Async.Art Programmable Music and Art "Money Badger" Release
By Rare Scrilla
I recently had the good fortune of dropping "Money Badger" in the second wave of the new Async.art programmable music pieces using Ethereum. The drop featured 5 songs from Mike Shinoda, pak, Lee Gaito, Richie & Matthew Hawtin, Beats Antique and myself. I put together 1 layer of 3 different music pieces, 1 layer of 3 different programmed drums & a layer of vocals from 4 different emcees. The rappers are Willie Waze on "Rug Pull," Kane Mayfield on "Crypnology," & Born Unique & Kaimbr on "Proof Of Work." The layers are all available for sale and the owner of the layer chooses which state it inputs into the master track. In addition, you're able to mint a "blank" NFT and record the master output of the desired state you want, as soon as it is made available byt the layer owners.
There ends up being 27 different possibilities of final music, and also 27 different artworks. Each state of music has a corresponding state of art. For instance, the honey badger changes its head and chain depending on who's rapping. The drum machine switches between an MPC2000XL, SP-404 and a DR-550 depending on which drum layer is picked. The music features one track that is derived from the Bitcoin blockchain. Bitcoin Audio, aka D, is known for his ability to find melodies by using the merkle roots and hashes and use a midi synth to get a melody (he explains it better than me) from the Bitcoin blockchain. So we took block 673782 and I chopped parts of it up and we were able to actually incorporate a "bit" of Bitcoin into the artwork and music. The music track changes trigger the triangles and background to change colors, with the Bitcoin logo prominently featured in the layer featuring that music. Shoutout to Mister Wise for helping with that music track as well, and for his overall mix engineer work on the individual tracks. It's a different beast to tackle when you have to mix something that won't be mastered but needs to all sound good changing and co-existing with one another.
Sophie Sturdevant does a real good job breaking it all down here.
The whole concept of programmable music and art is wild. The gamification of owning the layers can be far and wide. It will be interesting to see how this new way of creating will play out. Some cool points of programmable music are the fans can interact with the artist in ways they couldn't before, the art and music is a living and changing piece, the the gamification of quick minting, holding layers hostage, and much more, is just some thing I'm looking forward to seeing play out with all of the releases.
