Music production and SaccChoir

Help me find a music publisher and you could win pounds! Join this memetic experiment

I’ve been messing around with computers and synths for about 85% of my life. I’m a total studio rat and code geek.

Frankly, I’ve done plenty of high-brow self-indulgent crap which I thought was quite clever. Well, we all have an ego to feed. But now, being a memetic engineer (or better still a “cliologist”), I’ve turned my attention to the viralization of contemporary popular music. In the name of science of course.

In my list of possible users of cliology, I put in megalomaniacs. I claimed that this inclusion served as a reminder that the tool-kit of cliology was ethically agnostic, but it really is quite transparent that I’m talking about myself there. The viralisation of contemporary popular music then is about abusing these cliological weapons so as to mass contaminate minds with sticky ditties and make me dirty stinking rich. Well we can always dream, but I still have an ego to feed.

I put all of this personal production work under the umbrella term Saccharine Choir. That is overly sweet and synthetic – and the fact that I ate a packet of sweeteners when I was a kid and it made me sick. Anyway, I like to use tons of airy pads and heavenly choirs as furnished by Native Instruments. That and the multitracking and pitch correction, offered by Steinberg Cubase, which even makes my singing not entirely like torture.

Under the Saccharine Choir banner is my Ohrwurm (earworm) programme of weaponizing pop music through the technology of memes. I’m not aiming at clever, or even good music here, just insanely popular: sickly sweet, but at least its not fattening. I’m after the ultimate killer hook, the ultimate in sorbitol laced chewing gum for the ears, the ultimate in heavy radio station rotation.

Of course synth choirs are a matter of convenience. I can pull up a sample library any time of day or night and get whatever I’m mumbling on dumped down for future reference. This isn’t something I can access with a few hundred real people. All this SaccChoir stuff is there to give me a mock-up demo. With that, I want to find real musos to get out a proper demo, then maybe approach a publisher with some thing they can commercialise. After that, its upto them to attract the superstar producers and A list artists. More dreams and ego fodder.

But let’s put it this way, I’ve probably made enough mistakes to realise the old time served maxim that ”it’s not what you know; it’s who you know” (or to be more cynical: it’s what you know about who you know). In practice I do know tons of folks; and I want to know tons more. The world is small, but massively fascinating. This is the principle of Milgram’s “small world problem” otherwise known as “six-degrees of separation” (or 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon) as scrutinised by network science. Network science has much to offer memetics and cliology as it also considers biological and ideological epidemiology: how thoughts spread through society. The upshot then is about getting a message from A to B where it is impossible to go direct, or for that matter know the path the message will take. The case here being getting a demo to the right publishers and getting a track to market. Hence, cliology is not just about fabricating the music, but also about its popularisation.