Substantive Consumption
Exploring Relational Connections to Digital Musical Entanglements
Sam Stretch

Submitted to the Jake Kerr Faculty of Graduate
Studies, Emily Carr University of Art + Design

Dr. Katherine Gillieson, PhD

Associate Dean for the Master of Design, Jake Kerr
Faculty of Graduate Studies

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Craig Badke, Thesis Advisor
Associate Professor, Faculty of Critical + Cultural
Degree of Master of Design, Interaction, 2022
Studies.

August 31, 2022

1

Keith Doyle, Internal Advisor

Associate Professor, Ian Gillespie Faculty of Design +
Dynamic Media

Abstract

This body of work sets out to explore ways
to enact relational and substantive notions
of care towards the system of digital music
consumption.
The things we actively care for in the world are predominantly what shapes the nature of our
existence within it. But when parts of the things we love the most have explicitly harmful implications
on a multitude of scales, it becomes both more difficult and more important than ever to care for the
entirety of something, rather than just the parts that are familiar and personally meaningful. In order
to consider the full extents of music as a complex system rather than just as a thing we love, we can
explore the extents of its assemblage as an entanglement of human characteristics that have become
both intentionally and unintentionally embedded within it. As the world becomes more digitized,
our daily interactions become more predominately cloud-based and algorithmically mediated. Our
consumption of music is no exception. Within digital networks the scale of human and environmental
entanglement can often feel insurmountable and ineffable, while at the same time remaining largely
abstracted and hidden from our every day experience. This research will seek to quantify and
begin to understand the extents of these entanglements. Music is more conveniently accessed and
consumed than ever, but what have we sacrificed to attain this level of convenience, and what are
some of the consequences of doing so? There is a growing need to confront the consequences of
the modern methods to which it is consumed. Through primarily critical, exploratory, and reflective
design methods, this work will try to re-frame some of our notions of the digital world. This re-framing
will be done in an attempt to gain a greater sense of literacy, and relationality to digital infrastructure,
in a hope to prepare ourselves for a world that is only growing more digitally focused.

2

Contents
Abstract

02

Land Acknowledgment

04

Key Terms

05

Preface / About me

06

Part I: Research and Theory

07

1.1 Monsters

08

1.2 Tangibility of Digital Media

10

Personal Digital Tangibility
Corporate Digital Tangibility

1.3 Embedded Meaning Within Music

13

1.4 Music Entanglements

15

Environmental Entanglements
Economic Entanglements

1.5 Personal Meaning and Care

Part II: Design Outcomes and Exploration

21

23

2.1 Introduction

24

2.2 Music Algorithm Explorations

25

Random Riff

2.3 Untitled Frequency Visualization

26

2.4 Juke Box Speculative Project

27

2.5 Place-Based Field Recording Project

29

2.6 Graduate Exhibition Works

32

Sound Vessels
3D Printed Work Case Studies
Image Decay Function

2.7 Design Reflection

3

38

Conclusion

40

Works Cited

42

Before I begin, I would like to recognize that the entirety of this research, design work, and
writing has taken place on the Unceded Territories of the Coast Salish People’s, Specifically the
xʷməθkʷəy’əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
As well as the Sqilxʷ/syilx (Okanagan) peoples. I do this acknowledgement as a means to show the
love I have for the land I am lucky enough to live and work on, as well as the respect and appreciation
I have towards its ancestral caretakers, both past and present. Some of the work I will discuss in this
writing exhibit place-based qualities that are only possible at specific locations. Because of this it is
very important to appreciate the caretakers of the land that is now caring for me, as well as maintain
a commitment to substantive notions of care towards the land on which I reside.

4

Key Terms
Substantive:
Having a firm basis in reality and therefore having important or considerable meaning. Something of
substantial reality.

Relational:
Understanding something not just in itself, but also within its societal context and relation to other
things. Relationality can be understood at scales of local or planetary dimensionality.

Entanglement:
The assemblage of positive and negative individual aspects that make up a large concept or system.

Anthropocene:
The time period in which humans have been the dominant influence on the environment. To think in
an anthropocentric way is to prioritize humanity over nature within their entanglements.

5

Preface / About Me
Before this work is internalized by someone else it is important that I explain a little bit about
myself and about where the positionallity of this work is located. My name is Sam Stretch. I started
this body of work when I was 22 years old and at the time of writing this I am now 24. I am deeply
passionate about three things in the world: The people I love, the environment and Music. In my
lifetime I have witnessed a massive change in the way people interact with music due to a rapid shift
to digitally based mediums. I would describe my relationship with digital technology to be one of
cautious optimism. I am by no means a Luddite, however, I always try to first and foremost engage
critically with digital technologies that I adopt into my life. A shortcoming of this criticality that I have
found is in my relationship to digital technologies that make it easier for me to access and engage
with the things I love. As a result, this research attempts to cut through my personal biases towards
digital music entanglements. For long enough I have passively engaged with music and have taken
for granted the convenience that digital consumption has allowed me. This work is first and foremost
a personal exploration for me to identify harm in the thing that I love most, and to re-engage a
critical and reflective exploration of digital music entanglements. In doing so I hope to open the door
for others to do the same. To step away from our everyday digital engagement, and re-frame our
relationship with music to better understand the entirety of our digital entanglements.

6

Part I: Research and Theory
Contents:
1.1

Monsters

1.2

Tangibility of Digital Media

1.4

Environmental Entanglements

Personal Digital Tangibility
Corporate Digital Tangibility
1.3

7

Embedded Meaning Within Music

Music Entanglements
Economic Entanglements

1.5

Personal Meaning and Care

1.1

Monsters

How do we understand the existence of
monsters within our world?
Within their literary and mythical depictions, monsters are commonly understood as evil
entities in a morally binary sense. They are painted in an evil light and in a stark opposition to
humanity. In truth; monsters are not inherently evil but can be better understood as assemblages
of both good and evil human characteristics that we project onto them. Anna Tsing describes the
idea of a monster in the case of a jellyfish; a beautiful but also deadly creature with the ability to
completely consume marine ecosystems. Under normal conditions, the jellyfish exists harmoniously
within marine ecology, but warming sea temperatures, large scale fish farming, and ocean pollution
have created the conditions that have allowed jellyfish to rapidly expand and colonize what is left of
their ecosystem. Some jellyfish are able to consume 10 times their weight in a single day and, in some
cases, grow to over 450 pounds, which is large enough to capsize boats and all but decimate many
aquatic food chains (Tsing et al., 2017). These cases of expansion highlighted within the jellyfish what
we determined to be monstrous characteristics, However, the monster in this case was not an enemy
of humanity, but one enabled by it. “In all our heedless entanglements with more-than-human life, we
humans too are monsters.” (Tsing et al., 2017). As humans, we rationalize ecological entanglements
without conceding the fact that we too live within the world and are almost always central to any
entanglement. Mythologically, we would describe the Jellyfish as being our horrific creation, one that
has begun enacting it’s revenge on us for our part in creating such a monstrosity, however; the true
evil comes not from what we see in our creation, but in our neglect towards caring for that which
we have created or enabled. As is the Jellyfish we too are of this world and exist within the same
ecosystem they do. In all of our attempts to rationalize our creative efforts to better our world and
solve the problems that face us, we often forget that we are not exempt from the consequences and
entanglements that emerge from those interventions as they live in the world in unexpected ways.
Bruno Latour’s understanding of monsters begins with an examination of Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein. What did Frankenstein’s monster do to humanity that can be considered as “monstrous?”
It was not born of evil but was taught to be evil as a response to humanity’s anger at it’s existence.

8

The “monster” itself became a monster as a result of it’s creator abandoning it, horrified at his own
creation (Latour, 2011). In analyzing both Latour and Tsing’s works together we can define monsters
in some capacity. Monsters can be partially understood as complex assemblages that allude to the
anthropocentric actions of modernity and its entanglements with the natural world. But, to truly
understand these entanglements means enacting a substantive notion of care towards that which we
have enabled to exist. This begins simply by repositioning our understanding of the Anthropocene to
one that does not prioritize our own existence over our environmental entanglements. Patricia Reed,
in What is Care at Planetary Dimensions?, best describes the importance of caring for the unfamiliar
or impersonal in the modern world, describing how with 7 billion humans on the planet, as well as all
of our entanglements with environmental assemblages, the standard focus on intimate interpersonal
relations is no longer sufficient (Reed, 2019). We easily identify explicitly threatening outcomes and
symptoms of issues regarding our existence and ways of life, but the cause is often left unidentified
or at the very least disputed. These can be things that we create, whether intentionally or not, and
once they are seen as harmful we attempt to fix, cure, or solve their effects before we ever attempt to
understand how they came to be. How does our understanding of monsters change if we study them
as complex assemblages, all the while conceding that we too are of this world, and are central to any
ecological entanglements we have with our monsters? As much as we, as humans, exist as agents
of commerce, science, art, and technology, we are also nature.

In the digital sphere, the monsters we create are not as easily identifiable. The multitudes of
our entanglements extend to environmental, economic, and interpersonal implications. What even
further complicates this issue is the pervasiveness of digital economies in the late 20th and early
21st centuries. A perceived trend of pandemic/post-pandemic society is a mass digitization of our
world and our interpersonal interactions. People looked to the digital world as a means to maintain
connections with one another while isolated. Societal monsters within the digital sphere are hard to
identify and even harder to examine because in doing so we begin critiquing something that gives
us meaning, value, or something that we might even love. What happens when these entanglements
become deeply embedded within societal assemblages that are critically important to us, and we are
forced to identify monstrosity within the things we love the most?

9

1.2

Tangibility of Digital Media
I have observed a growing tangent of people in and around my life that have an end of history

viewpoint on the world: that while we will keep advancing technologically, we don’t seem to imagine
other societies coming after us. Part of this is a natural human arrogance and reverence towards the
complex sociological systems that people have created, but another part is general climate dread
and the belief that one way or another we will be the last humans to inhabit the earth. Either way,
someone or something will come after, and the idea that some of the most important relics and
artifacts of our age existing purely digitally can be frightening. There is something oddly comforting
to me about envisioning a post human world, where whatever life forms come next interact with the
remnants of our society, but I wonder how that interaction changes when many cultural and societal
artifacts primarily exist in digital mediums? There is an interesting relationship considering objects
and their ability to exhibit a sense of embodied meaning. Do our society’s notions of care become
lessened by our shift towards digital methods of interaction? Does this change the way we might
be remembered in a post-human world? As music begins to have less of a physical presence in
its consumption, these aspects are partially concerning, but at the same time it feels strange to be
concerned by it. Maybe, the idea of remembrance and societal permanence in itself is so entrenched
in modernity that it does not matter what artifacts remain, as the state of the world itself will reflect
our true legacy. Considering what we should be remembered for might be a benign argument, but if
any of the positive societal contributions humans have made throughout history deserve a perceived
sense of permanence, shouldn’t one of them be music? Or should the only proof of modernity be the
scorched earth we leave behind? Perhaps deservedly so.

Personal Digital Tangibility
Do digital keepsakes hold the same embodied memories and stories as physical objects? The
2021 Radiant Pavilion Exhibition in Melbourne, (Khoo et. al, 2021) included a series of artifacts from
various artists and designers titled Data Heirlooms. These various objects are essentially physical
vessels that are meant to embody people’s personal memories that would otherwise only exist digitally.
The group show was meant as a response to the mass digitization of social interactions within a

10

pandemic/post-pandemic world. It is natural to feel a sense of uneasiness about the digitization of
our memories, considering our digital ecology to be one of innovation and obsolescence. Being able
to have tangible connections to digital entanglements is crucial to maintaining a relational connection
to our everyday interactions. The digital world is becoming less tied to physical objects and artifacts.
Apart from personal devices, digital media is commonly observed to have very little connection to
the tangible world. The recent upsurge of digital infrastructures such as cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and
the Metaverse, has put digital world building on a trajectory of immense growth. Because of this, it
is often difficult for people to recognize physical consequences of their digital consumption, as well
as tangible connections of digital artifacts. For younger generations that have and will only know the
digital media age, how will we store memories and keepsakes if much of the things keeping track of
these memories exclusively occur digitally?

Corporate Digital Tangibility

Blackboxing:
“An expression from the sociology of science that refers to the way scientific and technical work
is made invisible by its own success. When a machine runs efficiently, when a matter of fact is settled,
one need focus only on its inputs and outputs and not on its internal complexity. Thus, paradoxically,
the more science and technology succeed, the more opaque and obscure they become.” (Latour, 2000).

Latour’s definition of Blackboxing from his book Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of
Science Studies is a possible way to consider the seemingly ineffable nature of tech infrastructures.
Modern tech products often do not generate a level of inquiry to how they function, as long as they
function correctly. Modern tech companies like Microsoft have headquarters in affluent and socially
desirable cities like Vancouver and Seattle, but their physical locations are much more far reaching
than that. Data centres, the physical tether of all cloud-based operations are not located in affluent
areas, and therefore these locations are largely not part of the company’s narrative. These massive
structures exist in areas where land and energy, the two most important resources to data centres,

11

are as cheap as possible. Studies show that globally, data centres use more energy than the entire
United Kingdom and have a comparable carbon footprint to the global aviation industry (Trueman,
2019). The following graphic is a size and cost comparison of Microsoft’s Vancouver campus to that
of its collective global data centres.

Figure 01: Microsoft Data Center Size and Cost Comparison

Raw data from (Trueman, 2019)

12

1.3

Embedded Meaning Within Music
In the 1980s ambient artist William Basinski produced a series of recordings that documented

different sonic experiments from various places and objects, as well as radio feedback frequencies.
The project was never used for anything specific and was eventually put into storage. Decades later
when Basinski went to digitize some of his recordings, he noticed how the magnetic tape would
deteriorate every time It passed the tape head of the digital recorder. As it deteriorated, interesting
new sounds and flaws in the recording would appear. He repeated this process for extended periods
of time and further produced the music into what he later titled the Disintegration Loops (2001).
Basinski completed the piece on the morning of the September 11th, 2001 (9/11) attacks on the World
Trade Center in New York. He later dedicated the album to the victims of 9/11 and used stills from
his footage of the fallout as the album artwork. Inside the album’s liner notes reads “the events gave
new meaning to the musical pieces created by catastrophic decay in my studio a few weeks before.”
(William Basinksi, 2001).

Personally, this piece of music is very important to me. Not because of the ephemeral and
angelic composition, and not because of its fateful connection to the events of September 11, 2001
- I was only three years old and have no specific memory of it happening. I have a connection
to this piece of music because I understand and empathize with the embedded stories within the
music itself. I grew up with a collection of magnetic tapes and, like Basiniski, have heard and noted
how they deteriorate over time. The idea that this deterioration itself is what creates the foundation
for a composition is something that I have found a lot of personal meaning in. Had I not known
this, I am sure I would still enjoy listening to the music, however, my entire relationship with the
piece would be different. The embedded stories and meaning that come from music are a large part
of how we connect and interact with it. Does the nature of the interaction change the embedded
meaning of that which we interact with? Does the convenience of technology change our perception
of media? Albert Borgmann describes an inherent loss of meaning within modern technology due to
a growing separation between the ‘means’ and ‘ends’ of a particular action. A device that performs a
task for a user provides the user with their desired outcome, but simultaneously shields the process

13

of generating said outcome from them. This abstraction can be understood as a symptom of our
entanglements with technology. A user is not largely concerned with the technological function of a
watch, only that it provides them with the correct time. The function is only taken into consideration
when the outcome is incorrect. With regards to a changing notion of meaning due to technology,
Borgmann goes on to consider the act of getting water. When retrieving water from a well, the user
is actively engaged in the process and understands at least in a general sense how the well works
and where the water is coming from. When they turn on a faucet they are only aware of the existence
of water, and not the process to which it is being delivered to them (Tijmes et al., 2001). Within
the context of digital networks this relationship is, for most non-experts, even more abstracted, as
there is a seemingly greater separation between action and function, hidden deep within circuitry,
programming, and complex global networking. If this abstraction can be understood as evidence of
our inability to perceive and understand our digital entanglements, how might an increased literacy
of their technological, social, and economic aspects impact our ability to engage with digital music
in a more meaningful and active way?

14

1.4

Music Entanglements
In today’s music industry, streaming services have allowed us seemingly endless access to

music at flat rate monthly prices, without concern of local device storage, and with an unprecedented
level of convenience. Music has become like any other form of digital media; readily available and
delivered to consumers with adaptive personalized algorithms. These algorithms track our listening
habits and then project our calculated taste in music back to us. If we consider music against
the backdrop of monstrous assemblages, we must consider the entirety of music as a system of
consumption rather than just our personal connections and biases towards it. This paper will go on to
explore modern digital music consumption as being implicated by various environmental, economic,
and personal entanglements.

Environmental Entanglements
The evolution of technology within the music industry has not necessarily been adapted
in search of a greater listening experience, but rather in search of the most easily producible and
conveniently accessed media format. Sales of the Vinyl LP peaked in 1977, the Cassette in 1988,
and the CD in 2000. In 2006, the mp3 file officially overtook the CD as the most consumed form of
music and ever since, music has become a predominantly digital commodity. In 2016, more music
revenue came from streaming subscription services than from MP3 downloads and CDs combined
(Bass, 2020). Music is an interesting example for which to analyze digital consumption, because
the trajectory of it’s technological innovation very well illustrates the shift from analog electronic
products to digital products and systems. For the most part, the material shift of each era’s newest
form of media follow a very distinct and steady trend (besides a few outliers that never fully gained
traction such as 8-track, SACDs, etc.).

15

US Music Revenue Per Format

Figure 02: Decade Average Music Revenue per Format (US)
1990 - 1999

2000 - 2009

CD 73.8%

CD 84.9%

Cassette 23.2%

Download 9.1%
Video (physical) 2.3%

Vinyl 0.7%

Video (physical) 3.4%

Vinyl 0.3%
Cassette 1.2%

Stream 1.3%

2010 - 2019

2020

Download 27.5%
Streaming 85.7%

Streaming 45.3%
CD 22.6%

Vinyl 3.6%

Video (physical) 1.0%

Download 5.2%
Vinyl 5.1%
CD 4.0%

As music becomes more of a cloud-based commodity the ways in which it is interacted with
have completely changed. Subscription services such as Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube, and Amazon
dominate music revenues and offer a level of convenience, accessibility, and price that is nearly
impossible to beat. Music is more easily accessed than before, it gives people the freedom to explore
countless genres and eras at the tips of their fingers; however; has this rapid pace of consumption
impacted our ability to substantively experience embedded meaning within music? In contrast
with other forms of mass consumption and saturation, overconsumption of music is a more difficult
phenomenon to quantify as it is seemingly harder for us to recognize problems with having too much
of something we love. Even if it does have similar negative impacts environmentally and economically.
In a product driven industry, people generally subscribe to the notion that the digital distribution of
goods is more environmentally conscious. The less plastic and other harmful, non-biodegradable
materials are used in mass producing something, the better. The music industry’s modern mode

16

of distribution undeniably uses less plastic compared to other mediums such as Compact Discs,
cassette tapes, or vinyl, but that does very little to reflect its true environmental impact. A study by
Dr. Matt Brennan of the University of Glasgow and Dr. Kyle Devine of the University of Oslo (2019),
explores a comparison of the music industry’s environmental impact across its historical mediums.

“From the plastics perspective, in 1977 (the US sales peak of the LP) the recording industry
used 58 million kilograms of plastic. In 1988 (the peak of cassette sales) the industry used 56 million
kilograms of plastic. And in 2000 (the peak of CD sales) the industry used 61 million kilograms of plastic.
Then, when downloading and streaming take over, the amount of plastics used by the US recording
industry drops dramatically, down to around 8 million kilograms by 2016.” (Brennan & Devine, 2019)

Out of context, this quote would confirm how digital media is thought to be immaterial and
therefore have less of an environmental impact compared to it’s physical counterpart, however; we
know this to be untrue. Brennan and Devine go on to produce a more accurate comparison of the
true environmental impacts of the music industry across various eras and mediums.

“It is possible to demonstrate this by translating the production of plastics and the generation
of electricity (for storing and transmitting digital audio files) into greenhouse gas equivalents (GHGs)….
The research shows GHGs of 140 million kilograms in 1977, 136 million kilograms in 1988, and 157 million
in 2000. But by 2016 the generation of GHGs by storing and transmitting digital files for those listening
to music online is estimated to be between 200 million kilograms and over 350 million kilograms in the
US alone.” (Brennan & Devine, 2019)

17





































































































  
      



    

Figure
03: Estimated GHGs per
 Streaming
    Format




­





€

ƒ €

 

„ 


€  
  ‚

Raw data from (Brennan & Devine, 2019), (Bass, 2020)

Economic Entanglements

Mass music streaming not only has tangible implications within the environment, but also
within the economic structure and inequality of music revenues. It is no secret that throughout the
history of the music industry, artists have been significantly underpaid compared to record labels and
other profit controlling entities. While many record labels are only recently providing more favorable
contracts to artists, the same cannot be said about music streaming. In 2002, the average royalty
payment for an artist’s first contract with a major label was around 15%. This figure is now around
27-32%. Now take Spotify for example. Spotify pays artists per stream (approx. $0.004) rather than
bulk sales because of its subscription-based business model (Sisario, 2021). This model creates an
immense level of wage disparity among artists, as only the most successful artists on the platform are
able to earn a living wage. In addition, the nature of Spotify’s algorithm for feeding it’s listeners music

18

is much more favorable to music that is already popular. The algorithms themselves are not designed
to just be a response to people’s sense of taste, as larger record labels are able to give their most
invested-in artists a bump in their algorithmic exposure via certain deals with streaming platforms.
Spotify also makes alleged backroom deals with the record labels based on some of their original
deal stipulations such as recoupment. Recoupment essentially means that within a record deal, the
label fronts the artist an agreed upon sum for them to record an album. When the album is put out for
sale, the sum is recouped by the label from the artist’s portion of the revenue (Sisario, 2021). In 1998,
The alternative rock band Eve 6 released their self-titled album which included the smash hit Inside
Out. The band and album never fully gained acclaim however the song was and still is incredibly
popular. If you have ever even passively listened to a rock radio station sometime between 1998 and
today, you have undoubtedly heard this song (commonly referred to as the “heart in a blender song”).
Popularity aside, the band never recouped on the contract meaning the label now has control over
all the streaming profits. The song over the years has become incredibly popular and now has over
300 million streams on Spotify however the band alleges they earn nothing (Sisario, 2021). Streaming
platforms are not necessarily the equally accessed meritocracy that they are presented to be.

Another issue with music becoming an entirely digital commodity is that it is now entrenched
within the existing power structures and inequality of tech-based capitalism. In her essay titled NeoFeudalism: The End of Capitalism, political theorist Jodi Dean described modern tech capitalism as
“Neo-Feudalism”; where the purveyors of the internet, the tech giants, are the lords of modern life,
and all their users who use their products and contribute their personal data are engaging in the
modern equivalent of serfdom (Dean, 2020). As users, not only are we the target consumer for the
media and devices that tech companies create, but we are also a free labor pool that contributes one
of the fastest growing and most valuable resources in the world: user data. User data is collected and
processed in order to individually script a user’s digital interactions. These companies not only sell
us their devices, but they essentially control how we use them. The digital world is rapidly becoming
more of a driver of modern society and of people’s individual identity and now, music is deeply
embedded in this monstrosity of a system. In the search for a greater level of convenience and mass
marketability, we conceded one of our greatest mortal creations into arguably the largest monster
we’ve ever created.

19

Even if the exact effects are unclear, the notion that our current method of music consumption
might be harmful should not be surprising. Whether or not this can be combated or changed is a an
entirely different story considering the scale of the monster we’ve built, but the question remains,
how do we confront the notion that the thing we might love the most in this world, is harmful to it?
Returning to our discussion on monsters, can we classify modern music consumption as such? If so,
how do we enact care for the unfamiliar parts of music that allude to a level of monstrosity? What are
the consequences for not caring for the entirety of music?

20

1.5

Personal Meaning and Care
What does it mean for music to become part of a largely entangled system of consumption?

When we consider the effects that mass digital consumerism have on us and our world, a question
arises of how we enact an ethic of care? We clearly care for music. One could argue there are few
things within the world that we care for more so, but do we truly care for the whole of music? The
system of how we consume music digitally has been geared towards the convenience, and speed of
the user’s interaction. In order to care for something relationally, we need to consider caring for it in
its entirety, providing our attention to both its positive and negative aspects.

Patricia Reed describes the idea of care at planetary scales as well as the concept of “planetary
dimensionality” as a way to help rationalize the growing complexity of our world today,

“I’d Like to propose ‘planetary dimensionality’ since it maintains fidelity to the need for modeling,
as best as possible, complex earth-social systems, while introducing nested scales of co-existence
within that totality.” (Reed, 2019).

With regards to the modern network of information and data sharing, the world can feel both
very small and accessible, as well as enormous and ineffable. The digitization of the world creates
a changing scale to which we live our lives and consume media and content. This fluidity makes it
much more difficult for people to have substantive notions of care towards things at both local and
planetary scales. We can rationalize and be sympathetic towards other struggles at a global scale,
but to understand care through our actions is not always self-evident (Reed, 2019). The complexity
of our interrelations has never been more overwhelming than in the digitized world, and the idea
of enacting care at a planetary scale is crucial to caring for the entirety of music. Music is largely a
human-centric system and is therefore crucially interrelated to the nested scales of humanity which
Reed describes. Trying to rationalize care for the totality of music is much more overwhelming than
looking into its interrelated systems as entanglements. We naturally care for the parts of music we
love and hold dear to ourselves, but as Reed describes, it is just as important to care for the aspects
of music that are impersonal and unfamiliar. These are largely the parts that have explicit implications

21

environmentally and societally. This makes caring for them in the same way we care for its more
obvious and personally meaningful aspects a more challenging but equally important practice.
“We ought to care these entities are cared for” (Reed, 2019). The things that we care for and pursue
collectively are what shape the world. Our monsters have both positive and negative aspects of us
embodied within them, and learning to care for both is more important than ever.

22

Part II: Design Outcomes and Explorations
Contents:
2.1

Introduction

2.5

Place-Based Field Recording

2.2

Music Algorithm Explorations

2.6

Graduate Exhibition Work

Computer Generated Piano 		

Sound Vessels

Scales

3D Printed Work Case Studies

2.3

Untitled Frequency Visualization

2.4

Juke Box Speculative Project

Figure 04: Sound Vessel Iterations
23

Image Decay Function
2.7

Design Reflection

2.1

Introduction
The following sections chronicle various design works I have pursued in exploration of our

entanglements within the modern frameworks of music. They encompass several propositional design
experiments that are meant to explore aspects of these entanglements, and create opportunities
for re-framing and reflection. A primary goal of these projects is to explore different ideas nested
within the entanglements as a means to understand and reflect on some of the environmental and
societal implications that this work considers. Providing opportunity for reflection within our complex
entanglements is essential to help us achieve relational and substantive connections towards the
things we consume and interact with. This work is primarily about asking questions, and is only
partially or passively concerned with answering them. Having an actionable notion of care within
the entirety of music is challenging and conflicting. Trying to rationalize levels of harm within a
thing that we love is a complex process and having moments for reflection is critical to our overall
understanding.

24

2.2

Music Algorithm Explorations
As a response to my growing frustrations of music becoming enveloped within the seemingly

insurmountable force of tech capitalism, I wanted to look at ways in which we might examine if music
pieces could begin to lose their human element and become purely data based. The goal of these
explorations was to examine music creation through a purely digital lens as a means to see how
the methods to something’s creation might change its perception and inherent meaning. As Albert
Borgmann considers the implications of the abstraction of the means and the ends of an action,
these projects are meant to explore the effects of nullifying the human role within the action of music
creation. If using the faucet rather than the well to collect water changes your relationship to the
water itself, does generative structures of music creation change the relationship to music? (Tijmes
et al., 2001).

Computer Generated Piano Scales
This project is a simple exploration of music related algorithms. Generating a music piece
from a written algorithm that plays a random sequence of notes from a standard piano key layout. The
resulting piece is, in a way, very interesting. I am in no way responsible for the piece compositionally
or musically and yet, by creating the algorithm, I am still somehow responsible for it. This exploration
is mainly inspired by listening patterns that we engage in with music that directly impact the nature
of interaction, such as shuffle functions and general streaming service algorithms. Modern streaming
services use algorithms to study the user’s listening habits and then curate their future interactions.
These algorithms are meant to be democratic and accurate to what the user would like, however;
Spotify for example does not curate musicians’ work evenly. As Ben Sisario outlined in an article for
the New York Times, the algorithms are not a perfectly equal meritocracy. Artists that are already
popular have a massive advantage to getting played, and independent artists have a disadvantage
as they often do not have the financial resources to bump their algorithmic exposure (Sisario, 2021).
In thinking about how algorithms dominate our digital interactions, this project is meant to consider
how they could also dominate music creation. What if music no longer required musicians?
All audio can be found at https://soundcloud.com/sam-stretch/tracks

25

2.3

Untitled Frequency Visualization
This project investigated ways in which sound waves might be looked at as more visual

entities. A lot of the research and design exploration looked at how music might be experienced
visually as well as sonically. This project looks at how we might use frequency values throughout a
music piece to generate visualizations of its compositional sound waves. Showing the visual outputs
of frequencies allows for people to contextualize musical properties in a new sense. Music in the
simplest sense is a compositional assemblage of vibrations within a space. We hear these vibrations
but often don’t consider what they might look like or feel like. While this experiment focuses more on
look than on feel, there is an opportunity to generate one from the other. A lot of the aspects of music
I have explored looked at ways to reposition music as more than a sonically based practice. Seeing
things visually or even physically gives us opportunities for new understanding of how sound looks
and feels within our environment.

Figure 05: Untitled Frequency Visualization

26
25

2.4

Juke Box Speculative Project
Design in a purely modernist sense is often considered to be a relationship of problem solving.

In this relationship we can develop a habit of looking to solve or fix before we seek to understand.
This more often than not creates a cycle of generating more problems in an attempt to solve one. This
cycle has and continues to be very present within the context of modernity and is something that we
as designers should want to avoid. While we address problems with new technology, we often lack a
sense of care for these technologies. Just as Frankenstein’s creation was abandoned and turned into
a monster, we continually create technologies that are doomed to obsolescence.

Figure 06: Embedded Obsolescence

Diagram based on “Western Melancholy: How to Imagine different Futures
in the Real World”. (Mitrović, 2018)
If we consider the entire system of modern cloud-based music streaming as a monstrous
assemblage, the harmful implications are largely a result of the industry and humanity’s continual
desire for maximized convenience. Is it possible to alter its entanglements to help lessen the impact
of its implications while still maintaining a level of convenience that is enough to encourage a
collective approval? This project is strictly done as a parody to tech narratives largely presenting

27

themselves as problem solvers and innovators and as a speculative exploration of how past and
present consumption methods might combine. Juke Box is a decentralized music streaming service
where “the cloud” exists in a server within your home. Your music, and user data are safely stored
in your individual server that can be accessed remotely from your phone. The primary purpose of
this project was to take a step back and consider how the lines of inquiry discussed within this
research might look in a commercial practice. While this work was largely satirical, it was interesting
to consider how some of these ideas would look with a different directive.

Figure 07: Juke Box Product Pitch

28

2.5

Place-Based Field Recording
In a theoretical sense, looking at music as assembled entanglements with tangible implications

in the world is a far-reaching and complex space to design into. I started by considering how music
itself could begin to explore some of the entanglements and help to provide an area for reflection and
contemplation of some of its implications. The resulting project consists of a series of music pieces
composed from field recordings of various locations around Vancouver, British Columbia. I spent a
lot of time wandering around the city and recording the audio of different locations: parks, beaches,
busy streets, quiet alleys, etc. In doing so I was able to focus specifically on how we might look at
music to be entangled within the world around us, and in this case, explicitly created from it. I then
took these recordings and produced music pieces that were specifically tied to their locations. The
presentation of the pieces includes a way finding capability to encourage the listener to visit each
location and experience the music from where it was recorded. This experience provides an alternative
process of consumption, one that is more intentional and actionable. This process also attempts to
foster an appreciation of natural beauty in the music produced by recording natural spaces. Each
specific music piece was produced in a way that was meant to soundtrack the listener's experience
at each location and embed a new sense of meaning within the piece. The intention of this work is
to create an alternative relationship to consumption - One that experiments with a method of music
consumption that does not cater to convenience, but instead to intentionality, slowness, reflection,
and the natural beauty of our everyday world.

This project is meant as a critical engagement of our modern modes of music consumption.
Stuart Walker describes the need for sustainable dialogues to refer to substantive notions of personal
meaning and the problems with maintaining this meaning within digitally saturated interactions.
The idea of personal meaning he proposes goes beyond seeking things that make us happy, as
that can often be misconstrued with material gain, but rather the things that are important to us in a
spiritual or existential manner (Walker, 2010). Personal meaning within sustainability should refer to
people desiring a more environmentally responsible world on a personal and relatable level. Personal
interactions within entanglements are essential to understanding how we exhibit care for music.

29

Referring back to Patricia Reed’s What is Care at Planetary Dimensions? Care is more evident within
the things we are familiar with and that have an existing notion of personal meaning, but less evident
with the unfamiliar and impersonal (Reed, 2019). Within music we are primarily familiar with just the
music itself and maintain our personal meaning within our perceived relationship to it, but this is not
the full extent of music. The familiar and personal elements of musical entanglements are essential to
maintain as they become the entry point to the discovery of the unfamiliar, impersonal, and harmful
implications of the larger system. In our day-to-day lives we are continually met with a barrage of
media, advertisements, and information. This project is ideally able to create a digital interaction that
slows this process down considerably and allows us time to reflect on and consider that which we
are consuming. Patricia Reed also describes the complex theories of how situated knowledge of
specific locations relates to overarching systems at planetary scales.

“On the one hand, human individuals are in this world somewhere, some when, in some body
and experience it differently in concrete ways. On the other hand, humans are also embedded in
abstract, discursive-historical frameworks that determine conceptual self-understanding and modes of
praxis as a result.” (Reed, 2019).

Entanglements that occur at global scales cannot be understood by either a situated
knowledge or a conceptual one, but by a combination of the two. This project is not meant to tether
the entire conceptual understanding of modern music consumption to a physical reality, but to simply
relate to the conceptual notions of understanding individual, intentional practices within a larger
framework. The intended listener experience at each of the recording locations is meant to create
a suspended moment in time where you have an opportunity to contemplate the natural qualities
of the location, as well as consider the sonic properties of what you might ordinarily describe as
mundane background noise. This relationship is effectively where field recording as a practice can
be very powerful. We become so attuned to the sounds within our environments that we rarely
consider them to be musical. Gathering and producing these sounds as music creates an altered
relationship to sonic environments and attempts to change the way a beholder may perceive a
particular space. William Basinski’s field recording piece: The Disintegration Loops (2001) primarily
inspires me because he manages to invoke meaning from the mundane, a relationship that I have

30

long been trying to consider within digital media consumption. Our digital interactions today often
feel very linear; whatever we are going to see next is already queued in a long line of algorithmically
organized experiences. This project is intended to question this consumption pattern, specifically as
it relates to music.

Figure 08: Place-Based Field Recording Map

From: http://vancouverfieldrecording.webflow.io
To me this project was an interesting way to reflect on the entanglements of modern music
consumption, and about how we might reposition our sense of care. There are tangible implications
when we do not care for the entirety of music, but instead just the parts that are already personally
meaningful. As Latour says, “We confuse the monster for it’s creator and blame our sins against Nature
upon our creations. But our sin is not that we created technologies but that we failed to love and
care for them.” (Latour, 2011). This relationship returns us to the importance of how we enact care
for the entirety of music, and the need to take responsibility of both it’s beautiful and monstrous
characteristics. Reed describes how the importance of caring for the things we love is similarly
important if not more important to care for the unfamiliar and the impersonal (Reed, 2019). In the case
of music, the unfamiliar aspects are generally the problematic and harmful parts of the entanglement,
but to truly care for something in a relational and substantive way is to care for those as well.

31

2.6

Graduate Exhibition Works
The majority of this work engaging with sound and field recording led to a grad exhibition

aimed at exploring these music pieces as forms of data; both visually and physically. Our capacity to
understand digital music consumption is not geared toward its consequences, but rather the things
that it allows us to do. Listening data algorithms have allowed for machine learning to approximate
our tastes in music and then feed them back to us as if we were discovering it ourselves. This
may not seem inherently harmful, however, in doing so we remove a sense of agency from our
interactions with music. All this is to primarily say that we are generating more data than ever before
and doing so with little to no acknowledgment of how this affects the physical world around us. This
exhibition was meant to extract the data from music pieces and display different ways to create an
alternate relationship to listening. The field recordings were initially created in order to cater a musical
experience at their specific locations. In order to exhibit this project in one location, the relationship
between the recording and the place had to become fractured. This fracturing allowed for the work
to focus on deconstructing the recordings themselves as assemblages of musical data. This data
was then processed to create both digital and physical artifacts to be displayed for the exhibition.
The physical aspect consisted of three-dimensional artifacts created from the sound data, while the
digital focused on reflecting on this sense of fracturing between the music and the natural spaces
they originated from.

Sound Vessels
Can we regain a sense of tactility within a music industry that is now almost entirely digital?
Does creating a physical interaction change our relationship to that which we consume? This project
explored a three-dimensional and tactile understanding of the previous field recording work, to
attempt to regain a tactility that is related to the music itself. In order to do so I looked at generating
models constructed from the waveform of the recordings. For each recording I took the waveform
and used it to construct a three-dimensional artifact or vessel that is physically and sonically unique
to the sound data of that recording. The prior sound visualization exercise showed the waveform data
for every fraction of a second of the recording. This work was intended to show how the entirety of

32

a recording can be visualized at once in a physical artifact. A vinyl LP records sound data in a spiral
motion, from outside to inside. These artifacts consider the same spiral layout but arranges them into
layers. As the song goes on, the artifact is extruded into a three-dimensional form. While this is not a
playable form of music like an LP, it regains some sense of tactility within digital music by exhibiting
musical data in a physical form.

Figure 09: Various Sound Vessels

Top Left: 3D Printed Study Model
Top Right: Grad Exhibition Sound Models (Negatives)
Bottom: Grad Exhibtion Sound Models (Positives)

33

3D Printed Work Case Studies
The sound vessel iterations were heavily inspired by two works. The data Heirlooms works
from the 2021 Radiant pavilion exhibition in Melbourne. These works create physical vessels that
were meant to embody memories and keepsakes that otherwise exist as purely digital entities. My
own work attempts a similar relationship in the sense of how it considers what creating a sense
of digital tangibility can offer to our notions of personal meaning and care within expansive digital
frameworks. The other is John Locke’s work creating 3D printed waveform artifacts of various points
of David Bowie’s song, Young Americans.

Figure 10: Data Heirlooms

Three artifacts from Emma Luke & Chuhan Khoo, Data Heirlooms (Khoo et. al., 2021)

Figure 11: “Young Americans” David Bowie 3D Waveform - John Locke

(Locke, 2015)

34

Image Decay Function
Since the primary focus of the field recording work was how it was intended to be experienced
in each location, the focus of the exhibition had to be slightly altered. In addition to the physical sound
vessels, the primary visual element of this work was to project a large image of each of the field
recording locations and create a function that distorts the image based on the waveform data of
the song. The more data the song is generating at a certain time, the faster the image will distort, as
the song continually plays the distortion continues until the environment where it was recording is
rendered virtually unrecognizable. The aim here is to visualize a relationship of distortion and decay
generated from continual streaming and to visualize musical data in a different way from the physical
vessels.

Figure 12: Forest Image Decay Function after 0, 1, 3, 6 Loops Respectively

All Images and Recordings Found at http://vancouverfieldrecording.webflow.io

35

As mentioned before, this work is heavily inspired by the Disintegration Loops by William
Basinski (William Basinski, 2001). Basinski explored musical decay and deterioration based on the
physical conditions of recording and production. This work aims to explore physical and environmental
decay based on the conditions of music consumption. How can we begin to understand data in a
more relational sense? We quantify data as storage, but as storage becomes more cloud focused,
our tangible understanding of data is lessened. This project aimed at visualizing data as a tangible
substance with the ability to saturate, deteriorate, and blur our digital and physical environments.
These design explorations picked up where the field recording work let off and helped to present digital
music consumption in ways that allow us to consider the effects and consequences of convenience.
Presenting this work alongside the physical vessels of each recording gave new meaning to the field
recording pieces, and helped to examine the site-specific conditions of each piece from a singular
gallery setting.

Figure 13: Graduate Exhibition at Emily Carr University

36

The setup for the show ended up being something that was supposed to draw people in
to experience the music pieces while visually interacting with the image decay function and the
physical models for each recording. I elected to exhibit both the positive and negative models of
each recording as both display the physical waveform and contrast with each other in an interesting
way. This work was not meant to be a commentary on digital music consumption, nor does it look
to explain or solve any of the issues within our world. It purely seeks to explore ways in which music
can be thought of as data, and turned into something hardly recognizable. The components of our
monsters that require the most care, the parts that we are largely unfamiliar with; those too are often
unrecognizable.

Figure 14: Graduate Exhibition at Emily Carr University

37

2.7

Design Reflection
These explorations primarily embody four major goals: To understand the dimensions of the

problem space. To question the problem space. To open up new ways of thinking about and engaging
with entanglements. To engage others and their own understandings of entanglements.

This work seeks to break apart the monotony of digital streaming and breathe life into various
parts of musical entanglements. As mentioned before, this work is very personal to me. I worked
through these explorations to first and foremost aid my own understanding of entanglements, and
to rethink my own involvement within them. To create an opportunity for me to reflect on how music
consumption has changed in the digital age and in my life. These explorations are meant to open
discussions around music entanglements and their digital and physical implications. Reintroducing
a physical element to what has become an otherwise digitally consumed medium helps to create
an entry point for discussions centered around our personal relationships to music. These are the
primary goals of the critical, exploratory, and reflective nature of my design work. To open the door for
others to ask the both the questions that I have asked, and the ones that I have not yet thought of.

I do not have the answers for how to fix or cure the monsters that we have created within
music entanglements, but I can instead seek to trouble our implicit understanding and often passive
engagement of music in the digital world.

38

Figure 15: All Decay Functions after 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Loops
Ocean
49.317, -123.261

Forest
49.254, -123.225

Commercial
49.269, -123.070

Street
49.255, -123.100

All Images and Recordings Found at http://vancouverfieldrecording.webflow.io

39

Park
49.293, -123.149

Stream
49.242, -123.110

Conclusion
I often think of music as mirroring humanity. It has the capacity to exhibit an understanding of
the most beautiful and most horrible aspects of our world. In order for us to truly care for our world we
must also do the same. This requires us to deeply analyze all aspects of things that we care about. To
consider not only the implications of the thing itself, but also the methods to which we interact with
it. The methods to which we consume music are as important if not more important than the music
itself. In his book, Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of
Worlds, Arturo Escobar writes:

“Does it matter whether we write with pencils or on an iPad? Whether we engage in activities
collectively in the neighborhood or in the solitude of our individual rooms in nuclear homes? Whether
we dance and make music with others or listen to it in silence through our earphones? In what ways
do these diverse practices construct different selves and societies? Does it matter?” (Escobar, 2018).

This discussion is essential to consider within our methods of listening to music. We have
an inherently relational sense of care and understanding of music itself. It shapes who we are, and
provides a mirror through which we can view parts of our world, but we largely do not understand or
care for how we consume and interact with it. Escobar asks “does it matter?” in a primarily rhetorical
sense because it clearly does. We do not live in a static world. Our behavior and patterns of existence
rapidly shift and pivot to reflect different understandings of what it means to live presently. By the
same standard, why should our creations be designed statically? A primary symptom of modernity is
continual innovation and subsequent abandonment of our monsters. The things we create become
casualties to the things we create next. Within digital networks, these casualties are even more hidden,
and harder to identify as monsters. When Latour describes black-boxing he describes artifacts that
are hidden by their success (Latour, 2000), but in the same way these artifacts are hidden by their
failures as they become forgotten. All this is to primarily consider the methods to which we consume
and interact with the digital world, and our entanglements within it. To enact a relational sense of care
for our monsters is the first step in preventing their creation in the future. Before we seek to create or

40

fix, we must first seek to understand. This work first and foremost aims to question and provide space
for reflection on our entanglements with digital networks. To enact relational and substantive notions
of care for the entirety of the things we love, and to recognize the importance of questioning not only
the things we think or know to be harmful, but the things we hope are not.

41

Works Cited (APA 7)
Bass, M. (2020). U.S. Recorded Music Revenues by Format. Retrieved January 25, 2022, from
https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/.
Brennan, M. & Devine, K. (2019, April 8). University News, University of Glasgow.
Dean, J. (2020, May 12). Neo-Feudalism: The End of Capitalism? Los Angeles Review of
Books. www.lareviewofbooks.org/article/neofeudalism-the-end-of-capitalism/
Escobar, A. (2018). Out of the Studio and into the Flow of Socio-natural Life. In: Designs for
the pluriverse: Radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds (p. 30).
essay, Duke University Press.
Khoo, C., Luke, E., Pokrovsky, J., Glover, J., Geck, K., & Khorasgani, M. L. (2021). Data
Heirlooms. Retrieved December 10, 2021, from https://dataheirlooms.io/.
Latour, B. (2011). Love your Monsters: Why We Must Care for Our Technologies as We Do
Our Children. In M. Shellenberger & T. Nordhaus (Eds.), Love your monsters:
Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene (pp. 18–25). essay, Breakthrough
Institute.
Latour, B. (2000). Glossary. In Pandora's hope: Essays on the reality of science studies
(p. 304). essay, Harvard University Press.
Locke, J. (2015, May 28). “Young Americans” David Bowie 3D Waveform [video file]. Youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUtPnIYelwU&ab_channel=JohnLocke
Mitrović, I. (2018, August 27). "Western Melancholy" How to Imagine different Futures in the
"Real World". (M. H. Baletić, Trans.). Retrieved December 20, 2021, from
https://interakcije.net/en/2018/08/27/western-melancholy-how-to-imaginedifferent-futures-in-the-real-world/.
Reed, P. (2019, August). What is Care at Planetary Dimensions. Lecture, Berlin; Floating
University. Retrieved February 8, 2022, from https://laboriacuboniks.net/textsinterviews/what-is-care-at-planetary-dimensions/.

42

Sisario, B. (2021, May 10). Musicians Say Streaming Doesn’t Pay. Can the Industry Change?
The New York Times. Retrieved January 10, 2022, from
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/07/arts/music/streaming-music-payments.html
Tijmes, P., Achterhuis, H., Brey, P., Munnik, R., Smits, M., & Verbeek, P.-P. (2001). Albert
Borgmann: Technology and The Character of Everyday Life. In American Philosophy
of Technology: The Empirical Turn (pp. 11–36). essay, Indiana University Press.
Trueman, C. (2019, August 9). What Impact Are Data Centres Having on Climate Change?
Computerworld, https://www.computerworld.com/article/3431148/why-datacentres-are-the-new-frontier-in-the-fight-against-climate-change.html.
Tsing, A., Swanson, H., Bubandt, N., & Gan, E. (2017). Bodies Tumbled into Bodies. In Arts
of living on a damaged planet: Ghosts of the anthropocene (pp. M1–M12).
introduction, University of Minnesota Press.
Walker, S. (2010). Wrapped Attention: Designing Products for Evolving Permanence and
Enduring Meaning. Design Issues, 26(4), 94-108. doi:10.1162/desi-a-00047
Walker, S. (2013). Imagination’s Promise: Practice-Based Design Research for Sustainability.
In The Handbook of Design for Sustainability (pp. 446-465). Chapter 28, Bloomsbury
Academic.
William Basinksi. (2001). The Disintegration loops. William Basinksi.

43