to do it with someone else who knows
the technology better than I do. But this
was just me and the software.
Which tools have you been using?
I was using the music program Logic
and then a software synth called Sawer,
which is a remake of an old analog synth.
I used my analog and physical LinnDrum
drum machine, and another controller
which is just a digital controller that you
can use to programme drums with. A
lot of the sounds I’ve used are things
that I’ve collected over the years, but
also sounds that I was able to get from
Christian Falk, my old collaborator [the
producer and musician, who died in
2014]. It’s a mix between new and old.
You embrace technology but there’s
a human element to your music, too...
An interest in technology is still
viewed as something off-centre or as
a counterculture, when it really is the
culture we are in at the moment and
will be more and more as a human race.
For me, it’s never been a nerdy interest.
Tekla Festival in Sweden returns in
April. What inspired you to start that?
The idea came from a discussion about
this at KTH, the University of Technology
in Sweden, where they asked me to do a
seminar. My friend Lina Thomsgård had
heard about this government initiative
to get women into KTH programmes.
I was thinking about these things
myself. It became a way to create a place
where girls and young women could
just be exposed to things that I hadn’t
been exposed to when I was their age.
What inspired you to get more
involved in technology?
I always asked other people to help me
instead of learning it myself. I think, for
a lot of girls, learning it on your own is
bigger than for boys, because we don’t
have other women showing us how to do
it. We’re not included in the boys’ club.
Outside of music, what technology
are you most excited about?
AI is interesting. It might be something
very different to what we think. It’s
interesting how it’s used within health –
that is going to really affect people. VT
Robyn is performing at London’s
Alexandra Palace on April 12 and 13
NEED TO
KNOW THE
LATEST
N E WS?
J U S T A S K
AN EMOJIWhen SAM
sees a fire emoji
paired with a
photo of a fire, it
knows whether
you’re enjoying
a cosy fireplace
or witnessing a
terrifying inferno.
If it’s the latter,
it will alert the
relevant parties:
airlines needing
to know about
disruptions,
security firms,
and journalists
looking for a story.
SAM is an AI
program that
harvests real-time
eyewitness data
from social media
to detect events.
Within minutes of
the Westminster
terrorist attack,
SAM identified
the crisis solely
through social
media data.
Former journalist
James Neufeld
first launched
SAM Desk in
2013 in Canada.In February 2018,
he moved the
headquarters
to London. The
programme has
been trained to
decode several
languages,
including slang- most recently
learning regional
variations of
Arabic. Thanks
to a partnership
with Snap, SAM
Desk can also
access the visual
data in public
Snapchat stories - including emojis
and stickers – and
use them to train
SAM’s AI.
“Social media isn’t
a very conventional
metadata
structure. To get
ahead of the media
on breaking news
events, we’ve
had to dig in and
understand the
importance of
emojis,” Neufeld
says. “SAM
has that deep
understanding
of how users
communicate on
places like Twitter.”
Initially developed
for the media,
the company
counts the BBC,
Associated Press,
Reuters and The
New York Times
as clients. But
SAM also caters
to schools,
commodity traders
and airlines: Aer
Lingus uses
SAM to monitor
everything –
from strikes to
bad weather –
that might affect
flights; it then
communicates
the information
to customers.
Breanna Mroczek
samdesk.io