Anne Dvinge: Amplified Togetherness
Anne Dvinge is, as she describes herself, a lapsed academic, music geek, entrepreneur, dog owner and bionic woman… in no specific order.
At #MTF Stockholm, she spoke to Frida Almgren about how her research into the social contexts of live music venues led her to abandon academia and create her Copenhagen-based startup, Low-Fi.
AI Transcription
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
people, concert, music, fi, platform, mtf, musicians, conversation, research project, frida, tech fest, behaviour, called, meet, space, bit, tech, entrepreneur, creating, togetherness
SPEAKERS
Andrew Dubber, Anne Dvinge, Frida Almgren
Andrew Dubber
Hi, I’m Dubber. I’m the director of Music Tech Fest. And thanks so much for listening to the MTF podcast. Now, if I was forced to pick a single person who summed up the MTF community, it would probably have to be Anne Dvinge and bring so many of the different threads together academic entrepreneur, music geek, she’s a regular attendee, and you’ll find an ad every area of the festival from the symposium to the playground, the Creative Labs to the showcase stage, so we thought we should get her on the interview stage too. And she not only has a fascinating story to tell, she has fantastic advice for people wanting to start any sort of project and describes herself as a bionic woman and amputee since birth. She’s embraced the cyborg possibilities of prosthetics, and invited hackers at MTF Stockholm to get hacking on her leg, which already boasts an incredible 3d printed fairing. She was at MTF representing her Danish startup Low-Fi, a fantastic community for user generated intimate concerts in people’s homes. She spoke to stockholms Frida Almgren about being tech curious. Enjoy.
Frida Almgren
So hi, everyone, my name is Frida Almgren. I’m an entrepreneur. I’ve just started off my own company. I’m running a communications firm doing PR and communications for tech and other industries, as well as doing moderating services. But enough of me I’m here to introduce our next guest. Anne Dvinge.
Anne Dvinge
Thank you very much
Frida Almgren
A music geek and entrepreneur and the bionic woman. I’m so excited to meet you again. Yes. Oh, yeah.
Anne Dvinge
This week? Yeah. How are you? I’m very well, thank you a bit was for where this is now, like three days in with two days of symposium and, and the beginning of the hack camp, which is why I’m wearing the fantastic and much covered it. Pink t shirt. There’s the whole Low-Fi team is upstairs playing away at some sort of creative, fun solution to one of the challenges.
Frida Almgren
super interesting. So you’ve been researching sort of what happens when you take music into new places, unexpected places, venues. Can you can you share a little bit about that? What What have you? What did you discover?
Anne Dvinge
Yeah, so I actually have a past. As an academic, I say I’m a lapsed academic. I left academia three years ago, but I spent 10 years as a music researcher at Copenhagen University and sometime in London sometime in New York. And one of the things that I spent time looking at was what happens when we move when we take music, live music performances out of the spaces that we’re usually accustomed to meet live music performances, and whenever we enter space, we’re culturally conditioned to perceive of the rules that the space sets up for us, right? This is, if anybody’s familiar with Christopher Small’s work on music, but there, it’s not complex at all the idea and you will recognise this. So we all know that when we go into a concert hall, and we’re supposed to do all this sort of conversation and having a drink and socialising out in the foyer, and then the minute we sort of step into the concert hall, we’re all guided into neat rows. And we’re to sit there and there’s this reverent The music is up and this this whole sort of, so there’s one type of behaviour. The Jazz Club is a different type of behaviour. tables and chairs are still sort of facing the music, but you’re allowed to have your drinks and be a little more social. And then there’s all the social rules of when to clap and not to clap. This jazz audience is really one of the most policing audiences you can possibly find. And then, you know, there’s the rock pop venue where you know, there’s like the open floor space, there’s like multiple bars, and the signal that you’re perfectly allowed to sort of party quite hard while the music is going on. So we all know this, and we all pick up on these very quickly when we start going out to hear music, if we do that sort of thing. But what happens then when we moved in initially actually work with urban space, I work with urban jazz festivals and what happens when, when when the city sort of becomes infiltrated with music. But at one point, I got preoccupied with what happens when we put live music into people’s living rooms. And the interesting thing is that so we all understand the living room, we all know what that is it pretty much plus minus looks the same across cultural divides low seating, low soft seating, personal knickknacks. Not necessarily lighting is like here in Scandinavia, we all like those little sort of mood lights in the corner. elsewhere in the world, you will have like really bright lights in the ceiling. But so that’s the biggest difference, but the sort of physical layout of a living room is pretty much the same. So we all understand it again, we’re culturally conditioned perceive of this space. As a quite a safe space. And we entered and we drop our guard a little bit because it is a safe space, however, then we put music inside of it. And suddenly somebody has altered this safe space. So it’s me slightly strange. So that means we end up in this liminal sort of place where we’re not quite sure what’s going to happen. And the very simple thing happens that the rulebook of concert behaviour is blown wide open. There are no rules. It’s like they’ve like been suspended. What am I supposed to do here? Is it okay? If I meet the other audiences? If I go over and say hi, as you do, because you’re entered a private home, this is what you do. When your guest is somebody’s home. You like, Hello, my name is Anne, if you did this in a music club, they’d be like, oh, stalker, right. So, so people go they meet each other, they meet the the musician. There’s not never, I’ve never been to a concert where anybody, like phones disappear, devices disappear. Quiet, no noise, no people talking in a bar, no coffee machines will be machines making noises, nobody spilling beer down your back. Nobody watching an entire concert through their little particular screen conversation musical spoken between musicians. The last one that I was at was tiny, very small crowd. And we actually ended up thinking it was a bit silly that we all know who the artist was, but she didn’t know who we were. So we did like a round of introductions who we were. And she was cross legged on the floor. And it turned into this conversation about art and music and life. And at the very end, everybody was just dancing in a big circle in the living room. So. So that’s a this format is incredibly powerful in terms of turning people sort of sort of tuning out and tuning in to use an old good old sort of 60s 70s expression where you leave all that noise and alone and aside from from all our social media, that we need to be online all the time, go offline, and just be present.
Frida Almgren
So interesting. So I think you touched upon it. But so you say yourself that at some point, you sort of fell in love with your research. So you started you became an entrepreneur, you started Low-Fi. But can you take us to the moment where you actually like I need to, to contribute to this space? I need to change something. What happened?
Anne Dvinge
Yeah, so so simultaneously with discovering and looking into this format of the the house concert, I was also thinking, I need to come up with my next research project, because I was never, I didn’t have 10 years. So you just have to keep doing research projects. And I thought, and I was looking into creating a research project around the sort of economic and cultural and social sustainability in the music. And the way that digitization has changed the flow of money in in the music industry. And I thought I do that. arrows, do a big cross European project, do it for three years, we’re very, very, very good at this thing in that in EU speak is called knowledge transfer. I will maybe reach 1000 people that will maybe sort of get out to that, but then we have to be really good at it over the course of three years. I thought I’m not sure that’s quite enough. I think actually, that’s a bit unambitious. I think maybe there’s some I’m gonna have to do something and build something that can impact more people and can last longer. So I quit my job, which felt like an insane thing to do. But it also felt like the only thing to do. And when I started this journey of creating, of creating something that could have a bigger impact, then I actually, that’s about three years ago. So it’s taken us long now to get to this point, as it would have been to do a research project. We just launched our first sort of bespoke app, we’ve been working with an MVP for a while to get as much data as we could minimal viable product. Sorry, it’s a very scrappy platform. We’ve launched our first sort of proper platform and, and at this point, we’ve had at least 3000 people present listening in a room having conversations. So you know, already I’ve met and impacted and affected three times more than I could have done with a research project. And now it’s like on to the next hundred thousand people.
Frida Almgren
So cool. So I just long for lo fi to come to Sweden where I live. But for those of you that are not as familiar with what lo fi actually do. Can you tell us a little bit because this is you know, the artists and then it’s the audience and can you can go explain a bit out last night
Anne Dvinge
actually. So it’s an it’s an online community peer to peer platform that connects people who want to host concerts. with musicians who wants to play concerts and audiences who want to attend, and you can actually sign up to Low-Fi, find be all three of those at once. We, we do curate musicians to make sure and we also curate hosts, to make sure that people understand what it is exactly we’re doing. They will always, there’s never anybody who plays for free. With Low-Fi, I get a lot of sort of comparisons to other sort of concert arrangers that do should intimate secret gigs in intimate, unusual spaces. And there are two main differences is one that we insist that musicians get paid every single time I we have kicked people off the platform for contacting musicians to play for free. And, and also that everybody can get in touch with everybody. So you can reach out to that artists that you saw and heard and you can reach out to the host, you can also reach out to all the people that were at that concert. So it’s a idea is that that it should be a self generating community. And we’re not really the concert arranges the artist and the host, co create the concert together. And then the economy sort of centres around that. And it’s working. It’s sort of it’s taken a long time for us to find out exactly what it was we were doing. But now that we sort of within the last year, we really get a good grasp of it. Now we can see it. As you under this is an interesting exercise as you sort of build something and you’re trying to figure out what the hell it is you’re building, because you don’t really know you sort of know, you know what you want to achieve, but you have no idea how to get there. And you stand you’re like, Oh, no, maybe we should do this other thing, like be a booking platform. And I’m like, No, let’s not be booking platform, that’s very status quo, won’t change anything. You sort of your message that the communication is very muddy. But the minute you get yourself and the sort of the gels into something very specific, the communication becomes much stronger. And then suddenly you get people coming in, where you don’t have to explain everything 15 times and like for the first time, we’re actually having our hardest thing, or nut to crack is getting host people who’s like, yeah, sure, come to my house and play console. And now is the first time that we’re actually getting people signing up saying, I’d like to host we’re like, what is that? When did that happen? How did that we’ve been at trying to explain this concept for so long. And now it’s just happening on its own. So that’s really exciting, because that is one of the sort of core parameters for growing the community.
Frida Almgren
So cool. As a fairly new entrepreneur, I’m also interested in human like your Are you a risk taker and going from the academic world to becoming an entrepreneur? Or did you get a lot of support? Or, you know, did people question your ID? How was that
Anne Dvinge
our learning? So when I told my colleagues at university, they were like, Oh, dear, I was like, No, I’m fine. Nobody’s died. It was very interesting. But no, I’m, I there was a moment in time where I personally and financially was able to do this. You might have my support system was in place, I have an amazing husband, I had a little extra money that I could spend is I ended up spending two and a half years without a paycheck. So that was that I’ve never been so broke in my entire life. And I’ve never been so okay with being so broke. It’s a very interesting experience. I thought I needed it. Like, I actually thought I was one of those people who needed who couldn’t be an entrepreneur because I really wanted the comfort of having that paycheck growing every month. And it turned out it just wasn’t very important. Actually. It’s like Fine, whatever, we’ll figure it out. You as you figure it out, you do your hustle you do like we at one time we get to places we could go back and forth. So then I Airbnb one place while we were at the other place, and you figure it out, you do all kinds of weird little consulting jobs to sort of make ends meet. And then you have I was incredibly fortunate to have this amazing person by my side who not only supports morally, but is also able to support financially. So that’s been an enormous benefit. You just lower your costs. living costs is fine.
Frida Almgren
inspiring. Almost. No, when you started Low-Fi, I mean, before that you were, you know, interested in tech, but that sort of opened up your eyes for the possibility of tech also in your private. Yeah, I mean, yeah, looking at your fantastic leg. Yeah, you want to talk a little bit about
Anne Dvinge
that I totally well. So I’m actually wearing a 3d printed fairing. I have a prosthetic leg and I’m wearing a 3d printed fairing from a company called unique. What they do is they they sort of try to push the boundaries for What our image of people with disabilities are. I grew up as a one legged person I was, I was amputated when I was a very young child. And, and throughout my childhood, that was hard. That was a really difficult thing it was, I got it was fine. It was on one hand, it didn’t matter. But then whenever you meet people, so if it was just me, and people I knew, it didn’t matter. But then you get met with it by the outside world, and the outside world reacts in really weird ways. To you being a one like a person. So, so I spent a lot of my youth sort of trying to hide it. And, and then as I should have, I was actually in a talk with a Swedish presentation by a swedish man called hanish tribler. who see a transhumanist if anybody knows what that is, is people who had their own bodies, putting chips inside and doing all kinds of interesting things. And he did this talk when he’s like, yes, you know, like we all think of when we talk about cyborgs we all think of this and then it was a slide with, with, with Terminator, and he says, but these are the real cyborgs. And then the next slide is like a bunch of little old ladies with the like roller things. And they’re pacemakers and their artificial hips. And I was like, Oh, my God, that’s me. Fuck. I’m a cyborg. That’s really cool. And I was like, Alright, okay, I’m, I can see this. This is fun. This is interesting. There’s been this push towards changing the conversation about what it’s like to, you know, whether whether you’re actually whether disability is even an interesting word I met, it’s an organisation in the US that calls it diverse ability . And for me, it’s been this incredibly liberating thing to go in and embrace meeting all these techies. And the conversations that happen that for me has that has changed is that before when I met people that sort of looked at me, and they think, Oh, she walks away, and then they are so what happened to your leg? And I was like, nothing really, I have a prosthetic leg. And oh, dear, I’m so sorry. I, that’s that was the conversation I used to have. But now the conversation is, oh, wow, that’s so cool. And it’s a much much nicer conversation to have with people. So entering into this. I’m not a techie, I couldn’t, you know, I can I can Google enough to change the colour of a link in CSS. Sure. But I’m not a tech person. But I’m, as I say, I think it my bio coined this word is that I’m tech curious. I, I think there’s so many possibilities, there’s so many so much stuff that you can do. The first MVP that that was built for love, I actually built this, I had to build something for this accelerator programme that I was in. And I had sort of stupidly said I would have a platform 10 weeks from that conversation. So I had to do my research, I found found a, a, a tool that I could use took me about three days to find the correct tool that didn’t require any coding for me. And it took me two days of content making and creating some really, really, really bad graphic design. That was like you had to upload a logo. And I was like, I don’t have a logo. Alright, put a logo up there, find, like, do something. And then like five days later, I actually had a platform and then spent the next five weeks inviting musicians to the platform. And then, at the end of those 10 weeks, I had built a platform had the first concert happening at the first sale of tickets through the platform, so and so basically, if you can, if you can see it in your mind, you can hold it in your hand. That’s sort of my main premise for for doing almost everything these days.
Frida Almgren
That’s so good to hear. I think just one last question. I think also you talk about, or we in general talk about co creation, crowdfunding and such doing things together. And you also talk about experiencing music together like co experiencing and really taking responsibility for for that can you just, you know, shortly elaborate a little bit but
Anne Dvinge
so that’s that’s back to sort of blowing that that rulebook of concert behaviour wide open. Because when you are put in a situation where there aren’t really any rules, everybody suddenly have a responsibility for what happens in that room. So at at these concert moments, the the concert happens is something that everybody creates together, the musician the host and the audience’s. And that shared responsibility for the for the concert moment, provides a shared sense of identity and purpose that’s really powerful. It creates connections between people that you’d never normally see in a concert situation and, and for us, it also means that people are, are, have deeper connections to the artists. They have a Want to support and keep supporting that artists, people will, after the concert conversations will keep going. We can see people meeting up across different concerts and attaching but this moment we actually call it internally, we sort of have this stake, it’s amplified togetherness, which is what these concerts bring about. And we do think that every time that this happens, it makes the world a tiny bit better. You know, we form connections between people. So if we can just do that one living room at a time incrementally, and we’re not, there’s a lot of people saying, Oh, we want to disrupt the music industry. We’re not even in the music industry. We’re in the let’s get people together industry. Actually.
Frida Almgren
I think that’s so great to end on such a positive note to say amplified togetherness. I will bring that with me and check out low five. And thank you so much for the conversation. Give her a big hand. Thank you
Andrew Dubber
Anne Dvinge with Frida Almgren, at MTF Stockholm, you should go check out Low-Fi online, there’s a link on the podcast page. And I love that idea of amplified togetherness. That’s such a great way of expressing some of the feedback we get from Music Tech Fest too, because it’s all about the people putting different kinds of brilliant minds in the room and making new connections and collaborations. Anyway, thanks very much for downloading, listening, subscribing, and hope you’re enjoying these. Feel free to go back through and check out some previous episodes maybe have a bit of a binge, and drop us a note on our Facebook page. Say hi. Let us know you’ve been listening. We’d love to hear from you. Have a great week and talk soon. Cheers.
