too, because he was joining Loop as well. James Holden! OK maybe you don’t know him, but he’s a quite popular DJ who’s also an author/producer and instigator of various experimental acts, and also really chill and loves to share how he does things and what his process is. So he was there in front of me eating a croissant, and of course I would NOT tell him anything because eating a croissant is one of life’s sacred moments. You don’t want to interrupt anyone when they’re eating a croissant. It just breaks the magic and everything gets awkward, with pieces of pastry going all over. No, just don’t do it.

So I didn’t say anything.

But when we landed I got welcomed by a representative from Loop. She was very nice and told me we should wait until we met James and his colleague Camilo Tirado and then we would head out to get a taxi to our hotels. So I had a chance to actually speak to James! I said “hi” like a shy child, and then I told him I had seen him play at a long-closed club in London, many years ago, and he said something like “Ahh yeah when we were young!”, and asked me what I did! So yeah, exactly the down to earth person I expected. Camilo was also super nice, and I got to talk to him later on about musical composition, how you play Indian music, universities and schools, etc.

This was just a bit of what was to happen during the event: you would be listening to some artist talk about their process and then it was just very natural to come and talk to them afterwards, and they would also ask what were you doing. The whole event was set up with the goal of getting artists to make connections and not work alone, as the event premise is that making music has turned into a very solitary act nowadays and we spend so much time in front of our computer screens in contrast to playing with other artists, etc. It was a bit funny for me as my “main job” is not as a musician, but I’m “enabling” people’s music creations on the web and also make my own music from time to time, so it was interesting to see that they were really accepting of my ‘hybrid’ situation, and very excited about the notion of me enabling other people on the web, whereas generally people in tech are way more condescending and exclusivist (“oh, you’re not a real developer!”, etc).

As you can see I was semi unconsciously trying to extrapolate this to our “industry”; my brain was making comparisons all the time. I noticed little things like:

• the drinks at the bar were not free, and no one batted an eyelid; they just paid for them and also there were zero incidents with drunkards harassing me. Correlation? Causation?
• there was no t-shirt for the event, the only event themed t-shirts were worn by event people
• picking the swag bag was optional, they didn’t give it to you automatically. And the bag essentially just had a leaflet with the program and a notebook.

The panel

After the opening, Juanpe brought us to dinner to a nice Vietnamese place so we could get to know each other’s background a little bit more before the panel happened. I hadn’t met my co-panelists before, and I was a bit scared that they would be “more open source than ye” kind of people, as they essentially worked in Linux Audio stuff, but they were excellent people and really easy to get along with. Soon my concerns evaporated.

For reference, they were:

• Gianfranco Ceccolini, he works on a programmable pedal device called the MOD: it’s a device which has an embedded computer running Linux, and you can download effects and install them on it. Their business model consists in that they provide precompiled binaries so they are convenient for musicians that just want to get music done
• Marije Baalman, she is an artist and also developer for STEIM, a company that builds custom instruments and stuff for artists. They use Super Collider and Linux, and she was also involved in the Linux Audio conference.
• Paul Davis, he’s the lead developer of Ardour which is a very popular open source audio workstation (think Garage Band, but free), and also JACK which enables you to pipe and control audio in your system (without|with very low) latency (like CoreAudio etc, but again, free, and multiplatform). He also happens to be the 2nd employee Amazon ever hired so he’s been in the tech industry for a while too!

http://soledadpenades.com/2015/11/18/on-loop-2015/