Fluid and Mobile: Art+Logic’s Brett Porter Talks Music Tech’s New Expressivity

Brett takes us on a wild journey through the outer edges of music tech and its impact on music making and listening. In a time when tablets can be studios and algorithms bandmates, he and Dmitri explore the tension between aesthetics and tools, music’s evolving value frameworks and tried-and-true structures, and the fuzzy world springing up between makers and fans. No longer locked to a room, no longer tied to analog instruments or clunky digital interfaces, music lovers are finding new depths of expressive potential in tech tools.

A composer and veteran coder, an architect of the new MIDI 2.0 standard, Brett talks about how laptops and iPads are becoming their own kind of new instruments with unique interfaces, not just sleeker iterations of studio hardware and consoles. Sensors and prototyping platforms allow newcomers and experimenters to create complex gear and multi-touch controllers like Artiphon that depart from analog models. Standards and metadata allow for ever richer complexity. It all adds up to a revolution in expressivity, one that promises to transform how we translate our experiences into audio.

The Music Tectonics podcast goes beneath the surface of the music industry to explore how technology is changing the way business gets done. Visit MusicTectonics.com to learn more, and find us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Let us know what you think!