The guest for this #CyaniteTalks is Sarah Mibus. 

Sarah is an expert in music selection and planning and she works in close contact with radio and TV broadcasting companies. She regularly holds seminars of different topics tied with the editorial world and she is a music journalism and planning lecturer at various universities.

In this interview you will get acquainted with Sarah’s profession and get her perspective on the current state of the music industry in relation to one of our hottest topics – technology.

Cyanite: Hi Sarah, you are an expert when it comes to music choice and planning. What does your job revolve around and what was your latest highlight in your professional work?

Sarah Mibus: As a freelancer I mainly support Radio and TV editors in all kinds of music queries. On one side, I always work closely around the program: I select the music and plan playlists. On the other side, I give advice to radio directors on music strategies and market orientation too. I also give seminars about these topics on a regular basis. Last year I experienced, as well as many others, a full digitalisation boost.  In 2019 I still drove around for each seminar and meeting with the ICE; now everything easily goes out into the world from my top floor apartment via Zoom. I am thankful that through my job I can, in this new normality, still be in touch with many editors, radio hosts, seminar participants and students. Even though Zoom meetings cannot replace human contact – the sudden switch to digital and the realisation that it works so well has been for me the highlight of my job throughout these past few months.

 Cyanite: Due to Covid-19, advertising budgets have dropped significantly and costs are being cut quickly in music. How do you deal with this?

Sarah: Among my clients there are mostly public TV and Radio editors. Budget cuts have been a recurring theme for years, everybody is encouraged to save money and funds have to be used very conscientiously. It has been like this before Covid-19. Event transmissions and presentations have not taken place since last March, for this reason a lot of money has probably been saved.

Cyanite: Imagine if you had an assistant robot, what would she/it/he do for you?

Sarah: I would urgently need someone who could tidy up my hard drive. Otherwise, I enjoy doing everything concerning my self-employment – even taxes!

“Music perceptions are so different: sad music makes some even sadder, others find comfort in it. For this reason I see a lot of potential in personalised formats in the music field “.

© Photo by Jr Korpa – Unsplash

Cyanite: Artificial Intelligence in the music field – where do you see the biggest potential for its application?

Sarah: Artificial Intelligence and algorithms are very exciting and I am curious to see where the society is going with this. Music perceptions are so different: sad music makes some even sadder, others find comfort in it. For this reason I see a lot of potential in personalised formats in the music field, we are only at the beginning. For providers such as Amazon or Spotify, each of us is a gigantic data set that we constantly feed with social media, online shopping and the daily clicks on the internet. This created a clearer consumer profile, which can be precisely served. Gadgets such as the Apple Watch give providers information even about our bodies’ biochemistry. I would not be surprised, if Spotify knew about my cycle at some point and delivered the most fitting soundtrack to my PMS mood. I find this impressive and scary at the same time. Mass programs on TV and on the radio represent the opposite. It is not about individual moods, but about creating or depicting a collective feeling, which has its own charm next to the individualised offers.

Cyanite: Creating a collective feeling sounds very exciting and also very difficult: are there any patterns or tips you’ve identified about how to work out the right music for a larger group of individuals?

Sarah: Music directors need a gut feeling for certain moods or social feelings that many people experience.  For instance, this year Carnival was cancelled – a great tragedy for the inhabitants of Cologne. They now had to spend these days mostly alone at home. In such situations, it is up to the editors to ponder whether and how to depict this social feeling of sadness, nostalgia and disappointment in their programmes. This transports itself through emotive presenters and contributions that show compassion and sense of community – and of course through the right music. For example, you can deliver the carnival to the listeners’ living room or play motivating songs that give hope for a better future. One of the strengths of mass programmes is to convey the feeling of not being alone and to listen to music with others and feel like you belong with them. An important topic especially at this time!

Cyanite: What tips would you give to DIY content producers looking for music for their films or productions and that often cannot rely on a budget to consult experts?

Sarah: In my workshops I always advise the participants to listen more to their gut feeling. By this time, content creators have access to so many data to backup their decisions and to make sure to meet the taste of their audience. In this process, the personal touch and an artistic aspect often fall by the wayside. But I think it is also important to learn the rules of music planning and music use to be able to break them in a meaningful way. This way individual and creative ideas can emerge.

“Numbers and surveys alone are not enough to set trends […]

you need expertise, decisiveness and fun while working.“

Cyanite: If you could change one thing in the German-speaking context in the professional handling of music, what would it be?

Sarah: I would like more courage! Many music editors in this country make decisions very reluctantly or do not make them at all. At times, you blindly rely on market research results and bluntly translate the numbers into the program, without being aware of your own music strategy. This happens out of habit and / or fear. All program managers should have the goal of their daily work on hand in one sentence. I would like to see and hear that much more often! And that’s what I’m competing for! Numbers and surveys alone are not enough to set trends and create extraordinary good programs. More than ever now you need expertise, decisiveness and fun while working. 

Cyanite: Your job in 10 years?

Sarah: With the best will, I don’t know how this path will look like in 10 years. But my goals is clear: to touch viewers and listeners through music and through music choices in TV and Radio formats, and to inspire and motivate my seminar participants.

Thank you Sarah for taking the time and helping us shaping our outlook to the music industry and tech.

Check out more #Cyanitetalks here:

Cyanite Talks #1 with Karolina Namyslowski from AMP Sound Branding

Cyanite Talks #2 with Vincent Raciti from TRO – About AI in sound branding

Cyanite Talks #3 with Josephine Geipel – Music Therapist & Researcher at SRH Heidelberg

For this guest post we are glad to share Benjamin Doubali’s analysis on how to visualize sound. Benjamin studied sociology in Mainz and Paris. Through his work and research, he aims at exploring shifts in society, knowledge and everyday interactions under the conditions of digitalization. He is passionate about artistic concepts in regards of the relationship between culture and technology.  

The article was written by Benjamin Doubali.

Let’s say music is a code. 

This call may seem a little confusing. Isn’t music an aesthetic experience, isn’t it dynamic, fleeting? Isn’t it everything that code usually cannot be? Sure, music is unique, it is art. Nevertheless, allow that thought for a moment: music is systematically structured, categorised, it follows a strict “grammar”. It is not mysterious, but enigmatic. Music is auditory code. A code that needs to be deciphered and translated. And we can process this code by technological means, like any other sign system. Unlike other codes, however, the code of music is not stable and predictable, but surprising and diverse. 

Songwriters are translators – and so are music lovers

Consider the matter from the songwriter’s point of view: she has an experience to share, a story to tell or a musical idea she can’t let go of. Songwriters seek to express feelings from the depths of the human experience, like the confusion after a break-up, missing the person that is now just somebody you used to know. They have the knowledge and the tools (literally “instruments”) to transform and condense ideas into sound. For this purpose, they use established symbol systems, tonal grammar, musical code. A songwriter expresses her feelings in a sonic language, which is a term used by the musician Claudio in addressing this issue. The songwriter becomes the translator of her own emotional world. 

Later, someone will hear the sonic language, its tones, rhythms, lyrics and translate it once again, perhaps feel something, associate situations, or images with it. How does emotion translate into a great song? And how does it “turn back”?

Admittedly, this is a very broad concept of translation: I refer to the mere interpretive, consistent transmission from one thing to another. One could call it intersemiotic translation; this is a term from philology, the cultural study of languages, indicating the translation between totally different sign systems (or modes of expression). This is what happens, for example, when novels are adapted for cinema. 

Sounds are symbols – and they’re able to touch us

How does a great song turn into emotion? It’s not so easy to determine: Sound does not “carry” meaning in some magical way. In other words, the emotion, and images we associate with an auditory impression are not surfing on the sound waves, they’re not transported to us. Sound itself is a meaningless symbol of a complex code. The solution can be found elsewhere: Emotion has not been transmitted into our consciousness – it is already there. 

Music can resonate in places of our inner world; it touches and moves us. By listening to music, we feel sadness, joy, and ecstasy – fundamental components of the human experience. These are not plainly inscribed in the sonic language. We should rather think of music as a way to stimulate impressions which are deeply intertwined with our existence. 

David Anderson © Unsplash

When music looks like twisting shapes

Our interpretations of the sonic language encompass elusive associations, slight toe tapping, wild dancing, and unrestrained singing. Another unique mode of musical perception is called synaesthesia. Synaesthesia is a cognitive phenomenon, describing involuntary combinations of perception. In a common form of synaesthesia, people perceive numbers as inherently coloured. For others, sounds have shapes. Illustrating this, a synesthete described an example to me: When two people sing together, she perceives two lines that either run harmoniously or repel each other. The cognitive perception of music can thus become a dance of geometric forms.

Su-san Lee © Unsplash

This is fascinating and underlines that the full meaning of the sonic language isn’t part of the physical sound, but only evolves through individual perceptual processing of its structures, sometimes creating surprising effects. The listener’s perception processes the material entity of sound into an experience. According to this, a melody is like a sequence of data that requires a “processing unit” to be meaningful (for more on this, I recommend the book “Muster” by the sociologist Armin Nassehi).

Using digital technology for translation

It may hardly come as a surprise that the power to process and therefore translate the sonic language is not an exclusively human ability. Digital technology can also access the sonic language. Cyanite’s AI is trained to analyse it by recognising recurrent patterns. 

The process to successfully analyse music with neural networks takes several steps. Following my reasoning, we can picture these steps as translatory tasks. When it comes to data pre-processing, the team at Cyanite generates a visual representation of music (namely spectrograms); an activity we can call a “strategic rearrangement” of music: The characteristics of music are translated into graphical patterns, which can therefore be subject to pattern recognition. With the help of strategic rearrangements, the musical code reveals itself. After thorough training procedures, the AI learns to “read” the sonic language and to ascribe, how it resonates in us.

Going a step further: Creative Coding

It is well known that there are bittersweet ambiguities in music; a song can be both uplifting and sad. Cyanite’s music analysis tries to do justice to such contingencies by giving probability values for its attributions and by allowing “overlapping” mood categories.

In the context of inherent ambiguities, the independent art project vi · son tries a different, creative approach to digitally translate music. The project is working on audio-reactive digital art and engages with the question: Can we make music visible? Not just metaphorically, but truly? 

To translate the sonic language visually, the group applies methods of creative coding. Particularly so-called Generative Art enables data-based artworks such as moving sound sculptures that accentuate specific features of music. The curator and digital art expert Jason Bailey writes: “Generative Art is art programmed using a computer that intentionally introduces randomness as part of its creation process.” This doesn’t imply the complete autonomy of the machine nor total command over it: “The truth is that generative artists skillfully control both the magnitude and the locations of randomness introduced into the artwork.” Generative Art is a way to explore portrayals of sound-data, creating visual suitable representations of music. The resulting artworks interpret and reflect the spirit and aesthetics of the sonic language.

Guido Schmidt & vi · son: Sound Data Sculpture Sketch

One example is the digital scene “aurora” from the series Sound Data Sculpture Sketches. The creation process starts with a set of dots that move on a sphere. Over time their path is traced to form tubes, this produces an organic appearance. A representation of the underlying song’s frequencies is texture-mapped onto the geometry of the tubes and used to generate colour gradients that react to music. From this interpretative, digitally mediated translation of the original song, a dreamy audio-sculpture is created. By interpreting the musical parameters, this artwork goes further than a mere technical analysis. It thereby contemplates the poetry and beauty of the sonic language, seeking to visually formulate an accurate translation.

The project presents further examples of creative music visualizations in an ongoing digital exhibition. 

The whole theme of “translation” points to the fact, that music is socially formalised and follows symbolic structures. Music is deeply connected to our human experience because it works like a language, because it translates into emotion and bodily reactions. The notion that music is tangible and rests upon patterns that we can calculate and process with digital technologies is not as weird or scary as it might seems. Music is a code – and that is a beautiful thing.

Visit vi · son ‘s digital exhibition here

For more of our blog articles,

we recommend to check these out: 

3 Ways to Display and Integrate AI Search Results in Your Music Platform

How to use the Cyanite API to analyze Music on Genre, Mood, Bpm, Key and more

The 4 essential Steps for analyzing Music with Neural Networks