The Creation Engine: MC Bartle And DJ Babbage

How did I end up in a club dancing like a nutter, waving a glow stick and wearing a rave mask emblazoned with the copyleft symbol?

It’s a long story.

On Monday, Jerry Paffendorf of the Acceleration Studies Foundation announced that Dr Richard Bartle would be coming to Second Life for a special Future Salon Q&A session.

He also cheekily suggested that someone should write a hardcore techno dance track sampling Richard saying "If anyone samples this for a hardcore techno dance track I shall expect a royalty."

I'd been meaning to make some music for a while, so I spent a couple of hours on Monday night throwing together a hard drum n bass amen mash-up featuring Richard's sample.

On Thursday Greg Lastowka mentioned the track on Terra Nova talked a bit about whether Richard's claim to intellectual property rights was legal while Komuso Tokugawa quoted William Gibson saying, "Who owns the music and the rest of our culture? We do. All of us."

At that point I decided it would even better to include Richard's IPR demands in an open source hardcore techno dance track.

I'd been wondering whether it would be possible to make a good hip hop or dance track using only open source samples for a while, so on Friday night I went to creativecommons.org and from there to ccmixter.org to download some legal drum loops.

The ccmixter site is a really great idea. It only hosts tracks which can be sampled and builds a family tree of tracks which sample each other which is very cool. The biggest problem for me was that ccmixter.org didn't exist in the 1970s when it could have open sourced some Clyde Stubblefield samples to rival breaks like The Winstons “Amen Brother” or The Incredible Bongo Band's “Apache”. Unfortunately, not only does he have the best tunes, the devil has the best samples.

Nevertheless, a few hours later I had a completely legal version of “Hardcore” uploaded on to ccmixter.org and linked to the tracks it samples. Have a listen and if you decide to remix the track, let me know.

So, now I had a URL for my completely legal track that I could stream from a plot of land in Second Life, but I wanted to wear my new open source credentials with pride so I downloaded the copyleft symbol from Wikipedia and spent a couple of hours this morning building a rave mask which makes your avatar dance when you wear it and optionally starts streaming “Hardcore” from ccmixter.org in to Second Life. Combined with Kit Proudfoot's glow sticks it makes a great outfit to wear while listening to hardcore techno dance tracks.

Naturally, it's freely modable and copyable, so feel free to remix the mask as well as the track. You could turn it in to an open source jukebox, fill it full of open source dance animations or maybe just turn it in to a lamp shade.

It will be interesting to see where ccmixter, creative commons and media rights go from here and how they affect Second Life. At the moment though I just hope we can get a few dozen masked ravers dancing like nutters at the next Second Life Future Salon.