Talks by Tom Lodge and Glenn McGarry

Tom Lodge

The Databox project seeks to enable all the advantages of personal data analytics while at the same time enforcing accountability and control in order to protect a user’s privacy. It provides an app-style ecosystem where users can install data box apps to process personal data within an accountable environment. I’ll present a quick overview of the project and a demo of a visual programming language (a variant of node-red) which allows app developers to rapidly build and test databox apps.

Glenn McGarry

The rise of digital technology has radically reconfigured the musical landscape, disrupting and reshaping the ways music is both produced and consumed. The ease of accessibility to digital marketplaces coupled with affordable music production tools, such as Digital Audio Workstations (DAW), has enabled a broader range of people to engage in producing and distributing music, often independently from major record labels.

My thesis focuses on exploring new possibilities that may be enabled by exploiting metadata to develop new forms of value in music production and consumption. Musical metadata, has traditionally been treated as a by-product of the production process, having little or no value beyond that, and is largely discarded. Uniquely, this thesis focuses on the social character of metadata in music production in order to understand its role in coordinating and accomplishing production processes. This in turn opens up the social life of music production (e.g., the actors involved in making music, the activities and collaborations they engage in, the resources they exploit, how music is crafted in practice) to drive design thinking around new value propositions exploiting metadata.

The aims of my thesis are to understand the social organisational role of metadata created and used in music production processes and to identify new possibilities for the development of digital technologies that exploit and create value from production metadata. So far, empirical studies of music production in the field have unpacked and explicated much about the methodical purposing of metadata created and used in the production process. Active engagement with design practitioners surrounding the findings of these studies, including the coordinative character of metadata to label audio used in the process, has informed the development of novel production tools. More information is available from the FAST Project website.