The BeeSide: a future where musicians and listeners achieve communal digital autonomy through cooperative music writing, jamming and online hosting.
A triptych of post-progress musicking futures
Degree Project
2025
In this project I use a design after progress approach to look beyond the current narratives surrounding the activity of musicking and tell new stories about music and it’s role in society. I aim to reframe music as a natural activity and a social way of being central to being human. To do so I present 3 future narratives of musicking through an audio-play and future artefacts. These future narratives describe how musicking might be infrastructured in post-progress worlds. The narratives explore concepts of inviting and inclusion, music as a cultural immunogen, and the collective nature of music making. My understanding of these concepts is rooted in my engagement with jamming communities in Umeå. In these engagements I have taken a participatory design approach, either by me participating in the music making or inviting musicians to participate in future making and prototyping.
The three futures presented through a cohesive auditive narrative.
The three futures presented through a cohesive auditive narrative.
The Oyster Rooms: a future where people use endless loops of layered music to connect to neighbours and ancestors.
The Nightingale Society: a future where a tightly operated organisation makes clay ocarinas for the people of the city, and invite everyone to play with them.
If not progress, then what?
Experimenting with musicking relationships through workshops.
Trying out the Oyster Rooms at UID.
The BeeSide opens on a collaborative songwriting canvas, where users can post fresh ideas and add new layers to the grooves of their peers.
Page two of the BeeSide shows the jam calendar and allows any user to plan a new jam.
Users of the BeeSide can stream their collectively made recordings through a P2P filesharing system.
