Democracy in Music

Imagine sitting down at a digital piano. You cannot play it alone. It only works if two or more people play it. It scales to the tens of thousands of simultaneous players.

In Mean mode, you play a note, and instead of hearing what you played, you hear the average of everyone's choices. Anita plays C4 and Dev plays G4, but they hear E4, the note right between. Add more people and the average shifts with every new voice.

In Mode, the most popular note wins. This maps more closely to democratic voting. By adjusting the threshold, allowing not just the top choice but the top several, you move from melody into harmony. You move from first-past-the-post to proportional representation.

The music that results is, from a songwriting perspective, equally owned. In terms of IP, this piece of music is automatically and equally owned by 30,000 people. The people making the music were also its first audience. They could not know what the outcome would be. They were not only its creators but its first listeners.

The Piano above works in discrete notes. Mean Mode moves to a continuous pitch space — you place a vote anywhere along a frequency range, and so do thousands of simulated others. The distribution builds up on the right: you can see where consensus clusters and where outliers persist. Switch between mean, mode, and chord to hear how the same set of votes produces different music depending on the aggregation method. Move your vote to see where and how much it counts.

Inspired by Miró's Bleu II, let's move from a keyboard to a canvas. Instead of choosing notes, you place a single touch on a shared surface. Where you touch determines visuals and pitch. Where others touch builds density. Overlapping choices become peaks in a landscape, a topography of collective preference.

Imagine that topography from above. A single concentrated dot might be a choice made by 100,000 people. Lower the threshold to include more candidates and you get something closer to proportional representation. Something that starts to look, and sound, like a painting.

Regardless of the rightness or legality of how much of cultural history is owned, the people who see it as their cultural history rarely have much to do with its curation or profit. This model changes that. Entire populations could co-create and co-own their cultural products.

In the 1700s, composers wrote Musikalische Würfelspiele, musical dice games, where each bar could be joined to any other bar to create a coherent piece. Players would gather together and roll dice to determine the order, creating a unique composition partially shaped by chance. The grid layout is not dissimilar to Ableton's Push controller, which lets producers stack melodies and harmonies they've composed in advance.

At the moment, these choices are made by individuals. What would it be like to have audiences collaborate democratically in that process, voting on chunks of sound?

The following model introduces quadratic voting. You spend voice credits on the choices you care about, with each additional vote on the same choice costing quadratically more. You can express strong preference for the ideas you really care about.

This maps beautifully to music because the output reflects not just what most people chose but what people felt most strongly about, a lot like how musical expression actually works.

The previous prototypes all ask: what do you want to choose? This one asks a different question: what do systems do with your choice?

You vote for one of seven parties. Three hundred simulated citizens vote alongside you. Then you toggle between three electoral systems — first past the post, proportional representation, and coalition — and hear what happens. The votes don't change. The system does. And the music changes because of it.

With first past the post, one party wins and the rest fall silent. Under proportional representation, every party is heard in proportion to its support and the full spectrum fills the room. Under coalition, allied parties blend while forced coalitions produce dissonance.

Same votes, different rules, different music. The system shapes the outcome as much as the electorate.

Democracy is not only about casting votes. It is about being seen, recognized, represented. About being on the record. A piece of music that is co-created by people moving through space can be, in this sense, deeply democratic.

Imagine sitting in an audience. The lights come down. A dancer comes on stage and their movements happen to correlate perfectly with the sound you hear. Other dancers enter and the music shifts. When they're in lockstep it becomes a recognisable pattern with a pulse. When they fall out of step, the music swirls and changes, breaks apart and coalesces in new configurations.

These are dancers composing in real time, with cameras catching their movements and transcribing them into sound. A composer has set the parameters but the composition itself cannot exist without the performers. They are necessary to hear anything at all.

What emerges is the tension that every dancer, musician, and actor already knows: between abandonment and responsibility to an overall structure. Here, that tension is lived out not in response to some external score, but to the other people on stage at that moment. To oneself at that moment. And to the audience at that moment.

Music is most commonly owned by the individuals or small groups who create it, by corporations, or by trusts. All of Leonard Cohen's music is owned by Recognition Music Group under Blackstone, an American asset management company for instance. Regardless of how we feel about that, the people who see this music as their cultural history have nothing to do with its curation or profit.

The models above would change that, because entire populations could co-create and co-own their cultural products. And those communal projects could last for many more years than a single lifetime.

It could be the quite literal ownership of cultural history. A neighbourhood that builds a shared composition over a decade. A digital community of 50,000 whose work arrives in viral waves. A family lineage across 200 years. A city of half a million over half a century.