Too Much Music

Greg and Alison return to detonate the incendiary claim that ended Part 1: Can you make art without selling your soul to capitalism? They dissect the music industry’s machinery, Spotify’s frictionless decay, and the eerie rise of AI-generated content while revealing how these forces drain creativity and trap artists. But hope sparks in the Fediverse: Alison shares her dive into Mastodon’s nerd-utopia, where community-run festivals like the Radio Free Fedi Fest and raw hardware synths fuel a rebellion against the attention economy. From Yamaha CS-30 patching rituals to the power of inefficient creativity, this manifesto declares: your art isn’t a product. It’s a sanctuary.Doctor Body is Alison & Greg's experimental electronic duo.PatternSonix is Alison & Greg's niche consulting firm focusing on the intersection between sound and AI.Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or check us out at toomuchmusicpodcast.comMusic, blogging, & more from your hosts: Dr. Greg Wilder | Alison Wilder

Greg and Alison dive headfirst into the toxic grip of big tech on creativity and mental autonomy. Sharing raw personal journeys from Alison’s early Facebook rebellion to Greg’s radical "de-Googling" in the mountains of New Hampshire, they dissect how algorithms poison focus, erode privacy, and stifle artistic expression. Your fearless hosts then expose the hidden cost of "engagement": stolen attention spans, fractured communities, and a world where making art feels impossible. With fiery anecdotes about startup culture, zombie-like scrolling, and Trent Reznor’s DX7-smashing rage, this candid conversation asks: Can we reclaim our minds from the feed?Doctor Body is Alison & Greg's experimental electronic duo.PatternSonix is Alison & Greg's niche consulting firm focusing on the intersection between sound and AI.Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or check us out at toomuchmusicpodcast.comMusic, blogging, & more from your hosts: Dr. Greg Wilder | Alison Wilder

In this episode, our fearless hosts trace the evolution of digital audio tools from these academic, computationally intensive origins—where concepts like granular synthesis were offline processes—to the real-time, interactive software common today. They delve into the technical and philosophical differences between operating systems, characterizing macOS as a stable but closed "walled garden" and Linux as a powerful, open, but more demanding environment, particularly concerning the challenge of third-party plugin compatibility. The conversation culminates in a strong philosophical argument for adopting Linux, framing it not merely as a technical choice but as a deliberate act of resistance against the surveillance, subscription-based models, and constant commercial distractions of modern proprietary software, ultimately advocating for it as a path toward greater creative freedom, focus, and digital autonomy.Doctor Body is Alison & Greg's experimental electronic duo.PatternSonix is Alison & Greg's niche consulting firm focusing on the intersection between sound and AI.Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or check us out at toomuchmusicpodcast.comMusic, blogging, & more from your hosts: Dr. Greg Wilder | Alison Wilder

This episode primarily explores the hosts' deliberate transition towards hardware-centric music creation methodologies, examining the motivations and practicalities of minimizing reliance on digital audio workstations. Key topics include the distinct studio setups of both hosts, one embracing an entirely out-of-the-box recording paradigm and the other integrating analog mixing with DAW-based capture, both aiming to circumvent the creative impediments often associated with computer-based production. The discussion highlights how tactile interfaces and the inherent characteristics of physical instruments can foster a more immediate, focused, and arguably more authentic engagement with the compositional and performance process, moving away from the "work zone" mentality often induced by screen-based environments.Doctor Body is Alison & Greg's experimental electronic duo.PatternSonix is Alison & Greg's niche consulting firm focusing on the intersection between sound and AI.Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or check us out at toomuchmusicpodcast.comMusic, blogging, & more from your hosts: Dr. Greg Wilder | Alison WilderDoctor Body is Alison & Greg's experimental electronic duo.PatternSonix is Alison & Greg's niche consulting firm focusing on the intersection between sound and AI.Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or check us out at toomuchmusicpodcast.comMusic, blogging, & more from your hosts: Dr. Greg Wilder | Alison Wilder

Feeling overwhelmed by endless gear options and digital distractions? In this episode Alison & Greg dissect how modern life impacts musical creativity. They tackle the seductive "gear honeymoon" – is it real inspiration or just a temporary high? - and explore the critical difference between technologies that free your mind versus those that try to do your thinking for you. How can musicians cultivate a unique artistic voice when consumerism and algorithmic content constantly vie for attention? Tune in for a thought-provoking conversation on navigating the modern creative landscape, fostering genuine, internally-driven musical expression and move beyond fleeting novelty to focus on more a sustainable, authentic artistic practice. This is a conversation about finding your own creative space in a world designed to pull you away from it. Doctor Body is Alison & Greg's experimental electronic duo.PatternSonix is Alison & Greg's niche consulting firm focusing on the intersection between sound and AI.Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or check us out at toomuchmusicpodcast.comMusic, blogging, & more from your hosts: Dr. Greg Wilder | Alison Wilder

Coming at ya with a show about live performance: the gear we use, how we think about it, and what we're planning for the future. Covered topics include Alison's live Bitwig and/or Ableton setup using the Ableton Push 3 and various mixers, Greg's spatial audio work, their 2023 live setup for Blix Byrd, and...Justin Bieber?!?Doctor Body is Alison & Greg's experimental electronic duo.PatternSonix is Alison & Greg's niche consulting firm focusing on the intersection between sound and AI.Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or check us out at toomuchmusicpodcast.comMusic, blogging, & more from your hosts: Dr. Greg Wilder | Alison Wilder

 Greg and Alison are back...to talk about themselves! In this episode, they'll tell you about how they met, why they're not still married, and what things are like today. Don't worry, you'll hear plenty of music talk along the way. Doctor Body is Alison & Greg's experimental electronic duo.PatternSonix is Alison & Greg's niche consulting firm focusing on the intersection between sound and AI.Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or check us out at toomuchmusicpodcast.comMusic, blogging, & more from your hosts: Dr. Greg Wilder | Alison Wilder

Alison & Greg talk about how we hear, understand, and define the identity of a piece of music. After a bit of a dive into the great music thinkers of the 20th and 21st century and their work on how our minds hear and process music, they jump into the specifics of what musical parameters go into identity, and how we can define and codify those parameters so that they're available to an AI system.Doctor Body is Alison & Greg's experimental electronic duo.PatternSonix is Alison & Greg's niche consulting firm focusing on the intersection between sound and AI.Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or check us out at toomuchmusicpodcast.comMusic, blogging, & more from your hosts: Dr. Greg Wilder | Alison Wilder

Today we take a look back at the music technology underpinning a startup co-founded by our hosts in the early 2010s. With the motto "Use Music to Find Music" , Clio Music was perhaps the first commercially available search engine to speak the language of music and has been a part of TiVo since 2012. Listen in as our intrepid hosts share insights from that experience as well as ways they see this technology playing an important role in the future of music AI.Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or check us out at https://www.toomuchmusicpodcast.com/More from your lovely hosts:Greg: https://gregwilder.comAlison: https://alisonwilder.net/Doctor Body is Alison & Greg's experimental electronic duo.PatternSonix is Alison & Greg's niche consulting firm focusing on the intersection between sound and AI.Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or check us out at toomuchmusicpodcast.comMusic, blogging, & more from your hosts: Dr. Greg Wilder | Alison Wilder

Where does music live? Is it the sound in the room? Is it in your brain? Or maybe it lives on paper? In order to repeat it, we need to create systems to write it down, and ultimately represent music as information or data. But what gets lost when we do this?Writing music down seems straightforward enough. But as we’ll see, the process of reducing the rich experience of music to dots on paper isn’t as simple as jotting down a grocery list or even writing down your innermost thoughts about last night’s dreams.Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or check us out at https://www.toomuchmusicpodcast.com/More from your lovely hosts:Greg: https://gregwilder.comAlison: https://alisonwilder.net/Doctor Body is Alison & Greg's experimental electronic duo.PatternSonix is Alison & Greg's niche consulting firm focusing on the intersection between sound and AI.Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or check us out at toomuchmusicpodcast.comMusic, blogging, & more from your hosts: Dr. Greg Wilder | Alison Wilder