pistes 0.1.0

👣 pistes: jouer means to play 👣

Les champs de pistes: an unbounded distributed collaborative music

Motivations

How could an unlimited number of people collaborate on one piece of music?

How could this be accessible to as many people as possible? To people with little money or technical knowledge or bandwidth?

How could this happen with as little technology as possible? With no technology?

The image

Back in the day, all audio was recorded onto magnetic tape. One tape could have multiple recordings on it, all laid out precisely as 2 or 4 or even 24 thin and perfectly parallel tracks on a great long tape.

But what if you had unlimited tracks? It wouldn't look like a tape anymore, but a great field, an unbounced field of independent tracks.

The champ de pistes

A champ de pistes is a conceptual audio tape recorder, with an unbounded number of tracks called pistes, numbered 1, 2, 3, potentially off to infinity.

A group of people start a champ de pistes and agree how to work. They put segments on pistes, and create mixes for all to hear.

The details

Segments

Pistes contain audio segments. A segment is the address of an audio recording. It identifies a portion of an audio recording somewhere, on or off the internet.

The segment's audio is not stored with the segment or the piste - a segment points to audio, it does not contain audio.

What a "recording" is, is left under-specified. The exact definition of what a recording is depends on the rules for the specific champ.

The idea of address is also under-specified: there will be technology for things like URLs and digital audio, but there's nothing stopping a composer from including an address that asks someone to come and sit in a specific basement and listen to pipes dripping.

Mixes

A mix is a set of instructions on how to mix pistes from one or more champs into single piece of audio. A mix can even be a program in Python or some other programming language.

For many people, a mix would be some sort of human-readable score they would prepare and give to someone else's program to prepare the output for them.

That score might also be prepared by a program - for example, a program that reads and records faders a person uses like a classic mixing board, or something much more radical.

About time

A clip represents time: it has an optional début/start time, and an optional durée/duration.

A segment is just an address and a clip to the where segment is within the audio found at the address.

Separately, segments are also clipped to a piste - in fact, a piste is nothing more than a list of segments and clips.

A concept first, with some technology to make it happen.

I want to re-emphasize that at its base, a champ de pistes is not a technological thing.

A group of people could agree to a champ de pistes and organize it on paper or even in their heads, creating mixes using stopwatches and whatever devices they had at the time (LPs, cassettes, MiniDisc, wax cylinders), or even sheet music, singing and a good sense of time (whether sheet music is a "recording" would depend on what the champ's definition of a recording was.)

That said, there will be simple free open source software to let you easily make pistes, champs, and mixes, and and of course listen to them.

Frequently Anticipated Questions

Q: Champs and pistes: is this a sports thing?

I wanted to emphasize that these aren't conventional tracks at all, and was looking for a different word. "Field of tracks" in French is "champ de pistes", and I live in Normandy.

Q: Where is it?

Even though it's purely a conceptual thing, for most people, including myself, some software will be really what makes it zing.

There will be a workflow involving Git (from any provider, GitLab, GitHub, etc) that will be automated into a tool to build and share pistes, champs and mixes.

Writing the workflow tool and one simple mixer won't really be a huge amount of time. Libraries like numpy, requests, and bs4 will do the heavy lifting and I've done an enormous amount of this stuff before.

In this case, my old proverb really holds - weeks of programming can save you days of planning. I intend to get the planning justso before I wrote more than tiny sketches.

Q: Why not just have mixes which include segments, wouldn't that be simpler? Why have champs and pistes at all?

A: That was my original idea, but it lacked any natural form of collaboration so it sat in the back of my head for a long time. Eventually, the idea of the infinite tape recorder started to crystalize in my head, and then having people work on individual pistes was the logical next step.

Q: I want to share mixes. What about copyright?

A: I strongly respect copyright laws, and I deplore the fact that composers and musicians are so poorly compensated.

No copyright material is included in a mix - in fact, no audio material at all, only addresses. There will be mechanism to turn addresses of, say, Bandcamp or iTunes URLs tracks that a user has purchased and exist on their machine, into mixes. If you don't have some track, you get silence, so you could go out and buy the track - or you could clone the mix and put some other track that you owned in there instead.

Q: Why are the pistes numbered? Why not a name?

You will be able to attach labels to pistes, but any individual piste will always be at a fixed number like 2, 12 or 23.

Again, this is to thicken the plot: to add a little structure to help collaboration.

You can have pistes that are "right next door" or "far away", or talk about a "block of pistes". It adds a geography and a metric to an otherwise trackless world of labels.

More, people can write mixes that work on any champ de pistes, simply by mixing pistes by index number.

If you want, you can organize your champ so that everything is by label and completely hide the idea of the piste number, no one is stopping you!