Nonturn - Jellybeans (2023)

In the 1980s, the finance professor Jack Treynor conducted an experiment where he asked students to guess the number of jellybeans inside a jar. The result was that the average guess of the group was superior to the vast majority of the individual guesses. Since then, the idea of collective wisdom has been widely recognized and is now applied to everything from Wikipedia to vaccine development. But is there a way to make use of collective wisdom in creating music?

According to James Surowiecki, author of "The Wisdom of Crowds", for a crowd to be wise, it must meet four conditions, namely: diversity of opinion, independence, decentralization, and an aggregation mechanism. For this album, I gathered 60 different sets from a wide variety of sample libraries all over the world, and from these, I selected a total of 500 pieces of audio data. My goal was to use only these samples, editing them to turn them into musical compositions.

First, I took several samples at random and put them together. The more samples I combined, the more muddled the sound became, so I had to edit them to make sure all the parts functioned together suitably. Like clockwork, each individual sound had to be an indispensable part of the whole. Through repeated addition and reduction, the
unwanted ego and bias got leveled out, and the parts that survived the selection process became the main motifs of each composition.

After making use of all the samples and working on them for about a year, the songs were finally taking shape. From an aggregation of phrases with diverse roots, musical compositions with novel and original styles were being born. At long last, after borrowing the wisdom of countless people I don't know and shutting myself at home, not
meeting anyone or thinking of any specific melody, I was able to finish an album that I was happy with.