Edinburgh International Festival: Sounds of the city

ON FRIDAY last week, the Edinburgh International Festival entered the world of crowdsourcing. That morning saw the launch of a web-based project called Edinburgh: Festival City, the culmination of which will be a one-off performance drawn from sounds submitted online by the public.

It’s being instigated by the American composer and 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Music finalist, Tod Machover, who describes it as “a sonic portrait of the city of Edinburgh, especially in relationship to the festival.” Following a similar model to Machover’s previous work, A Toronto Symphony, Festival City is inviting a cross-section of Edinburgh residents, festival performers and attenders and past or present visitors to the city to share their experiences and sounds of Edinburgh.

Some primers on the website suggest thinking of your favourite sound in the morning, the noise of your street or a busker playing, as well as sharing photographs and memories of the city. Images and sounds can be emailed in and audio can be played down a dedicated phone recording line, before being collated for developmental use by Machover throughout July.

The suspicion is that the target audience of this programme might have a rather narrow view of what the city is and where it stands within their own breadth of societal experience – being on the whole cultured, affluent types who attend Scotland’s most prominent festival of high culture. Yet it’s a project with noble intentions, and it would be great not only to see it succeed (it’s unlikely to fail as a musical experience with Machover’s involvement), but to see it capture those non-EIF-attending year-round residents of the city who might best be able to capture its heart.

While the nature of this project makes it a truly artistic endeavour, though, the crowdsourcing model – where an artist solicits help, be it practical or financial, from online communities to complete a project – is one which is growing in prominence throughout the music industry. As ever given any California-hatched plan to transfer social activity to an online format there’s a whiff of utopianism about the idea, but for an increasing amount of musicians operating in an uncertain industry it’s a model which is working. “Lots of people have got involved with our work,” says Tommy Perman, formerly of the band FOUND, “and I don’t know why that is. I think they just like to feel part of a creative project.” FOUND have had success with art projects like Cybraphon, #UNRAVEL and End of Forgetting, all machines which used varying degrees of online interaction in order to operate, whether it’s searching Twitter for mentions of themselves in order to affect their ‘mood’ or recording their gallery surroundings for posterity and playing it back – what Perman calls ”secret crowdsourcing”.

In a purely practical sense, musicians are now paying for their records, or crowdfunding them, by appealing to their fans before they’ve even been recorded. It’s how Latin-folk fusion band Salsa Celtica are planning to fund their next record, as the group’s Toby Shippey explains. “It’s not my preferred way, but it seems to be the best way of doing it these days. It’s a struggle to make money from recorded music, not for really big bands but for groups like us, yet we’ve got a big, varied fanbase around the world, around 60 per cent of them in Colombia. I have a feeling that if the band ask them to help then they would be willing to contribute before it’s made.”

In Shippey’s opinion even paid-for online methods of selling music like iTunes are old-hat, because now everyone uses free streaming services like Spotify, and he believes that the time to ask fans of your music for money is when there’s still the promise of something unheard at the end of it, rather than when they have the stark choice to pay or hear it for free. It’s a method which worked via funding site Kickstarter for both Glasgow-based musician Howie Reeve, who hit his part-funding target of £300 for his new album Friendly Demons in four days (the site is live for another month), and Scott MacDonald of the Edinburgh-based group Iglomat. They achieved a target of £1,000 to fund a vinyl release of their new album, because McDonald – who also runs the group’s parent company KFM Records – says the format has become unaffordable to produce unless you have guaranteed sales.

“I did it on the premise that people will either want it or they won’t,” says Reeve, “and when I got my funding I thought, it’s a real validation of who I am and what I do. But you have to watch for overkill. You need a bit of space (between crowdfunded projects), because we now live in a culture where we’re not funded through conventional routes any more, so everyone’s asking for money. I’m not evangelical about it, but it worked for me and there was enough space in the framework for me to be myself. I wasn’t bending over backwards or prostituting myself within it, so that was good.”

MacDonald tells a similarly positive story. “Once it was done, it felt really good, especially for me (as label boss). If I’m putting together a piece of vinyl, it can cost seven or eight quid to get a really nice package made, and if nobody buys it you’re losing money. Whereas this time I put the order in to get them made and I knew they were already paid for, that they already had a home. It was a very positive experience. At the start you worry it’s going to go wrong and be quite embarrassing, but at the end it feels very positive, and I know other bands who’ve felt the same way about it.” Both agree that what worked for them was having modest aims and a tight-knit community of fans who they mostly know well, but it’s true that larger projects might falter on the fact that fans might feel they’re contributing towards an already wealthy group’s success. For example, Texas indie-rockers Eisley recently caused a storm when they asked for $100,000 dollars to record a new album, while Amanda Palmer’s decision to source musicians to play alongside her backfired when it emerged they weren’t being paid, which raises the ethical point that crowdsourcing of willing and somewhat starstruck fans could be charity or it could be exploitation.

Yet Palmer’s faith in crowdsourcing continues to work on a practical level for her, as she pointed out in a recent internet post urging Morrissey to harness the goodwill of his army of fans.

“What does one need a record label for nowadays?,” she wrote. “ To put albums in stores? The stores are closing. To make all the phone calls, so that radio plays the album? The radio stations are closing.” As those who have done it might agree, it’s not the only model, but it’s certainly a viable one.

• You can find out more about Edinburgh: Festival City at www.eif.co.uk/edinburghfestivalcity. The result will be performed as part of City Noir at the Usher Hall, Edinburgh, Tuesday 27th August. FOUND’s Cybraphon is also part of this year’s Edinburgh International Festival programme.  www.cybraphon.com