✧unun. 🛠 Building our own music and multimedia platform - Sofja & Astrosuka

[Applause] [Music] hi i'm sophka hi i am astrosuga we are very excited to be here we are going to talk a bit about our work and share some ideas and processes we're both musicians and artists from buenos aires argentina very beautiful city we love it for the last several years we've been working in different areas related to our artistic practices practices like organizing events parties experimental electronic music live shows and also doing workshops and art exhibitions and releasing our own music we are own net label and collective called reno we used to be part of and for the last year and a half we have been in uh in the nft ecosystem trying different uh platforms and uh tools of uh uh presenting our work to the world and uh making a living out of out of it which is a very very important thing yes we've been mainly working with visual arts in the nft space and we we really like like exploring the new platforms and projects that always are coming up um because each one like uh offers a different way to interact and to yeah to try different formats but we we were also really interested all this time in building our own space because in that way we can decide which things we want to do and maybe to have like yeah a little personal space to do the all the things that we want uh in and explore formats and ways of connecting different multimedia and music [Music] and also get to know like the tools and how this web 3 stuff works because it's a really important thing in our practice like open up things and and trying to understand which parts makes what and in that way you have more control and more power in in yeah deciding how you are going to present your work so we came up with this new project that is called unun that is going to be a small net label focused on releasing music and multimedia and experimenting with different formats of releases yes we're trying to build a space where we can feel free to do whatever crazy thing we come up with and uh being able to publish it uh and also like uh having the platform being an extension of our our identity and not having to like adapt to uh something that has nothing to do with us like the music industry is something we're not really part of even though we like have music on streaming platforms and all that it's not we're not making a living out of it and yeah it's just like something we're part of just because uh i don't know why [Laughter] i mean our friends could listen to our music uh via some more personal experience and yeah so [Music] we're very interested in expressing our identities through the tools we use and through our platform and uh we also believe in the in that idea that every community and every even every individual should be a platform because since now it's possible thanks to all the other tools you developers and thinkers are providing so that's a perfect opportunity we want to focus our on our uh on a small scene of uh uh of buenos aires underground like our friends and uh yeah to try and to make something humble you know because it's something that also happens uh that every new platform project that emerges it's like trying to be the next big thing and we don't really like that attitude we don't really need things bigger than the protocols that uh lay below the things we see on the surface like stuff like the blockchain and all the metadata protocols and all that stuff it's very important to have something that global and interoperable but on the surface we need more identity like millions of different small platforms that interconnect and build like bigger networks but yeah no one has to adapt to and not being who they are like yes i think that's something that is really inspiring for us is thinking about how if we learn to talk in the same language we can build like things that are completely different uh and super personal and representative of some kind of small community or whatever but uh they can talk to each other because there's they share this the same protocol or they share the same metadata standards so so yeah it's a really exciting moment to be building stuff because all those things are possible now like when midi came up and suddenly you can you you have the chance to connect all these different brand instruments between each other and make music with stuff that look so different uh but yeah you plug a cable and they work and they are talking to each other and that's really awesome and and that's one of the things that technology like gives us i guess um and the other thing that we are thinking about a lot is the metadata and how that is like also how that also offer us new ways of thinking how we are going to present our work and our music and or everything like thinking what information are you going to give about your release like maybe you yeah yeah not just the description but also like you can include different media in your you know release so there could it's like there are the possibilities are infinite like for example we're thinking about media a lot we love me it's a beautiful technology we're thinking it makes total sense to include midi for electronic music releases as uh part of a music release and having it associated to er to a song and then making building something with that we have ideas for future projects to uh future releases of our platform to make use of this resources so uh but first we wanted to start with something more simple we always were curious about um generative art of course and since i mean music digital music distribution is kind of boring it could be more exciting and there are also already people experimenting within the free space with all that so yeah we wanted to to make our first single uh for the platform is a music piece uh sophie and i wrote and produced using uh this old synthesizer we bought not that all but yeah a hardware thing like a big box that makes sounds using with tables it's beautiful so we want to each we want to have a of course like a unique artwork for each edition of the song it is going to be an erc2721 a token with a the same audio a a little surprise also and each artwork is going to be different so for that we had to learn to use p5gs so i don't have any programming background software nose stuff but yeah we're we're little babies in terms of programming so it was a crazy experience to like okay so uh oh that's how you draw a circle now give me like um thousands of those and let's see what the happens and it's so it was all very very chaotic and stressful but also like beautiful because we've built the whole thing like in a couple of weeks and and yeah we also were uh thinking about okay how do we arrange all the metadata because we use the p5 gs to generate artworks and also like associate each artwork to a specific link on ipfs of the music and there's also a second link for certain traits like being this hidden track i spoiled it but i don't know i don't care it's still going to be a surprise so yeah we had to include all the information there and it's generated with with the artwork and then yeah we've had some problems uploading it and connecting the smart contract to that metadata because we didn't know that you have to like erase the json extension so it would work and it was like yes but i think this all this technical stuff wouldn't be possible if it weren't for like our friend max that really helped us in finding the exact tools that we needed to build something because before we were like always thinking yeah we have to make this make this and we were like googling stuff and it's kind of overwhelming if you don't know like how to search for a thing that is so specific because there are many ways of doing things and yeah it's really important to have someone that is pointing you in the right direction in this kind of things because the information is there it's just it's just a matter of getting there and he kind of pushed us towards it so we thank him yeah and also we made some like he made this template for us to stop start building on top like the the react app with all the hooks and stuff we are still learning how to use but yes we think it's really important to share all this stuff so we want to make this project open source and upload it to github and all the stuff and make some kind of tutorial that it may not be like very technical but i think it really helped us to have these steps step-by-step thing with only only the parts that you need to to change to make it your own uh yeah like a template yeah like a template with all the stuff together uh yeah because i think it's important to show other artists that these things are possible and you can be your own platform just like downloading some lines of code from the internet and yeah [Applause] yeah and that's our project we have a next release after this one and that's going to be a compilation with music from our friends it's going to be like five tracks it's not huge but it's important for us because it's people we really love and and yeah the idea is basically the same to have like a generative artwork for each edition of the track but also have the different tracks and we don't know which how how would be the best way to release like albums we we think that is important i don't know i really like listening to whole albums i i wish there were more more whole albums because everything got really centered in single releases and songs individually uh so yeah yeah for now like we've been thinking about this stuff and we know there are ways like uh the chaos project they were making this uh nfp that that contains other entities and stuff but we we we are going to get there too but for now i think we're just going to like really release it all the tracks on the tracks like one two three four five and then again one two three four five like the metadata of the music is going to be that way and each artwork is different and we i think we'll make it like so you you can only mean uh five uh tokens all at once all at once and not less so so people grab like the whole album because there was also yeah the possibility of making a single audio file of the tracks but i don't know if it will work like in long term it's more uh like as a release of different of different artists i think it's not the best way but yeah i want to get there and now that we have this project we are also going to investigate more about all the other people involved in this for a while and yeah like trying to learn new yeah it's really exciting yeah so now we're going to basically like show the steps and like some technical details of how we made this thing oh you know so we started making the the music for this release and decided to give give ourselves the restriction of only working with this synth that we have recently that is an access virus ti and the idea was to make all the midi in the computer and send it to the synth and record it from the stereo output of the scene so we can we have it like already mixed by how we made the the sounds from scratch like mixing it uh thinking from the sound design and then gave it a little bit of mastering uh here with the compression and eqs and a little bit effects in some parts to give it more color and yeah it was it was fun also because it gave us the possibility to to listen to it and then change the the patch here and change all the sounds and it's something completely different although it has the same notes and the same timing like and the the mood and the the expression of the music is completely different so it gave us also ideas to to try new things with releases in the future with this project like with the midi files and the stuff which is fun [Music] yeah once we had the music ready we used this app called nft storage to upload our files to ipfs each it is like super simple you log in with your github or whatever you like and generate an api key and then drag and drop the files here and you get the ipfs link to use later on your contract and whenever whatever you need to link to your files um yeah we used to be five gs for uh for the artwork it's it was like uh our first time making this uh and using this it's a javascript library like an adaptation of processing yeah it was a nice first approach to generative art and it was fun to also like uh figuring out uh the way to generate also the metadata stuff in the same script so when we finish like the recording of each [Music] each artwork it also comes with its own json file with all the metadata um yeah we have like two tracks one is a hidden track it's a secret so don't tell anyone and once we had everything like exported correctly we end up with this huge file that is like a list of all the jsons with the traits and we had to replace here like the ipfs link which points out to our images that we had uploaded to the ipfs with nfd storage and then to split this into multiple files we made this little code in python that gets rid of some extra characters and yeah if you run it on the terminal you got all these files with everything like separated which is super cool so then we uploaded the json files to the ipfs with the same app and use this front end that made max which interacts with the story contracts for the editions and the drops and yeah you can make multiple additions with this part and we are using this one because we have different different networks for each token so here we we pasted like the ipfs link and here you should paste the other link which directs to the json file where you you have all the metadata of the general metadata of the contract we are building our website based on this uh max also uh yeah we made a fork of the ripple and then made our own website which has like a different ui and we have to finish the design part and all of that but it's it's super cool because we now have our special meeting page for a project there are very few things you have to change to to make it work with your own contracts it's like yeah you have like here anywhere you have like the link to a contract you just replace it with your contract and also like to to show a little like example of the process of uh configuring this thing it's like you just paste uh your contract salaries and a couple of fields and adjust the mean price right and then it's it's good to go notice and there you have it it was like cereal dot serial serial two green cable x that's very cheap for beautiful artwork and yeah there you see it loading it's waiting for the direct section to pass so then it can like make this postman dialogue really nice postman dialogue and there you have it so we're going to run a test with our uh i would uh to display like the the nft that has been minted in the gallery with our friends contract gregorian ash very talented and kind human being he's going to be part of our compilation so just copy and paste the address in the gallery tsx and then there you have it all these precious tokens sometimes things just won't just want to wait till they work and have a little break um yeah so this is it your our little gallery of our tokens we then will have to implement like some kind of marketplace where you can just see what are the tokens that you have in your wallet and listed and or by some others that have like price set and but that will be in the future for now i don't think that's necessary yeah for now now that we will have the meeting instance first and then we'll uh we'll be adding new functionalities like the yeah like the marketplace so you can like listen and sell your tokens and we have here like a nice audio player with all the music and all the things uh released with the platform so this is basically the template for our future releases and it's plain and very simple but uh we can adapt it to be whatever we want yeah so hope this is uh useful for someone and thanks for watching this and yeah like you can get in touch with us if you want to chat or like have like help with something or whatever and yeah