Combining technology with music creationTom and Rob in their studio

Even though Lorenzo's Music is a lo-fi, punk blues, alternative band, there is actually a lot of technology experimentation that goes on in the background when we create music. 

That goes not only for recording but also for software and collaboration.

The band has been heavily involved and supportive of open-source and creative commons for years.

Because of this involvement in the open-source realm, I also work on different projects using GitHub to share and collaborate on projects.

Could I Use GitHub For Music?

When I thought about applying GitHub to music collaboration.

One day as I was sharing changes to a web project on GitHub I thought -- Could I use this for music? Could the band use this to share full recording DAW sessions with each other to collaborate on songs remotely?

Couldn't find anyone else that was doing this.

I searched and searched online and I couldn't find any other band that was doing this. So I wasn't sure if it was possible.

I looked at one of our recording sessions in Ardour (the open-source DAW we use). It had separate folders for all the contents the software used like a folder for the audio recordings.

And if I searched for the Ardour file that opens the session in the software, and right-clicked on it to open it in a text doc -- It was just an XML file.

It was just code.

So I thought, that should work right?

The Experiment:

Testing a song idea with GitHub and Ardour DAW for the first time.

I decided to try out the idea with a new Ardour session. At my home, I recorded a keyboard idea for a song. That way at least if it didn't work I didn't lose a song we were already working on.

Uploading the session to GitHub.

After I saved the session and closed it. I created a new repository for it on GitHub and uploaded the entire Ardour session folder to GitHub.

Accessing the session on a different laptop at the studio.

So here was the first big test.

Later at our studio, I cloned the GitHub repository to the laptop we use out there. I opened the session and everything was there!

So far everything was working just great!

Next, I created a new branch in the repository so we could record new parts for the song. Then when we were done I saved the session and uploaded the new changes on this branch to the GitHub repository.

Here's the real secret to using GitHub for music collaboration

Our bass player Cliff said something that changed the whole thing...

He said, "Why would we have to merge it?"

After the recording session, I described the whole process of what I was trying out to the band. I told them my main concern was what was going to happen when I tried to merge this new branch with the main branch.

I worried that If there was a conflict during the merge of the two branches there was no way to fix it.

That's when our bass player Cliff said something that changed the whole thing...

He said, "Why would we have to merge it?"

He was right! We weren't writing code, we were creating music.

Branches = Song changes

So we started using GitHub as a way to track the timeline of a song not maintaining a main branch. Each new branch is a new iteration of that song.

So the next time we wanted to make changes to a song we just created a new branch from the previous branch and so on until the song was done!

When the song is done

And when the song was done. We would make a new "Final-mix" branch and make that the main branch in the GitHub repository.

Collaborative Power

We were actually able to record and mix several songs because of this method during the global shutdown in 2020.

The other members of the band could now contribute remotely by adding new parts, and effects, and mixing songs from home.

And even today it brings flexibility to the creative process for us, allowing ideas to flourish outside the confines of our studio.

The Technical Setup:

As far as our technical setup, we use Ubuntu Studio, a creative operating suite for musicians so all band members have the same software tools and effects installed by default.

We haven't tested it with other recording software but in theory, this could be done with other DAW setups.

However, I encourage other musicians to explore the possibilities of using open-source tools and version control for their projects.

You can even create a bootable USB version of Ubuntu Studio to try it out yourself without having to install the operating system on your computer.

Conclusion:

We continue to work on new songs combining traditional recording with remote collaboration using GitHub.

The freedom and creativity of experimenting with open-source tools have brought a lot to the band.

Have a question about this?

If you would like to ask more about this process you can send us a message

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Recent scholarship in critical agrarian studies has increasingly turned its attention to the relationship between authoritarian populism and the rural world. While acknowledging geographical variegation, this scholarship emphasises a defining political feature of populism, namely “the deliberate political act of aggregating disparate and even competing and contradictory class and group interests and demands into a relatively homogenised voice, that is, ‘we, the people’, against an ‘adversarial them’ for tactical or strategic purposes”. The literature sees these features in relation to how authoritarian populisms take shape in rural societies, generally contributing to worsening and deepening economic dynamics that are detrimental to rural classes of labour. This includes widespread and longstanding yet accelerating conditions of distress, resource grabbing, widening rural-urban disparities, ecological breakdown, and agro-industrial transformations that are largely unhinged from employment generation or other benefits to rural communities, coupled with an exhaustion of progressive counter-mobilisation. The rise of authoritarian populism in the rural world, in other words, simultaneously indexes an increasingly generalised crisis and a dire need for emancipatory politics from below, something we explore in an Indian context in our new book Authoritarian Populism and Bovine Political Economy in Modi’s India.

So far, however, much of this scholarship has retained a primary interest in the ideological and discursive qualities of authoritarian populism. This has, in turn, spawned new calls for analytical recalibration towards a more sustained analysis of constitutive capitalist and class dynamics.  Bernstein, for example, writes: “What should be clear enough is that authoritarian populism, for all its diverse manifestations, should always be interrogated first through the questions: what class interests does it serve? By what means? And with what effects?” In a similar spirit, McKay and colleagues have argued for probing capitalist dynamics that structure authoritarian populism, with their distinctive class antagonisms. This, they argue, “requires going beyond the discourse to a serious engagement with the role and nature of the state, and thus, an analysis into the nature of the class and intra-class relationships in society and in agrarian formation”.

Authoritarian Populism and Bovine Political Economy in Modi’s India takes these invitations seriously as it uses India’s bovine sector – key to the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of rural Indians – as the entry point for analysing capitalist dynamics under Modi’s authoritarian populism.

Two defining features of Modi’s authoritarian populism emerge from our analysis. In the political sphere, we see an aggressively advancing Hindu nationalist cultural politics centred on Hindu pride and unity. This cultural politics seeks (with remarkable success) to incorporate significant proportions of India’s poor and working classes across the lines of class and caste, in antagonistic opposition to a threatening Muslim “Other”. Bovines are crucial to advancing this agenda, evident in how Hindu nationalist vigilante groups operate with an increasingly free hand to violently enforce their brand of cow protectionism to punish individuals (especially Muslims) who “disrespect” the rules of Hindu cow veneration. They operate with the tacit approval of the Modi government that has, additionally, presided over the introduction of strict legal restrictions on the consumption of cow meat and the transportation of cattle for slaughter.

In the economic sphere, we find the Modi government heavily invested in neoliberalising the economy, opening new spaces for capital accumulation for dominant class interests. Bovines are crucial to advancing this agenda too as the slaughter of millions of bovines annually is required for key firms in the corporate beef export industry to sell Indian beef worth several billion US dollars to markets in the Middle East and South-East Asia. These firms are based on corporate concentration around dominant class interests and have been key in establishing India as a world leading beef exporter.

We argue that these twin features of Modi’s authoritarian populism index underlying capitalist dynamics which can be fruitfully approached as “state contradictions” between a political project that seeks legitimacy from and the incorporation of India’s poor and working classes, and an economic project that is hostile to the class interests of those same groups. These, we argue, can be understood as inextricably linked “moments” of Modi’s authoritarian populism, yet embedded in strained and conflictual class dynamics, something which we expand upon conceptually in Chapter 1 where we also locate Modi’s brand of authoritarian populism within the longer story of neoliberalisation and state-capital relations in India. Far from confined to the bovine realm, this lens can, we argue, illuminate broader ongoing dynamics at the heart of the political economy of Modi’s India.

Starting from an analysis of the politics of vigilantism and cow protectionism, Chapter 2 demonstrates the centrality of bovines to the Hindu nationalist project of turning India into a Hindu state. This project also unfolds in the legal domain of ever-stricter cow protection laws. The state contradiction becomes clear once we document a surge in beef exports from an expanding formal meat sector – with state support – that sits in uneasy proximity to the bovine politics being pursued by Hindu nationalists. We uncover a process of considerable restructuring of the bovine economy over the last decades, characterised by the expansion and consolidation of a corporate beef export sector dominated by a limited number of large enterprises. This aligns with the overall neoliberalising thrust of the Modi regime, entailing novel class and accumulation dynamics that differ markedly from how the livestock economy otherwise functions within the livelihoods of the country’s classes of labour. The emerging scenario is one where an informal bovine economy largely in the hands of classes of labour faces usurping competition from a formal industry that is centralised, capital intensive and firmly controlled by dominant class interests.

The subsequent chapters explore the unfolding dynamics of these state contradictions. Chapter 3 analyses their impact among classes of labour engaged in sectors of the bovine economy who live through what we refer to as a process of double victimisation. Specific segments of classes of labour are direct and indirect victims of new forms of legal and extra-legal regulation of the bovine economy that restrict their economic agency and produce economic hardship and physical suffering. At the same time, they are also increasingly excluded from a transforming bovine economy because of broader political economic restructurings that favour dominant class interests. This chapter thus offers substantial evidence concerning the class interests that Modi’s authoritarian populism serves, as well as its ramifications among the country’s poor and working classes.

Chapter 4 analyses the acceleration and intensification of these political economic dynamics that undermine the livelihoods of classes of labour while contributing to corporate concentration during and immediately after the Covid-19 pandemic. Fast-changing class and accumulation dynamics in the bovine economy have, we argue, enabled further corporate consolidation across multiple sectors. This trajectory of change favouring upper-class and corporate interests means that the organised beef industry is now increasingly well-positioned to capture a larger share of the value hitherto produced and retained among classes of labour in the informal bovine economy, starkly revealing the class bias of Modi’s authoritarian populism. When read alongside the argument that the incorporation of already-precarious classes of labour in Modi’s political project increasingly occurs through the destruction of key parts of their livelihoods, this chapter demonstrates how the state contradictions that this book is centrally concerned with are arguably moving towards being less contradictory insofar as the political and economic moments of Modi’s authoritarian populism move towards increasing alignment in an intensifying manner.

While this emerging dynamic is an acute threat to the livelihoods of millions of rural Indians, it also opens for another – and more hopeful – line of thinking politically about the prospects for emancipatory or counter-hegemonic projects. This is the ambition of our concluding chapter. Returning to our central contention that India’s bovine sector must be understood as an exemplar of broader political economic dynamics at play in Modi’s India – and of the contradiction between Hindu nationalism’s attempts at incorporating India’s poor and working classes while also pushing neoliberal economic restructuring to the benefit of capitalist classes – we suggest that the unfolding intensification of such dynamics may index emerging structural conditions of possibility for progressive counter-hegemonic mobilisation. In making this argument, the concluding chapter engages the emerging scholarship on the recent farmers’ agitations in India, locating structural conditions of counter-hegemonic mobilisation surrounding bovines within broader dynamics in a restructuring economy in which agrarian relations are taking on novel configurations; and where Modi’s authoritarian populism seeks political majority by pitting classes of labour against each other.

The post Authoritarian Populism and Bovine Political Economy appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).

Drawing on a caricature of the work of Dani Rodrik, for most mainstream economists a model is just a model and there are many models. Norms only enter into the picture in terms of clearly stated and testable components of models and models provide a means to explore the scope of theory. In principle, policy advocacy is supported by model findings and as such mainstream economists tend to start from the position that their work has the rigour and clarity of quantitative science and that its policy implications carry the force of empirical evidence. Critics meanwhile tend to argue that mainstream economics struggles to come to terms with the implicit normativity of its frames of reference and with the ethics its concepts and foci presuppose but that its discourse elides. In particular, they often criticise the tacit politicisation of its theory and method.

In a recent paper in Journal of Economic Issues, I explore a particularly interesting variant on the problem of unexplored normativity, politicisation and its ethical consequences. Put simply, standard theory of tax evasion inadvertently treats everyone as a criminal. Moreover, while recent work on theory of “tax morale” seems different it is not as different as one might think. Both contribute to a world of biddable neoliberal subjects.

Briefly, the formative work on tax evasion is Michael Allingham and Agnar Sandmo’s 1972 article “Income Tax Evasion:  A Theoretical Analysis,” and this treats the problem from the point of view of a standard utility function in which a rational economic agent must choose to pay tax or withhold payment (i.e. evade tax). This is essentially a calculative decision posed as optimisation in terms of the probability of being caught (via audit or informant etc.) and the size of any fine. But consider what thought process the theory is attributing to an economic agent:

1. It is permissible to break the law.
2. Breaking the law is what one would do if not prevented.
3. One is motivated to break the law even if one does not do so.

To be clear, the intent is merely to use a standard economic concept – the utility function – to explore taxation and to establish that tax evasion can be conceived as rational behaviour. But the unintended outcome is the normalisation of criminal behaviour. We are all criminals except and insofar as a loss/gain calculation is made in terms of possible sanction and risk tolerance.

What is very obviously missing here is the role of socialisation, institutions and a sense of the collective and individual good i.e. that we might recognise that it is right to pay taxes and good for society that we do. To be fair to Allingham and Sandmo, there is a further consideration in terms of possible “reputation damage”, but this is developed in subsequent models via its pecuniary impact despite that it is a hard to estimate non-pecuniary variable. And obviously the nature of the argument regarding the role of tax can be looked at differently if one is an advocate of modern monetary theory.  Yet it is still the case that longstanding mainstream theory inadvertently criminalises economic agency.

“Tax morale” takes a different point of view, rather than an implied stick it offers the carrot in the form of carefully framed communicative cues intended to make the economic agent decide to pay. This takes many forms but the dominant applied theoretical perspective is the behavioural economics of nudge theory.  As Blair Fix notes, this tends to:

1. Begin with the model rational utility-maximizing agent and claim this is false.
2. Create a test of the falsity of the model agent and confirm that it is false.
3. Keep the model agent as a benchmark and label the behaviour isolated in the test a “bias.”
4. Repeat the process for a new context of behaviour.

There are numerous criticisms of the limited nature of this approach. For our purpose, however, the main problem is that applications via nudging of manipulation of “bias” – the process of intervention – treat its subjects as a collection of feelings and behaviours that can be isolated and triggered. There is no moral economy here of the kind explored by Andrew Sayer. As such, theory of tax behaviour is not focused on addressing its subjects as fully conceived ethical beings who can be persuaded to a position in a deliberative sense. Economics does nothing to address the meta-trends or direction of travel of its times – there is no recognition of tax justice. Rather the technical skillset and concerns of economists inadvertently contribute to the production and reproduction of passive neoliberal subjects.  Arguably, this reproduction is itself imbricated with other processes – corporate tax avoidance and tax competition, deployment of Laffer Theorem style argument and legitimations, as well as, more broadly, strategies in “global wealth chains”, particular kinds of financialization and trends in technology of work.

To teach the economics of tax theory then, is a little like teaching mainstream economic theory of climate, it is to teach complacency.

The post How tax theory in economics treats us appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).

Following my annual practice, I have listed here my “novel” reading for 2023. This is a way of documenting what I get through in a year’s worth of reading on the commute to work, in the evenings after work, and while travelling outside of my “normal” academic reading. My use of the term “novel” reading is loosely adopted, as you will see from the list to include fiction and then really important non-fiction work I get excited to read in my spare time. As you will see, my novel reading shifted away from novels to much more academic reading in my “free time” and then back again. But that approach has been richly rewarding. One of the preoccupations was the monstrosity of capitalism and the monster-stories in the making of capital, combining political economy and literary theory.

1) Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger (Picador, 2022) [read twice].

2) Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris (Picador, 2022) [read twice].

3) Hernán Díaz, Trust (Picador, 2022).

4) Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses (Picador, 1992) [re-read]

5) Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing (Picador, 1994) [re-read].

6) Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain (Picador, 1998) [re-read].

7) José Emilio Pacheco, Battles in the Desert & Other Stories, trans. Katherine Silver (New Directions, 1987).

8) Italo Calvino, Collection of Sand, trans. Martin McLaughlin [1984] (Penguin, 2013).

9) Sylvia Walby, Theorizing Patriarchy (Blackwell Publishers, 1990).

10) Robert Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations (Cornell University Press, 2015).

11) Aaron Gwyn, All God’s Children (Europa Editions, 2020).

12) Bram Stoker, Dracula [1897] (Penguin, 2003).

13) Agustina Bazterrica, Tender is the Flesh [Cadáver Exquisito], trans. Sarah Moses (Pushkin Press, 2020).

14) Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (Routledge, 1946).

15) Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi, Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory (Verso, 2023).

16) Nancy Folbre, The Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems: An Intersectional Political Economy (Verso, 2021).

17) Ludovico Silva, Marx’s Literary Style [El estilo literario de Marx, 1975], trans. Paco Brito Núñez (Verso, 2023).

18) Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time [L’ordine del tiempo, 2017], trans. Erica Segre and Simon Carnell (Penguin, 2018).

19) Carlo Rovelli, Anaximander and the Nature of Science [Anaximandre de Milet, ou la naissance de la pensée scientifique, 2009] (Penguin, 2023).

20) Mark Steven, Class War: A Literary History (Verso, 2023).

21) J. Frank Dobie, Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver [1928] (University of Texas Press, 1985).

22) S.S. Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature [1976] (Verso, 2011).

23) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part I [1808], trans. David Constantine (Penguin, 2005).

24) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part II [1832], trans. David Constantine (Penguin, 2009).

25) Noreen Masud, A Flat Place (Penguin, 2023).

26) Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian [1985] (Picador, 2015) [re-read].

27) David McNally, Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism (Haymarket Books, 2012).

28) David Shrubsole, Who Owns England? How We Lost Our Land and How to Take it Back (Harper Collins, 2020).

29) John Steinbeck, The Pearl [1947] (Penguin, 1994).

30) Herman Melville, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life [1846] (Penguin, 1996).

31) Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man [1857] (Penguin, 1990).

32) Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism [1951] (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1976).

33) Lothar-Günther Buchheim, Das Boot / The Boat [1973] (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999).

34) Vasily Grossman, The People Immortal [1942], trans. Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler (New York Review of Books, 2022).

The post Novel Reading in 2023 appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).