Florian Grote’s Journal

As more and more people turn to online resources for everything from news to product reviews of all sorts, fresh marketing money pours into the realm of web-based publications. Although the absolute size of most budgets may not grow, but rather shrink (at least in the world’s benchmark market, the US), manufacturers of goods start to realize that the consumers aren’t necessarily where their ad money is. So they want to change the balance between online and offline spending. Problem is, how do they know where to go? In the society of the printing press, circulation numbers used to be the holy grail of marketing assessment. With magazines giving away more than half of their print run and two thirds of their paper paved with advertisement, the suspicion arose that quantitative data may not really have so much to say anymore.

In the online world, reader attention can theoretically be measured with great accuracy. Unique visits can be counted, and it is even possible to determine how long readers stayed on certain websites. Mighty tools such as compete.com and websitegrader.com do induce a feeling of power. However, it can only be a good sign that even these services warn you not to blindly trust their data. Combining data sources with qualitative research is what’s called for. The mere time a website is open in a browser window doesn’t tell you very much about the communication going on. The number of hits on a website can only vaguely hint at its relevance for certain target groups.

With this post, I want to kick off a series talking about possibilities to create a methodology for the integration of qualitative and quantitative analysis that could help find ways for better assessments while raising awareness for the complexity of the matter.

September 4-6, 2008, at the University of Hohenheim. The main focus will be on the combination of empirical research methods and the evolution of sociological systems theory. From the Call for Papers:

“It has been researched about most social phenomena as well as they have been described from the perspective of systems theory – and yet those two areas of sociology, systems theory and empirical research remained mainly ignorant towards each other. General reproaches of theoretical or empirical blindness too often collide. This leaves important potentials unused. The theory-based development of empirical methods as well as the empirical richness of social theory – especially this of systems theory – and thus the contribution of sociology to current problems of society have to rely on the bridge of methodology. Therefore the conference aims at pushing forward the dialogue between systems theoretical conception and empirical observation by broadening and deepening it.”

So, the University of Hohenheim sounds like an interesting place to be in the first week of September. Find out more at the Study Group Functional Analysis.
Download the Call for Papers

A separate blog dedicated to the Pd&GEM workshop at STEIM/Amsterdam is now online. I will use it to distribute class material and document what’s going on. Stay tuned for sounds & pictures!
Go to mypdclass.wordpress.com

Besides producing and performing music for dancefloors all over Europe, Speedy J also likes to cross over into more abstract realms of multimedia art. His recent project Umfeld.TV is a great example of the creative possibilities of up-to-date musique concrète and surround composition after the novelty factor of the technology has worn out. On his website, the full DVD image is freely downloadable under CC license.
Full interview

July 3-5, 2008. Annual workshop “The Computer as Medium”. This year, the focus will be on the new orders of knowledge that emerge as computers permeate cultural practice. What is the meaning of order today (security?), and who can control it? What are the new rules and structures of knowledge brought to order? Discuss!
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ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe) has published the full proceedings of this year’s next_generation conference, titled “Musik im Raum”. My contribution on spatial configurations of media music has been available in this Journal before, but now you can get it with the full context of other interesting articles.
More information

The good folks over at Pingipung Records have a nice Christmas calendar countdown-website this year. In association with Halle für Kunst, Lüneburg, they gathered 24 of their artists (including yours truly) to produce short pieces of music for the days before Christmas. Many of these miniatures turned out to be quite usable as ringtones. If you’re not down with the regular bells and whistles of Christmas sounds, this might just be your type of carol!
The calendar

From April 7 - 10, 2008, I will give a workshop on Pure Data and the GEM extension library for visualization at STEIM in Amsterdam. The workshop will cover aspects of instrument design for composition and live performance as well as the creation of custom visual user interfaces.
More information

I recently had the opportunity to interview Jan St. Werner of Mouse On Mars and Von Südenfed (the collaboration with The Falls’s Mark E. Smith). The result is a comprehensive insight into Jan’s working strategies and an interesting view on his music and his concept of musical instruments.
Full interview

The written version of my lecture at this year’s Netaudio Festival in Berlin is now available for download in the Articles & Lectures section. A podcast version of all lectures will be available on the festival’s homepage soon.

I recently got to interview Daz-I-Kue, founding member of London’s Bugz In The Attic crew. Although I woke him up for the chat, Daz was happy to share his personal history in music and his views on sound generators and creative collaboration.
Full interview

In the Articles & Lectures section, I have posted a documentation of 10 student projects from the FH Potsdam college. All interface-design majors, they investigate innovative ways to exert musical control. Some of the projects are shown at this year’s Ars Electronica Campus.

Whatever it was with this year 1997, something must have been special about it. Not in world politics, but in the homey world of the German Electronica (as it was still called then) scene. Somehow, social dynamics must have reached a point in 1997 that drove many of its protagonists to turn institutional. First shouts go out to De-Bug Magazine, of course. They are joined in their celebration by labels Sonig, Karaoke Kalk, Shitkatapult, and Sonar Kollektiv, to name a few. Coincidentally (??), two of my institutional backgrounds were founded around that time as well, with Native Instruments already having celebrated their 10th anniversary in 2006. But the Project ((audio)) at the University of Lueneburg can also claim the magic 1997 as its founding year. A great example of social dynamics - involving technology such as mp3 - building up to a point where an institutionalized organization of cultural practice “suddenly” seems to make perfect sense.

On behalf of Native Instruments, the major German manufacturer of software musical instruments, I get to interview artists about how they use the computer to pursue their form of cultural practice. Recently, I interviewed Bill Lloyd, live band member and sound designer of Placebo.
Full interview

The good folks over at the netlabel Thinner have a great new release. Laura Palmer’s “Background” exemplifies what the overused term ambient house can still signify today. The background is indeed the key in this album. It holds all the minimal microrhythms which essentially make the bassdrum feel refreshingly unessential. Download the album here.

October 5-7, 2007. The yearly netaudio festival has been established as a focus point for the international online music scene. The gathering combines performances with discussions and lectures. This year, the festival comes to Berlin, home to many netlabels and a hub for international online music infrastructure. My contribution will be a lecture on networked organizational strategies in an environment as uncertain as today’s music cultures.
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In a microeconomic experiment, unemployed inhabitants of the area around Kottbusser Tor, Berlin, were given the chance to develop concepts for unused decks of a massive parking garage. The top deck was used for agriculture, while the deck below it had a mixture of grocery vendors and small repair shops. A group of illustrators creating custom comic strips on demand seemed to draw the most customers. All in all, the atmosphere was not much different from a pre-Christmas bazar in any given old-folks home, though. Good will was showing, but there was no emergence of new socio-economic practice in the air. The problem with such microeconomic experiments: If you still use money as medium of success, you reference the entire socio-economic complexity of today’s society. Not a good start for an escapist experiment. Read more on the project page (in German language).

The grassroots approach of last.fm already proves extremely powerful in regulating our access to music at our desk. But one more important connection has been made in last.fm: The pooling of global links with local interaction. Based on your taste profile, you get recommendations for concerts in your neighborhood. Thus, last.fm provides a viable structure, making links in communication between global and local possible that used to require complex promotion embedded in the roots of the local music scene. The selection appears as contingency, but is that really true for everyone? Make no mistake: Last.fm may look grassrootsy, but it is already an institution of social power.

July 12-14, 2007. Annual workshop “The Computer as a Medium”. This year’s focus is on the histories, visions, and phantasms of computers in the society.
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