The Beat of Righteous Anger: APD Play and Sound

Australia's former Leader of the Opposition, Tony Abbot, has been in the news recently with his appointment as a UK trade envoy, despite his views on homosexuality (it's threatening), masculine biological authority (men are more adapted to exercise authority). Julia Gillard's address to his acts of sexism has inspired people to adopt her call to challenge misogyny through the social media platform TikTok. Revisiting her powerful speech led me to Rob Davidson's moving piece with The Australian Voices choir:

My assignment this week was to sideload the audio of Gillard's speech into Beat Saber as a playable song. Did I make it?

Allow me to digress into the steps to sideload a ripped audio version of a piece of creative work hosted on youtube. The digital nature of this artform means that it can be edited and distributed (Kallinikos, Aaltonen & Martn, 2010) in ways that break the artists' copywright protections. I could create an audio file into a format suitable for editing and reformatting for the VR game Beat Saber. This reformatting and remaking of the original piece has technical parallels to the 'inter networking' (Digital Studio, 2020) that form an etymological origin story for the internet: traversing audio file formats of m4a, ogg and Beat Saber format egg files and crossing the operating system divides of my laptops Apple MacOS and Quests's android operating system using a bridge of usb-c cables and software like SideQuest 

This inter networking of different technology ecosystems was built with guidance from Beat Saver Discord group. The game of changing the BeatSaber game is an act of creation, crafting an emotional experience (Salen, 2003) through incorporating a chosen song, mapping the rhythm to the movement of boxes that get smashed with a virtual light saber, and building an instance of this captivating game. Participating in this Game of Mods is a socially competitive game, the agon, (Hiuzinga 1955) where players demonstrate taste in music and technical mastery as individuals and as a community.

There is a parallel to the copyright considerations of social media platform TikTok and the vr game Beat Saber. Artists are not getting paid for their creative work. Our ethical and legal obligations are out of step with the technical capabilities of these platforms. Their is no bridge between the creative possibilities of playing with the music we love and the desire to meet our obligations and pay artists when we include their work in our creations on these platforms. My personal reconciliation of this ethical space was to make a patreon donation to Australian Voices.

In the end, I didn't load their audio work into Beat Saber, I got bamboozled by the audacity ogg audio file format that the Beat Saber mapping tool wouldn't accept was actually an ogg file. However if I had, I think I would have been even happier than in this made up video of me playing the Misogyny speech.

References:

Huizinga, J 1998, Homo ludens : a study of the play-element in culture, Reprint of the ed. 1949. edn, London.

Kallinikos, Jannis, Aaltonen, Aleksi, & Marton, Attila. (2010). A theory of digital objects. First Monday. https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v15i6.3033

Digital Studio University of Melbourne 2020, “Internet” and “Hackers”: New Threats and Opportunities, YouTube, viewed 20 Sep 2020, <https://arts.unimelb.edu.au/research/digital-studio/programs/seminar-series/2020/internet-and-hackers-new-threats-and-opportunities>

Salen, Katie, & Zimmerman, Eric. (2003). Rules of play : game design fundamentals. MIT Press