Music and Code @hilkeros - Tumblr Blog

Active and passive experience and learning at work

Three years ago I made a career switch and I moved to another country. Those big life changes learned me a lot about... learning.

After living in Belgium for my whole life, I moved to Switzerland in March 2016 to start working as a software engineer.

I actually earned a Master and PhD degree in linguistics and literature. After the PhD I spent most of my life somewhere between music, marketing and digital projects. I studied jazz double bass and music production at the music conservatory, toured internationally with a band, that I was also managing, spent some time in the world of startups and online marketing and I was managing digital projects for a cultural non-profit, mainly setting up an online community for people who love writing.

While managing digital projects, I developed a growing interest in writing software code myself. In 2016, I decided to really go for a software engineering career and a couple of events lead to the idea to start this new life in another country: Switzerland. In March of that year I started as an intern at a Swiss e-commerce company and in June of that year the company offered me a permanent contract.

In the first six months I learned A LOT. I had some basic knowledge of coding in Ruby on Rails and I became a much better coder on the job, learning at a fast pace. At the same time I had to learn a language that was not my mother tongue. Because my father used to be a German teacher, I had a good passive understanding of the language, but in Switzerland, the people speak rather specific dialects, which are pretty incomprehensible even for Germans. We didn't speak English at all at work, I was thrown into the cold water, hearing and speaking German and Swiss German all day. I also started to speak the Swiss dialect myself quite fast.

It was very interesting what was happening in my head in this period: thinking and speaking in different languages all the time and acquiring all this new knowledge and experiences.

However, after six months, the fast learning kind of stopped. Since then, I still learn new things of course, but at a very much slower pace.

At the time of writing, I am looking for a new job, because I want to gather new experiences and knowledge: new programming languages and frameworks, coding paradigms, other company cultures and new colleagues to share ideas.

However, most companies are reluctant to hire me, because they think I lack experience, especially in their framework or programming language.

In my opinion, there is a big difference between active and passive work experience. For 90% of the day to day work that you do at a company, you don't need to know that much. The 'active' competences that you need most of the time, you can acquire in 2 until 6 months, depending on your learning pace. The tricky part is that other 10%: some experience and knowledge that floats around subconsciously, because you used that library 5 years ago or you tackled a very similar problem 8 years ago. That is what sets apart experienced software developers from fast learning junior developers.

At a company, you need a good balance between the experienced seniors, who carry around this subconscious passive knowledge, and juniors, who miss some experience, but bring new energy and curiosity into the team and might challenge the seniors' habits.

I think a lot of companies are too focused on senior experience. Juniors might be better coders very fast for the 90% percent of the work. Their brains just need to be fed by the passive 10% knowledge from the seniors.

#coding software experience jobs senior junior

I have some new tracks. Kind of a warmup of things to come...

#SoundCloud #music #hroski

from digital to romantic nomad

I like to be alone. But I like to be alone in public.

I love trains, for instance. I often travel alone. You have a place for yourself, but still there are people everywhere around you.

I also like bars where you can work a bit while having a coffee or something. It is a little me-time in public, with lots of people around you.

Almost two years ago, somebody told me: “ I don’t like stuff”. He was talking about music streaming and how he liked the concept of not owning stuff any more, because everything was a music stream ‘in the cloud’.

I also don’t like stuff. The most important thing I own is my computer, and it is not even about this device, it is because it is a very handy screen to get access to this entire world, which is called the internet. All this immaterial ideas and knowledge which can be found on the internet, it is endlessly inspiring.

I like to travel by train. I like to hike through nature in Switzerland. It gives me the opportunity to deliver myself to the thoughts in my head. The internet is like an endless extension of these thoughts.

I probably also like music because it is in essence rather abstract and immaterial. You often use physical objects to create the sounds - and even really big ones, as I moved as a musician from the flute to the cello, to the piano and the double bass. However, sound and music is a powerful, emotional, yet abstract thing, although we know that physics and air pressure are involved.

I am gradually inclined to use less and less physical stuff to create music. An iPad is quite a practical thing for that, because it is very compact, but you can still have direct finger contact to play around with things. Actually, I prefer to carry around less and less stuff. I am really looking forward to the virtual reality era, where the only thing I need is something like glasses, or even an implant. Where I don’t need to carry around screens as I do now (yes, I have a laptop, an iPad and an iPhone and I have a second big screen at home for extra screen estate when I am working). When I can be somewhere in the mountains and have the idea to work on something, I can create a big virtual screen everywhere I want, I can read, write, create music, start a coding project or even perform music in front of an audience.

I don’t like stuff. I just want to travel around autonomously and own as less as possible. Did I become not only a digital, but also a romantic nomad?

Because... I find it also more and more difficult to attach to people. There are a couple of people which I am really fond of. However, building up a ‘normal' romantic relationship conflicts more and more with my desire for autonomy. Still, I don’t want to be completely alone. I would be really unhappy if I would live alone in a flat, would make dinner only for myself and watch some movie afterwards.

For the time being, I travel around, work in other people’s offices or kitchens and have dinner with them. Because there are still many nice people around me who let me do that. However, sometimes I am unsure how long I can go on with this type of life. Is it really possible on a longer term, this romantic nomadism?

#digitalnomad

This must be the kind of acceptance I was looking for my whole life :)

How should a 21st century music label look like?

Recently I started a new music label, called 1M Records. It is a collaboration with a Swiss partner, who runs a booking agency and organises a wonderful music festival in the lovely Swiss city of Baden.

Starting a label made me think about how a 21st century music label should look like. I want to use all the things that I learnt from the web startup community, how people get users to their websites, online marketing, online sales, etc. and adopt them to grow the fan base for our artists.

Promoting artists is the main task of a music label. Promoting something in the digital area is a whole new ball game. In my opinion, in the near future the good music labels will be those who excel in transmedia digital storytelling.

The first buzz word is on the table. This post will mention quite some buzz words. Transmedia digital storytelling is the future of marketing and content creation. Buzz words are actually concise formulations of a simple concept.

Let’s start with storytelling. It is obvious that, as a label, we should tell stories about and together with our artists. It is what labels always have been doing: create a good story around the artist. However, in the past this would mainly be supplying basic assets: writing a compelling biography, shooting band pics and producing music videos. You supply these basic assets to other professional storytellers: journalists, press, tv and radio and they will tell a story with it.

Nowadays, you have far more responsibility as a content creator. Artists and the teams around them tell the story themselves. They must create much more content. Only music is not enough. You post short blurbs on Twitter and Facebook, pictures on Instagram, videos on YouTube or Vimeo. Maybe you should write longer blog posts on Tumblr.

Almost automatically we end up with the ’transmedia’ part of transmedia storytelling. Nowadays, you tell your story via many different media: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, Soundcloud, YouTube, Vimeo, your website, mobile apps, and of course, radio, press, music blogs, television, etc. etc.

Every channel has its own rules and habits. This means that you have to repackage your story again and again. The story becomes quite fragmented, with many bits and pieces. But you always have to keep your overall story in mind.

Most content creators become to understand that they must craft their content 'digital first’. The New York Times wrote an internal rapport about how they should rethink their strategy as ‘digital first’. The rapport leaked and caused quite a stir. Most people consume the content of The New York Times in a digital format. However, the way The New York Times is organised, is still based on the print format. Digital is more like an afterthought. The rapport states that they should work the other way around. Procedures should be rethought and the digital format should be the primary one. Everything else should be a repackaging of that.

Many record labels or artists still see digital as an afterthought, as an extra channel. The 21st century music label should think ‘digital first’.

If music labels become digital companies, how should then the team of a music label look like? I think we will have some new roles in the 21st century music label:

the growth hacker

the designer

the developer

Of course, a music label still has to deal with more traditional tasks, such as maintaining good relationships with traditional media (newspapers, magazines, radio, tv) and talent scouting. But let us focus on the new roles.

The growth hacker is certainly one of the most buzzed company roles at the moment. It is sort of the new name of the marketing manager in the digital startup world. The growth hacker is responsible for the growth of the company. Most companies grow, if they get more users or customers, if users use the product often and if they pay. Growth hackers want to increase acquisition, retention, revenue and referral rates. They conduct a lot of experiments to drive this rates up, by setting up many different landing pages, tweaking little things in the product, etc. It is very interesting to read stories about some of the most successful growth hackers, such as Andy Johns, who invented growth hacking techniques for companies such as Facebook, Twitter and Quora.

We call them hackers, because they generally need some basic technical skills too, creating a lot of test web pages, etc. Later on, I will write a more elaborate post on growth hacking in music.

The 21st century music label will also need a talented designer. Because the label will create a lot of content, web pages, Facebook cover photos, mobile apps, etc., you want that everything looks great and is extremely user friendly. I think that creating album artwork will move to digital formats. As a music label, you are in the art business. All your visual assets should be high quality.

This type of label will also need a software developer. The developer supports all the creative ideas of the growth hacker and the designer. He guarantees that all the websites, apps and servers keep running.

To sum up, we need new job titles and new job roles in the 21st century music label. We need a new team and new competences to tackle the new role of a music label: telling strong, innovative and creative digital stories about music.

#transmedia storytelling music label growth hacking

Finally, mission accomplished!

Experiment: How the internet could change literature

It is quite clear that the internet changed how we communicate about, market and sell our stuff as artists. However, that is al about when we are done with creating art. The last couple of years I have been thinking about how digital and internet technology could change how we create art. It is the starting point for a few past musical experiments and projects which are still going on.

However, I also work for an organization called 'Creatief Schrijven’ (Creative Writing), which supports, advises and stimulates non-professional writers in Flanders. I am responsible for digital projects. This made me think how internet could influence literature. Nowadays, we actually read quite a lot, be it Facebook feeds and Twitter timelines of short messages and links, all day on our smartphones, tablets and computers. Could this new way of reading cause a new way of writing?

At Creatief Schrijven we decided to set up an experiment. Could we create a fictional story in the form of a social media timeline, with posts and profiles from fictional characters? Could this be the beginning of a new literary genre?

Professional writers Ivo Victoria and Carmien Michel took the challenge. They created a first story at fakeboek.be (it is in Dutch). We want to get more interactive about this. People can comment on the story, and in the future they will have the opportunity to write their own stories, co-write with others, etc. You certainly should have a look!

#literature #social media #internet

Traveling to Amsterdam: a new, magic music community, unique CDs and picture cutting stress

Last week I went to Amsterdam to the MAAN event of the artist collective Meduse MagiQ. On that evening 4 acts were playing (Bird on the Wire, Molly Nilsson, Blue Crime, and Bed), but also a lot of attention was paid to decoration, visual art, art installations and performances, and visual projections.

You can watch some more photos here. My motivation for going there was twofold. First, I am working on an international network of niche music communities. Bands such as Amatorski are not really mainstream, but appeal to a more specific audience of indie music lovers. While touring with Amatorski I discovered some of these communities in other countries. However, these communities in different countries are not really connected. Even if you are appreciated as an artist in the music community of your own country, it can be quite difficult to reach a broader audience in those communities in other countries, because you don’t know about them or you are not that well connected. It is my idea that I want to glue together some of those communities. By doing this, I will be able to offer promising artists more opportunities to build an international career. One of those communities, which started to play an important role in my personal life, is the Swiss community around the One Of A Million Festival in Baden. The Meduse MagiQ community seems to be a good Dutch counterpart to this. So, I wanted to get to know the people better, feel the vibe, see some shows of promising bands, and… gather some email addresses of people belonging to this community. When I was discussing this idea some months earlier with the founding mothers of Meduse MagiQ, Aino, Alex and Rosa, they asked me: what are you going to offer them in return, the people who give you their email address? So, I thought: let’s offer them a taste of my explorative work as a solo artist. As an artist, I am working on the idea that music should be a unique experience, bound to location and time. It is why I am working on a music app, which makes the music always different, dependent on the location and the time, which is tracked by your smartphone. However, this is very virtual, something which is quite difficult to offer as a physical gift. CDs are perfect gifts. And physical. However, the music on it, is not unique. Most of the time, there are hundred or thousand copies of it. They all contain the same, endlessly repeatable songs, memories of just one musical performance. But it is something which is very suited to put it in somebody’s hands. So, I have this dilemma: can I make this compromise between something physical and something unique? I decided to make a piece which was unique to this evening in Amsterdam. My starting point was a song by Bird On The Wire, one of the bands playing that night (the band of Meduse MagiQ founding mothers Rosa and Aino). I used a lot of samples of their song, morphed and processed them, and made it into a completely new track. In the spirit of my project philosophy, I didn’t create a definitive version of the track, but ran it into an algorithm to produce 4 slightly different versions, linked to four locations: Gent, BE (where I live), Baden, CH (starting to become my second home, and I made a big part of the music on the train between Baden and Gent), Antwerpen, BE (where I met Aino en Alex to discuss the idea), and Amsterdam, NL, the place where everything was going to happen that night. I bought a multiple CD burner and I decided that I was going to burn the different versions on CDs on the spot that night. With the CD printer you can also print artwork on the CD itself. I thought it would be nice to make this artwork something unique linked to the location of that evening. The people from Meduse MaqiQ found me an amazing local artist, Aafke Bouman, who made a very nice drawing, while the concerts were still going on. When she was ready, I started to print the CDs, with Aafke’s original drawing of that night and with the different versions of my music track. A quite unique present to the people who decided to sign up on my email list.

It was an amazing night and I really liked the idea of having a unique visual of the evening printed on the CDs. Obviously, it was the first experiment and I learned some things that I should do better next time. Aafke made her drawing on paper and it caused some stress to get this properly on my computer in the CD printing template. There was not enough light to make a clean, sharp picture of the drawing (we used an iPhone) and we had to cut it out properly, things we were not prepared for. But in the end, things all worked out and we were very happy with our result! Ready for the next phase of our journey!

The inspiration of train traveling

The last three days I spent about 16 hours on train traveling. I walked around in the railway stations of Gent-Sint-Pieters, Antwerpen-Centraal, Rotterdam-Centraal, Amsterdam-Centraal, Brussels-Midi, Basel SBB and Baden.

Arriving at the platform of Basel railways station

You might think that this must be exhausting, but actually, for me it is very comforting. Traveling gives me freedom, meeting other people in different countries gives me inspiration. Sitting alone four hours in a train keeps me focused. Working in a train is a good environment for single task management. When I work at home (with the constant interruptions of an online work environment), I have more distractions and a lot of small things to take care of. On the train I have more time to devote myself to longer tasks, to think about long-term vision, to go deeper into a topic. This weekend I wrote 3 texts about the future vision of 3 projects, I finished the New York Times report about their Digital First innovation strategy and I started reading the book by Frank Rose about digital storytelling. To relax, I read Arnon Grunberg’s novel ‚Figuranten’. Train traveling makes me productive and gives me inspiration.

#train #travel #productivity

First public appearance tonight as Hroski in Amsterdam. I will burn CDs with unique versions of a track I made with samples of a song by Bird On The Wire, one of the bands playing tonight

Oh See a festival

Two weeks ago I was very happy to work in the festival production team of my Swiss friends. It was the first edition of Oh See at the beautiful lake of Zürich. As always a good occasion to discover some new bands. I made a Spotify playlist of my best discoveries (although I must admit that I already met earlier the lovely guys of The Acid).

#music #spotify #ohsee

Playing with coding for iPhone

Sorry I remained silent for so long about my project.

But I am still working on it. It just needs a lot of research on music and software coding. And that's what I've been doing for the last months. Fortunately, Koen Tanghe is helping me a hand.

I decided to go for an iOS app (for iPhone, iPad and iPod, that means). It is not that I want to be snobby. I don't want that only Apple addicts can experience what I do. But if you make something new, you need to make technological decisions. And Apple seems to give you the best tools to go rather deep into audio software coding.

So, I have been learning about XCode and Objective C (you need this to write software for iPhone). I have been digging information about Audio Units, The Audio Graph, etc.. It is really hard to find good documentation about it. It is challenging. But we are making progress.

I'll keep you posted.

#hroski #ios

Gary Numan: no nostalgia

I just read an interesting interview with Gary Numan, a legendary synth pioneer from the '80s in the magazine Electronic Beats (n°36, Winter 2013/2014, quotes from p. 43). He doesn't really understand the rise of nostalgia in making electronic music. Striking how this relates to Reynoulds analysis about Retromania.

"The thing that I've noticed about it recently is that electronic music has been around long enough to have discovered its own nostalgia, which I find uncomfortable. I've always thought of electronic music as being very forward looking; you could almost say that its reason for being is search out new sounds, develop new technologies, and find new ways of doing things. Now we have people-and this is not a criticism, it's perfectly OK-who are now coming into electronic music and referencing the seventies or the eighties as the source of what they want to do. They're talking about old equipment with almost a romantic glint in their eye. They'd probably put a Minimoog on an althar rather than play it. I don't have any of those romantic, nostalgic feelings about it and I find the very idea of looking backwards musically to come up with something new a really strange concept anyway; I find it particularly strange with electronic music. It goes totally against what I thought it was for. Yet we have this new generation of people who are not thinking like that, who are thinking, "I want to be doing that too! How can we emulate that?" No criticism at all, I'm perfectly happy if people want to do that. But for me..."

(...)

How would you describe the impact of technology on you these days?

"I'm very much at the cutting edge of technology with music. I'm ProTools. I'm plug-ins. The only hardware synth I've got is Virus, which is a phenomenal bit of a kit."

He is called Numan for a reason, I guess.

#music #retromania

Nils Frahm audio experiment: Windisch

I announced quite some time ago that I would conduct musical experiments as a follow-up to the interviews I did about music in the digital age. Now it is time to present you the audio experiment that I did after the interview with Nils Frahm.

I must stress: they are only experiments. The purpose is to spend only a couple of hours on it. Another goal is to be challenged by some unusual constraints, which are time and location related. I will explain in detail how this works below, but first let's offer you this new track.

Please listen with decent headphones or speakers and try to create an environment for an immersive experience. This is really going to sound shit on laptop speakers.

Download the track

Now, for the geeks, some explanations about how I made this.

I mainly use samples from two audio tracks. The first track is the recording that I made with my iPhone during my interview with Nils Frahm. The guy you hear talking, that's Nils. The second track is actually a piece by Nils Frahm, from the album he made together with cellist Anne Müller called 7fingers. The track is called 'Teeth'. I threw these two tracks into a 'Simpler' module in Ableton Live.

What about the time and location constraints? In the Ableton Simpler you can set the start point of the sample. All the start points of my samples are determined by the time and location of the interview I did. The interview took place in Leuven at 19h08. At 19h08 already 79,72 % of the day had passed. That means that I set the start point of the samples at 79,72 % of the total sample. I did a similar thing with the location of the interview by taking the GPS coordinates into account. The latitude value for Leuven is 50,8797°. Because you also have negative latitudes values (on the Southern Hemisphere), I take 0° (the equator) as 50%. This means we were at 78,26 % as far as latitude is concerned. Consequently, a second starting point for my samples was at 78,26%. Finally, I did similar calculations for the longitude value of 4,7044°, which lead to a sample start point of 52,61 %.

Eventually, I worked with 6 samples: from 2 tracks with each 3 starting points. Of course, I only used this as a musical instrument. If you play the Simpler with the different samples on different places of the keyboard, you get very different sounds. A lot of samples are played very low on the keyboard, which causes a very stretched, disorienting sound.

I added some drum samples to make the experiment into a (hopefully) listenable and somehow esthetic piece of music.

The track was for the biggest part made in Restaurant Die Kurve, in Windisch, Switzerland.

#music #hroski #nils frahm

Eurosonic: Spotify tips

Eurosonic is almost a week ago. Here are two Spotify playlists that I made after it.

The first one is with bands I saw during the festival. I saw quite a lot of dance acts at the Simplon venue.

Yes, I must admit: sometimes I like more commercial songs with catchy vocals over a house, dubstep, drum'n'bass or whatever breakbeat beat. Sometimes they use cheap tricks, but I don't mind if they give us a good party. I must say: some acts sound better live than on their recordings.

I also have a Spotify list with new acts that I didn't see, but who seem to be promising. It's not always completely my taste, but if it's somehow exciting, I just share it. Enjoy and let me know what you think!

#music #eurosonic #spotify

Spiegel (13/13)

En ikzelf, spiegel ik me aan een archetype? Allicht wel. Ik ga in mezelf en in de andere op zoek naar de wat androgyne vrouw, een beetje stoer, maar toch voldoende vrouwelijk. Mijn nieuw lief heeft korter haar dan ik zelfs ooit als kind gehad heb. Ze lijkt een beetje een jongetje, maar is tegelijk te schattig en te knap om niet volop een vrouw te zijn. Een boeiende mix van vrouwelijkheid en mannelijkheid die me in deze levensfase bijzonder goed ligt. Zij en ik kunnen op het ene moment kwetsbaar, op het andere beschermend zijn. En ikzelf, hoe ver wil ik gaan in die vrouwelijkheid? Een androgyne look zal ik altijd wel nastreven, en graag wat naturel blijven, als het kan. Bij deze tekst, die in de krant komt, horen uiteraard foto's. Dan komen er nog meer dan anders vragen op: zouden we niet wat verder durven gaan? Meer (of zelfs veel meer) make-up? Maar als het puntje bij het paaltje komt toch liefst niet te veel. Het blijft een voortdurende zoektocht naar de moeilijk balans tussen naturel en toch de vrouwelijkheid wat in de verf willen zetten. De eeuwige twijfel voor de spiegel. De twijfel… van een vrouw?

#gender

Angst of liefde? (12/13)

Nu in de eerste plaats het holebithema (het transgenderthema moet op dit niveau eigenlijk nog op de agenda komen) de laatste maanden internationaal een topic is geworden (de discussie over het huwelijk in Frankrijk, de verontrustende situatie in Rusland), probeer ik de conservatievere kijk op de dingen niet eigengereid weg te lachen en te begrijpen wat er in hen omgaat. Maar het lukt me maar moeilijk om de Russen, om fundamentalisten of om conservatieven in al hun gradaties te begrijpen. Het enige dat ik kan bedenken is dat hun primaire drijfveer angst is. Een aantal weken terug verwoordde kunstenaar Koen Vanmechelen een gedachte die al langer in mijn onbewuste rondwaarde: een mens kan gedreven worden door twee grote emoties, liefde of angst (want haat is eigenlijk maar een uitbreiding van angst). Ik vermoed dat veel conservatief en zeker fundamentalistisch denken gevoed wordt door angst, angst voor de complexiteit van de wereld. Omgaan met die complexiteit lijkt me een van de grootste uitdagingen van deze tijd en we mogen ons niet laten verleiden tot oversimplificatie en een te strikte normativiteit. Laat de archetypes jouw houvast zijn, maar zie er de relativiteit van in en dring ze niet op aan iedereen.

#gender

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