This is an I-Heart podcast.

This is Solvable.

I'm Ronald Young, Jr.

It's kind of like forcing the entire world to eat with the same spices or to speak with the same language or with the same dialect, you know?

It's fairly common knowledge that a lot of genres of music borrow from one another to make their respective sounds.

Hip-hop borrows from R&B, rock borrows from country, songs are sampled, sometimes

covered. The DNA that links most popular music tends to dominate and influence musical cultures

around the world, even down to the very creation of new music and the tools and instruments

used to make it. Ultimately, we're talking about the supremacy of Western music theory.

And Western music theory essentially has, at its source, a very specific kind of music

making that was made and funded by a very specific class in a specific period of time.

It shouldn't be a surprise that even the music we hear in our heads and try to shepherd out into the world has already been colonized

in many ways by Western influences.

The very idea of what music is, who makes it, what are the classics,

are all questions that have been answered long before a creative sits down to make

something new.

We won't be able to move forward into the future where we can actually explore different kinds

of music making, things that might be transcultural, that represent our commonalities and our

differences in different ways.

Chaya Malami is a musician, composer, and researcher based in Berlin.

He just released new software, Apotomy, and Lima, which are expanding the pathways of music creation

beyond the dominant sound palette.

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