iRedux: Destroy your copyrighted music!

Music and copyrights, not the most inspiring subject to talk about. It’s not very simple either in these days of illegal and legal downloads, subscription models and streaming audio. Unless you do something fun with it, like destroying the copyrighted music and creating something completely new out of it.

That’s exactly what iRedux by Oliver Farshi does. You feed it some music you bought or downloaded, and it completely destroys the file for you. Then it uses this material to create an new piece of ambient music.

The website says: “By sacrificing music that you don’t truly own (perhaps pirated or purchased under a license from a record label), iRedux will create something original that you can legitimately share."

I like the idea. You are not allowed to share music you downloaded without permission of the owner, but when you transform it into something new and the original is unrecognizable, you can say that it’s yours and give it away.

What this project does is raising even more questions in the discussion about ownership and authorship, and I think it’s mainly aimed at doing just that. It will not be able to create a well produced song for you, similar to what you feed it.

The first examples of what this sounds like can be heard on ‘Minimal Bling’, a mini album created by Geraldine Juárez and Oliver Farshi, the creator of iRedux, which can be downloaded here.

On an aesthetic note, I would prefer the resulting audio to be a bit more subtle and easier on the ears. Noise is what you get, and I’m not a fan of reducing bit depth, which iRedux seems to do all the time. Oh well, we might as well process it another time.

iRedux isn’t available for download yet, so if you want to start using it yourself, check the website for further details.