“Time to Feed the Algorithm”:[1] YouTube as Musical Actor and Virtual Field Site in Japanese Ambient Music

Matthew James

SOAS University of London

As the COVID-19 pandemic fades and researchers begin their welcome return to in-person fieldwork, many ethnomusicologists are eager to get off the internet and back into the physical sites of music-making and community from which they have been kept for so long. Yet the recent suspension of collective social freedoms around the world illustrated more starkly than ever the importance of digital spaces; not only to users whose physical realities are curtailed (Hsu 2013, 387), but to the very notion of technological subjectivity in the twenty-first century. Developing strategies to navigate these virtual field sites is increasingly valuable in a world where the discourses and infrastructural dynamics developed during the era of platform-based user-generated content, known as Web 2.0, are fed back into the structure of offline life via networked technologies, which are ushering in a new age of far-reaching surveillance capitalism (Zuboff 2019). Within this context, ethnomusicology has the potential to offer vital, humanistic insight to the field of digital research, which so often is dominated by positivist methodologies which prioritize raw data collection over more narrative or discursive approaches.

YouTube provides one of the most comprehensive and easily accessible musical resources on the planet. Anyone with an internet connection and a capable device is free to enjoy the site’s millions of hours’ worth of content at a moment’s notice. This perhaps goes some way to explaining YouTube’s enduring status among the world’s most visited websites: in 2022, the site receives around 30 billion visits per month, currently placing it ahead of all major social media networks, with only the Google search engine drawing in more users (Similarweb, n.d.). While from our perspective as researchers it is tempting to view YouTube as simply a handy way to access musical materials, the site’s comment section is itself a hub of lively social activity: fierce debates, outpourings of love, deep personal reflection, and even literary experimentation mingle with a predictable raft of trolling, abuse, and assorted banality. The unique sociality that such platforms engender means they both offer and necessitate the development of “epistemological and methodological tools,” providing opportunities for us to “inductively [explore] users’ practices and imaginaries” (Airoldi et al. 2016, 11).

Just like the built environment, YouTube’s digital architecture provides affordances for users, suggesting routes through the available video content, offering up distraction and diversion along the way. Comment sections are spaces to gather, allowing for the formation of unique collective imaginaries; users who find themselves co-present in a similar aesthetic sphere often begin to relate their experiences of discovery to each other. Laudan Nooshin suggests “collectivized isolation” and “communitarian privacy” (2018, 356) as useful ways to describe this virtual sociality. These terms are particularly redolent of the YouTube-based kankyō ongaku audience, for whom private, individuated listening experiences are vital to their engagement with this music as a tool for self-care or mood regulation (Roquet 2021).

Kankyō ongaku, a historic sub-genre of Japanese ambient music, translated as “environment” or “environmental music,” is a style which for many listeners has become tied to their experience of YouTube itself as a mediating presence. The site’s algorithmic video recommendations have led thousands of new fans to the genre, primarily younger European and American listeners; at least, that is the story told by the popular music press and discussed among listeners themselves in the videos’ comment sections. Headlines such as “The Artist and the Algorithm: How I Became a Fan of an Obscure Japanese Musician” (Anderson 2019) or “My Year of Surrendering to the Strange, Soothing Power of the YouTube Algorithm” (Cush 2018) have helped to crystalize this narrative beyond the diffused strands of user generated comments.

Of course, this interpretation of events is much to the chagrin of those figures involved in licensing, re-pressing, and distributing this older music, who contend that the genre’s newfound popularity is simply the result of the artistic value and quality of the music itself. Mass algorithmic recommendation, they argue, is merely a function of users enjoying and engaging with these albums (Warwick 2017). Indeed, label boss Spencer Doran notes that such online popularity made their job of licensing the music for official release even more complicated as the records gained greater recognition, thus potentially (and paradoxically) limiting the spread of unheard kankyō ongaku works, since the rights to such material by now-famous musicians became harder to obtain (Doran 2019).

Despite this vital behind the scenes work, audiences’ framing of “the algorithm”as not merely a technological precondition of YouTube’s functionality, but a quasi-conscious and inscrutable agent in its own right, is a persistent trope of kankyō ongaku discussion. Commenters frequently offer their playfully ironic (yet somewhat sincere) thanks to this abstract entity, or credit it with sensing their innermost feelings and delivering musical suggestions accordingly:[2]

“YouTube algorithm decided I needed peace” [18 Likes] (Kokubo 2019) 

“did YouTube realize I was incredibly anxious and sent immediate help? Ty [thank you]” [121 Likes] (Kokubo 2019b)

“I absolutely have no idea why this one was in my feed... anyway, thank you mighty YouTube algorithm!!” [3 Likes] (Kokubo 2019b)

“god bless you sweet sweet algorithm.” [1 Like] (Sukegawa 2021)

“Sublimely gentle, I cannot thank our YouTube algorithm overlords enough for recommending this.” [18 Likes] (Kokubo 2020)

Users sometimes extend this idea and use it to frame a collective identification with their anonymous fellow listeners, who have been drawn to the same videos by these mysterious processes. The following comments, taken from an upload of Takashi Kokubo’s 1993 album, Oasis of the Wind II, highlight the varying degrees of stress placed upon the role of human agency in this co-constitutive process of discovery:

“Wow, so YouTube must have determined via algorithm that we are the chillest people on the internet.” [5500 Likes] (Kokubo 2019b)

“The decisions that we made on YouTube throughout the years led us to this moment, to this video in our recommendations. All of us, from different parts of the world making similar choices. At last, here, we are united! Welcome, tribe members! Welcome, family! Now let’s chill.” [588 Likes] (Kokubo 2019b)

Cultural sociologist Paulo Magaudda asserts that digital platforms play an important role in shaping and reinforcing the identity and circulation of music genres (2020, 35). Indeed, at least from the perspective of some listeners and music writers, the modern “identity” of kankyō ongaku lies precisely within its means of circulation, however narrow such a perspective may be in relation to the much richer and more complex history of the music. A recent conversation I had helps illustrate this point beyond the comments section. Two strangers overheard me listening to a kankyō ongaku album out loud and asked what the music was. When I explained it was ambient music made by a Japanese composer in the 1980s, one turned to the other and said, “Oh you know, like Simpsonwave, that YouTube genre.” Simpsonwave takes its name from the early 2010s genre of Vaporwave, a style that plays with notions of technological malaise and nostalgia, juxtaposing heavily edited lo-fi samples of Japanese City Pop and American easy listening records against a visual backdrop of corporate imagery from the 80s, 90s and early 2000s. Simpsonwave applies this musical material to similarly filtered clips of early Simpsons episodes.

Evidently, both Simpsonwave and Vaporwave are far removed from the work of a small group of Japanese kankyō ongaku composers active many decades previously. Yet while platform dynamics and algorithmic logic seemingly dictate these bizarre connections and associations, their precise workings are a mystery to all except the engineers who construct these highly secretive proprietary systems (Airoldi et al. 2016, 3). Nevertheless, in our attempts to analyze these discourses which have developed via platform-based mediation, researchers have several tools at their disposal. Open-source software such as Octoparse, YouTube Data Tools and AntConc, allow us to scrape, collate, and analyze vast amounts of textual data from not just YouTube, but a number of popular online platforms. Using these, we can search instantaneously through tens of thousands of comments for key words and phrases, or quantify types of engagement through the number of likes and replies some of these remarks receive.

Yet, as useful as these tools are for operating data analysis at scale, mere quantification can only ever tell us so much about a particular virtual field site, whether that be a platform as a whole or one particular discursive sphere. The mutability of such spaces stems from their nature as essentially cybernetic systems, feedback loops of communication in which user behavior is monitored in order to adjust and optimize the content which is displayed. Simultaneously, the user also adjusts their own behavior subconsciously in response to the informational networks they are thus exposed to (Hagood 2019, 136). This continuously shifting relational structure means that the mere quantity of data we gather is subordinate to our ability to parse it into new theoretical approaches and insights.

Cultural theorist and philosopher of data capitalism Byung-Chul Han writes that a simply additive or accumulative approach to research on digital spaces, embodied in corporate AIs consuming vast amounts of metadata to analyze patterns of consumer behavior, collapses into mere lifeless information. He terms this “positive science” (“Google science”), a coldly calculating informational worldview animated by neither narrative tension or hermeneutic inquiry, which produces “neither insight or truth” (2017, 74–76). In tackling the virtual field site, the quality of humanistic narrative which animates so much ethnomusicological fieldwork provides a counter to the prevailing positivism of big data. Exploring the granular discursive contours of online musical communities allows us to think against the neoliberal instrumentalization of these interactions, to reveal instead how these macrocosmic systems are shaping the minutiae of cultural life in contemporary society.

Notes:

References

Airoldi, Massimo, Davide Beraldo, and Alessandro Gandini. 2016. “Follow the Algorithm: An Exploratory Investigation of Music on YouTube.” Poetics 57 (August): 1–13.

Anderson, Cheyne. 2019. “The Artist and the Algorithm: How I Became a Fan of an Obscure Japanese Musician.” ABC RN, August 5, 2019. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-08-06/hiroshi-yoshimura-from-internet-obscurity-to-y outube-sensation/11366386.

Cush, Andy. 2018. “Uneasy Listening: My Year of Surrendering to the Strange, Soothing Power of the YouTube Algorithm.” Spin, December 27, 2018. https://www.spin.com/2018/12/youtube-algorithm-music-essay-ambient-hiroshi-yoshimu ra-midori-takada/.

Doran, Spencer. 2019. “Composing for Space: The Meticulous Design of Japanese Environmental Sounds.” The Vinyl Factory, February 12, 2019. https://thevinylfactory.com/features/kankyo-ongaku-japanese-environmental-sounds-spen cer-doran/.

Fiesler, Casey, and Nicholas Proferes. 2018. “‘Participant’ Perceptions of Twitter Research Ethics.” Social Media + Society 4 (1): 1–14.

Hagood, Mack. 2019. Hush: Media and Sonic Self Control (Sign, Storage, Transmission). Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Han, Byung-Chul. 2017. The Agony of Eros. Translated by Erik Butler. London: The MIT Press.

Hsu, Wendy Fangyu. 2013. “Mapping the Kominas’ Sociomusical Transnation: Punk, Diaspora and Digital Media.” Asian Journal of Communication 23 (4): 386–402.

Magaudda, Paulo. 2020. “Music Scenes as Infrastructures: From Live Venues to Algorithmic Data.” In Popular Music, Technology, and the Changing Media Ecosystem, edited by Emília Barna and Tamas Tofalvy, 23–41. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.

Nooshin, Laudan. 2018. “‘Our Angel of Salvation’ – Towards an Understanding of Iranian Cyberspace as an Alternative Sphere of Musical Sociality.” Ethnomusicology 62 (3): 341–74.

Roquet, Paul. 2021. “In the Mood: Toward the Full Commodification of Ambience.” Real Life, April 26, 2021. https://reallifemag.com/in-the-mood/.

Similarweb. n.d. “YouTube.com Traffic Analytics and Market Share.” Accessed September 20, 2022. https://www.similarweb.com/website/youtube.com/#overview.

Warwick, Oli. 2017. “Algorithm Is a Dancer: Is YouTube Starting to Determine Vinyl Reissues?” The Vinyl Factory, December 14, 2017. https://thevinylfactory.com/features/youtube- algorithm-vinyl-reissues/.

Zuboff, Shoshana. 2019. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a New Future at the New Frontier of Power. London: Profile Books.

Media References

Kokubo Takashi. 2019a. “Takashi Kokubo (小久保隆) - Oasis Of The Wind ～ Forest Of Ion ～ (風のオアシス～イオンの森～) (1992) [Full Album].” YouTube Video, 56:07 January 6, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEgmpe8nToU.

———. 2019b. “Takashi Kokubo (小久保隆) - Oasis Of The Wind II ～ A Story Of Forest And Water ～ (1993) [Full Album].” YouTube Video, 53:09. March 11, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWEI9y6PElo.

———. 2020. “小久保 隆 Takashi Kokubo - Healing Music - Bird (Full Album).” YouTube Video, 43:27. May 5, 2020.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtMR2ouIQXo.

Sukegawa, Toshiya. 2021. “Toshiya Sukegawa (助川敏弥) - Bioçic Music: Jewels (バイオシック・ミュージック「宝石」) (1994) [Full Album].” YouTube Video, 59:08. March 30, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EUFiMj4leI.

Yoshimura Hiroshi. 2016. “Hiroshi Yoshimura Soundscape 1 surround (1986).” YouTube Video, 38: 52. December 4, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJSuKb8YAYI&t=1954s.