Wayne waxes on homescrews and turns on a little lightbulb over my head:
and that's what this is all about: expanding the listening experience, the modes of reception, our very interaction with the music around us. consumption blurs into production, much like with a record scratched, a radio dial tuned in and out of signal rhythmically (i love doing this when nothing particularly good is coming through in the car), a twisting of EQ knobs on a shitty boombox, etc. folks have been doing this kind of thing, intentionally and serendipitously, for a long time, and i'm delighted that, in the wake of so much sizzurpy sound, more of these experiments are coming to "light."...
OH, right, so this is kind of another example of the wider trend towards USER INNOVATION, as discussed by Virginia Postrel, touched on previously in a giant mash-up of a post from a couple months ago:
When most people think about where new or improved products come from, they imagine two kinds of innovators: either engineers and marketers in big companies trying to ''find a need and fill it'' or garage entrepreneurs hoping to strike it rich by inventing the next big thing.
But a lot of significant innovations do not come from people trying to figure out what customers may want. They come from the users themselves, who know exactly what they want but cannot get it in existing products.
''A growing body of empirical work shows that users are the first to develop many, and perhaps most, new industrial and consumer products,'' Eric von Hippel, head of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote in ''Democratizing Innovation,'' recently published by MIT Press. (The book can be downloaded at Professor von Hippel's Web site, http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/.)
Innovation by users is not new, but it is growing. Thanks to low-cost computer-based design products, innovators do not have to work in a professional organization to have access to high-quality tools. Even home sewing machines have all sorts of computerized abilities. And once a new design is in digital form, the Internet allows users to share their ideas easily...
As I noted, while the focus is largely on innovations in consumer and industrial goods, this all certainly applies to cultural production and consumption as well - in fact, obviously, cultural goods are probably the leading edge of this 21st-century model of user innovation:
Creative power has been flowing steadily downstream for decades at least (any music historians in the house feel free to note how this has actually been happening for centuries, I'm sure it has), but I feel like the pace really picked up significantly in the '90s with the advent of the home studio, widespread amateur remixing, mashups, MP3s, and internet-enabled sharing of sounds and words in general. With the increased penetration of broadband access in recent years, and MP3blogging in just the past year alone really, 'podcasting', &c, it feels like we're about to be dumped into the ocean of truly global and truly popular pop music, created for, by, and/or under the influence of music listeners (e.g. 'users') who are increasingly indistinguishable from what we used to call artists ('manufacturers').
Lots more interesting reading from all those links above, especially the Democratizing Innovation online book. It's all pretty heady stuff, especially when you consider the potential of FabLabs and even more futuristic personal fabrication technology to foster innovation for and by developing world users. When considering the unforseeable and undoubtedly mind-bending dysfunctions and difficulties that lie ahead for humanity in the 21st century, keep in mind that the number of user/innovators that will be bringing their diverse knowledge and abilities to bear on our problems will be expanding, geometrically IF NOT EXPONENTIALLY -