Decolonizing Electronic Music Starts With Its Software

By: Tom Faber February 25 2021 ElectronicGlobal

In 2004, Khyam Allami was ready to give up on electronic music. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t write melodies that sounded like the music in his head. “It felt like the software was leading me somewhere that wasn’t my intention, and I couldn’t understand why that was,” he recalls. Born in Syria to Iraqi parents, Allami had grown up in London playing guitar and drums in punk bands. He was exploring Arabic music for the first time—or at least trying to, but the music’s distinctive quarter-tones were proving difficult to emulate. The software simply wasn’t made for him.

While every part of the world has its own distinct acoustic instruments, electronic producers around the globe must make do with a narrow range of production tools. Popular digital audio workstations like Ableton, FL Studio, Logic, and Cubase were built primarily to facilitate music-making in a Western mode, according to the principles of European classical music. If an artist wants to compose with the common features of music from Africa, Asia, or Latin America, they have to fight against the software and rely on complex workarounds.

Last month, Allami unveiled an ambitious solution to this problem. More than 15 years have passed since his initial frustrations, and he is now an established multi-instrumentalist, music researcher, and founder of Nawa Recordings, a label for alternative Arabic music. At the virtual incarnation of Berlin’s CTM Festival for experimental arts, Allami—along with Tero Parviainen and Samuel Diggins of the creative technology studio Counterpoint—introduced Leimma and Apotome, two pieces of free software that aim to shatter the hegemony of Western musical thought in electronic production. Leimma allows users to explore tuning systems from around the world or create their own, while Apotome offers generative music creation using these diverse tuning systems. They intend to give musicians a blank musical slate, rather than nudging them towards any specific musical tradition.

“I think what Khyam and Counterpoint have done is amazingly beautiful,” Iranian producer Sote tells me. “It has the potential to revolutionize the process and the outcome of electronic music composition.”

Music carries its own local characteristics the world over—a song might “sound” Turkish, Indian, Irish, or Cuban principally because of its distinct timbre, rhythm, and tuning. While diverse rhythms and timbres (the characteristic tone of an instrument) are relatively easy to approximate in production software, tuning is another story. A tuning system is a collection of pitches from which musical scales and modes are derived, and the subject has attracted some of history’s greatest minds to expound on the mysterious relationship between music, mathematics, and metaphysics. Tuning is one of the most fundamental elements of music-making, Allami says, yet it is also one of the least understood.

Most electronic music tools (along with the guitar, piano, and wind instruments) are set by default to a tuning system called equal temperament, which is the foundation of most Western classical music from the past two centuries. This does not allow for microtonality—the notes between a standard piano’s keys—which is commonly used in musical traditions outside of Europe. Through his research, Allami discovered that it had been possible to explore microtonality using MIDI, the language of electronic music tools, since 1992, but software developers had not implemented functions to make microtonal tunings intuitive to use. As one product manager of a popular music notation program told him, they simply didn’t believe that there was a market for such features.

Allami expresses a keen sense of injustice about the young global musicians struggling to make digital sounds that feel authentically local. “It’s not that the music they make will sound ‘more Western,’ but it is forced into an unnatural rigidity,” Allami says. “The music stops being in tune with itself. A lot of the culture will be gone. It’s like cooking without your local spices, or speaking without your local accent. For me, that’s a remnant of a colonial, supremacist paradigm. The music is colonized in some way.”

This was certainly the experience of Kenyan producer Slikback, one of the musicians invited to test-drive Apotome. “I find Ableton pushes me towards following the beat grid,” he says. “Everything sounds somehow Western—very mechanical, not organic like the rough tones and raw drums I heard growing up in Nairobi. Even as I try to break away from the loops and the 1-2-3-4 drive of these music tools, I always end up back there somehow.”

Unassuming as they may seem, these technologies are far from neutral. Like social media platforms, dating apps, and all data-driven algorithms, music production tools have the unconscious biases of their creators baked into their architecture. If a musician opens a new composition and they are given a 4/4 beat and equal tempered tuning by default, it is implied that other musical systems do not exist, or at least that they are of less value.

In 2012, the musician and writer Jace Clayton launched Sufi Plug-Ins, a suite of Ableton tools that explore North African music and culture, including a drum machine for handclaps, synthesizers hardwired to Arabic scales, and a tool that respectfully lowers your computer’s volume at the time of the Muslim call to prayer. While the cultural limitations of software like Ableton and FL Studio have not stopped artists from Latin America, China, East Africa, and the MENA region from finding workarounds to create some of the most compelling electronic music in recent years, Clayton argues these innovations do not negate the need for new tools.

“Sure, Ableton is flexible, and on the one hand you can say these great producers from Kenya are using German software to make the funkiest music imaginable,” Clayton says. “But wouldn’t it be nice if we could extend the same creativity we have making music into how we make our tools? We might even end up with Germans having to fight against African software to make their metronomic techno.”

Seeing Leimma and Apotome in action during CTM’s digital showcases last month was far from an academic exercise in postcolonial theory—there was the thrill of musicians witnessing their horizons broadening right before our eyes. Across five performances, artists from around the world used the software to play sets ranging from austere experimentalism to raucous dance tracks. Indonesian producer Wahono adopted the tuning systems of wind and reed instruments from Sumatra and Java, while Tunisian producer Deena Abdelwahed called on the tunings of beloved Arabic songs from her childhood. Slikback drew inspiration from traditional Kenyan trance rituals, and found Apotome—with its generative system that creates music according to parameters set by the artist—pushed him to define his own sound more clearly. All three producers said that they plan to use Leimma and Apotome moving forward.

Following last month’s launch, musicians around the world started experimenting with the software and submitting their own local tunings. (Those inclined can still book a slot to perform live with Apotome on the CTM site through March 14.) But Allami believes the technology has great potential beyond the world of experimental music. He gives the example of genre-bending Spanish star Rosalía: “She has incredible vocal capabilities and knows the flamenco tradition, which is very microtonal, but she’s forced to sing with Auto-Tune using equal temperament. This can help break us out of that.” It could also have radical applications to sampling. Allami takes the example of U.S. hip-hop producers like Timbaland, who have created hits by sampling music from India or the Arab world. Instead of taking those samples wholesale, they could copy the tuning from the source song and use it to tune their 808s and basslines, drawing the distinctive feel of the original without actually using the sample.

It is vitally important to Allami that Leimma and Apotome are accessible to everyone, which is why the programs are available for free and run through web browsers, rather than as plug-ins for expensive music production software (though they may be released as plug-ins in the future). He is particularly interested in the educational potential of the software. For too long, the world’s tuning systems have been presented as an academic concern—something to be studied rather than heard. Leimma offers an intuitive, tactile introduction for anyone. Even if you know nothing about the musical systems of Indonesia, Japan, or Iran, you can jump in and hear the differences immediately.

Leimma has already taught Abdelwahed lessons about Arabic music that she never knew she needed. “Before this project, I didn’t know major and minor scales were Western,” says the Tunisian producer. “I thought they were simply ‘melodies’ and I didn’t realize there was an alternative.” The programs allowed her to musically access something within herself, to address an absence she had long felt but never been able to articulate. “I had always felt oppressed by my melodic phrases in Ableton. I don’t want to say my brain is wired to Arabic scales because I’m an Arab, but I found it much more logical to go from one note to another in Leimma and Apotome. They brought me close to something familiar, closer to what I truly want to express.”