Introducing Low Frequency

Welcome to Low Frequency. This is my personal/professional blog where I’ll be writing about interesting things I’ve learned about music and technology both through my job at the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at UMass Amherst and in my own time as a curious person who tries really hard to find satisfying answers to questions I have. 

I’m starting this blog to write about the history of music community online, and I’m pretty certain this is the first attempt anyone has ever made to tell that story comprehensively. The path of this story is definitely a windy one, running through scenes ranging from Chicago drill music to the Grateful Dead to the rave underground, networks that came before the Internet like ARPANET, and filesharing technologies that would inspire Spotify. I won’t be telling this story chronologically, because it’s a lot easier to understand how all these disparate moments fit together thematically.

I’m telling this story on this blog first because I think this history belongs to the Internet and the music lovers who have done something interesting with this technology.

The research going into this blog is still in progress, but so far it’s made up of interviews I’ve conducted, other people’s writing, artifacts I’ve found trawling the Wayback Machine, and lots of word-of-mouth anecdotes I’ve accumulated over the years. I have personal experience with some of these topics, so I’ll be leaning on that too, although I’m trying not to rely exclusively on my recollections at any point. “Stuff that happened online” isn’t a genre of memory defined by intricate detail for me, plus I was pretty stoned while using the Internet from like 2009 through 2015.

This is my first time writing publicly about a lot of my research from the past 5 years, mostly done for my graduate work during my masters program at MIT and in support of the Freq project I’m developing at iDPI. That’s a little bit because I’ve been dragging my feet, but mostly because I’ve been waiting until I feel like I actually have a point to make with all this. I’ll tell you what that point is in the next post, I swear.

I’ll try to get around to some other research I’ve done on concert live streaming during COVID and comparisons between the environmental and climate impacts of physical media and on-demand music streaming. Plus there will probably be more. Every once in a blue moon I’ll dedicate a full post to a hot take or an opinion, but I’ll try to keep it minimal. You know what they say, opinions are like assholes. People on the Internet can’t stop posting ‘em!

But the nature of blogging is it’s pretty off the cuff, so I’m basically writing first drafts of all. I’m always glad to have a nice conversation about what I got wrong, so don’t hesitate to comment or reach out. Heads up that I have visual processing dyslexia, so there are going to be typos and weird sentences with missing words or autocorrect nonsense.

Also, I’m undoubtedly missing things. I take requests!

Who am I and why am I doing this? Well, hi, I’m Mike. I’m an active musician—my dear friends at Lizard Label put out my solo album Slug Beat recently and I’m really proud of it—and I’ve been involved in underground music for a long time. I used to write for and edit the blog AdHoc that was associated with the old 285 Kent venue in Brooklyn and had a bit of a freelance music journalism career for a few years. I’ve played a bunch of shows, booked a bunch of shows, and met most of my friends and romantic partners through music. I also ran the project Groove Café to do community work in DIY music and distribute materials about good safety practices online. I do want to find a way to pick that back up again.

I’ve been researching music community online in earnest for about five years at this point, since I started a masters program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT (RIP). My master's thesis was an ethnographic study of how communities gathering around improvised music transitioned from in-person scenes to online ones during the early days of the COVID lockdowns, then how they used their social ties to help support protest movements during summer 2020 following the murder of George Floyd.

A big part of why I’ve been continuing that research is for a software project I’m developing at iDPI called Freq, short for Frequency. It’s social media software for community-based music discovery, powered by the MusicBrainz database and inspired directly by actual Internet music history, as well as contemporary social media platforms like Letterboxd and Reddit. 

Freq’s development is driven research: ethnographic and historical research I’m conducting, co-design research with college radio stations, the incredible social science research by my colleagues in the lab and our field. And I’m working hard to make sure that this is a project that responds to the needs of real music communities, so I’m experimenting with involving community and college radio stations in the development process to make this relevant to real music communities that exist in actual places. I’m very intent on this project enriching music culture, not investors.

So basically this blog is one of the results of my research, and Freq is the other. I’ve learned a lot about music history and music community and the music industry and the music Internet, and I want to put that information to good use. 

Why am I calling this blog Low Frequency? Aside from the Freq connection…

Low frequencies, when they’re audible, are bass frequencies, or the sound that we tend to feel most viscerally in parts of our bodies that aren’t our ears. Lots of music that owes its popularity to the Internet contains a lot of bass, a lot of low frequencies, especially hip hop and various electronic dance musics.

In a synthesizer, a low frequency oscillator (or LFO) creates a wave that moves too slowly to hear, used to control the sounds you can hear. So, you would use a keyboard to actually play a note on a synthesizer, but the LFO would change some quality of that note while you’re playing it, such as its loudness or its pitch or its timbre. An LFO doesn’t control sound, but modulates it.

But low frequency also describes the kind of opposite of what the Internet has been shaped to reward. We’re supposed to check our  notifications all the time, chat with people instantly, keep up with every single update in a breaking news story, etc. I look at Low Frequency as a blog that operates on a different time scale, tracing the ebb and flow of a phenomenon to understand how the Internet has taken and lost shape at various points in time. 

Much like an LFO in a synthesizer, I don’t think music community has ever controlled the internet, but it certainly shapes and modulates it. And on the flip side, you’d only ever hear an LFO while playing a note on a synth. Similarly, music community is only legible when it reflects what shape the Internet takes in a particular moment.

And lastly, I reserve the right to post with a low frequency.

Hit that freqin’ subscribe button. Thank you, talk soon.