2020: an (online) Concert Odyssey
A concert circa June 2020
I live in a part of Montreal affectionately known as “La Petite Italie”. As the name suggests, it's home to bunch of delightful little Italian restaurants, shops, and cafés; but just off the main boulevard is a much less expected resident: the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms, also known as MILA.
I recently had the chance to meet and talk with someone from MILA about the research being done to apply Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence to music. Although the practical results of this research might still feel far off, if you want to experience the intersection of music and AI today, you don’t need look much further than Spotify's personalized recommendations, a playlist curated to your musical tastes thanks to wonders of machine learning.
One of my favorite parts of being a classical musician is curating the music for concerts. The combination of music, history, and story-telling really appeals to my creativity and imagination. Unlike the art world, where curators are limited by the reality that a painting usually exists in a only single original copy, musical curators are able to feature nearly any piece they can think of, given they have the musicians to play it. Our limit instead lies in the concert format itself. It used to be that one of the main challenges was fitting ideas into a standard concert duration, but of course nowadays it’s gotten a whole lot more complicated.
Last week I found out that a tour I was set to do in February with violinist and long-time friend Eva Aronian will be replaced with virtual concerts.
(sidenote : does anyone else feel that we need a better term for these? Maybe I'm just getting tired of hearing the words "online", "digital", and "virtual" applied to anything event related...)
In an alternate version of reality, we were going to be playing part of our program this week here in Montreal, as the final concert of a mini-series of happy hour shows I had been invited to curate for Jeunesses Musicales Canada. Now instead of adapting our concert for happy hour, we're reworking it for the internet.
It’s no surprise then, that the unique challenge of effectively adapting a classical music concert into a "digital experience" has been on my mind a lot lately. After all, audiences come to a concert hall specifically to hear music, but the internet is kind of the Wild West. If I get bored of the concert I'm watching, I can always tab over to social media, or watch something different on Youtube or Netflix.
Now perhaps it's just the notoriously short attention span of my generation that's getting in the way, but I can’t help think that the one thing all these alternatives have in common is their learning algorithms that seem know me and what kind of content I want to consume better than I do.
There is a fundamental and fascinating difference between human and algorithmic curation.
When I select the music for a concert, ideally there's a story I'm trying to tell, and I combine the kind of music I want to play with what I think audiences will enjoy. But sometimes, I might put the narrative first and include music that will I know might be challenging for the audience to listen to. After all, I’ve got you captive once you're in the concert hall, and you sort of have to listen to what I play unless you want to make a scene.
Algorithms on the other hand tend only feed to us more of what we already like. On the Internet, where attention literally equates to money, this turns out to be a shockingly effective strategy to keep you from clicking away.
However, this disparity makes me wonder how art — which I believe is supposed to challenge us to a certain extent — will find its place in the internet landscape, and how the relationship between human and algorithmic curation will develop.
“Show me upcoming concerts in Montreal”
“I'm sorry, Cameron. I'm afraid I can't do that”
I am eternally grateful to all of the people who have been making a point of tuning in to the many online concerts right now. You're helping all of us musicians keep making music. However, I can't shake the feeling that, given the unique ways we consume content on the Internet, there must be a better way to reformat classical concerts for the digital age than just filming a normal performance. To have a concert feel like it was made specifically for the Internet instead of for the concert hall.
I'm going to keep on thinking about it. In the mean time, I'd love to hear about your favourite "digital concert" experience in the comments below.