Error Music is an educational youth project founded by Yosa Peit, a Berlin-based musician and music producer. Her latest album Gut Buster is out on Fire Records. The Error Music project works with children and adolescents, mainly girls and queer kids, and attempts to present an educational format that brings together tech education and electronic music-making.
In this wide-spanning conversation, Yosa talks about the origins of the project, the listening habits of the TikTok-generation, the role of human creativity in the age of AI and the ongoing strengths of the DIY-spirit. The interview was conducted in German and translated into English for publication.
Can you say something about what the Error Music project is, how it began, and how it has developed over time?
Yosa Peit: Error Music is about experiencing a positively defined “error-culture” [Fehlerkultur] that embraces the error as a creative force. It is about children and adolescents — specifically girls and queer kids — learning music production with digital and analog tools, and then performing the results in a real club, Berlin’s ACUD MACHT NEU. The project is run by a team of professional music producers, DJs, educators and audio engineers and composed of mostly women and queer people.
The project has been around since the end of 2019 and has since then evolved into a larger network within Berlin's electronic music scene. I came up with the idea for the project in 2019 because as a producer I found myself within a very supportive, but also mostly male environment. I had been a singer previously and I got my start as a producer when the guys from Brandt Brauer Frick heard some of my productions and then released an EP of mine on their The Gym label, which was basically all guys at the time. Getting that support was really great for me, but I also kinda thought where are all the women?
And around that time, I also had a job at a grassroots coding initiative. And that really made me think, “wow, kids in Germany aren’t learning anything about electronics, or programming, or electronic music!”. In other European countries, that’s completely different. And today, everything is so interconnected! So for me the question was, how can these kids lose the fear of engaging with technology and sound? That’s really where the concept for Error Music came from. And at first, it really just was an experiment to see if the concept can work and I thought it would be cool to have access to a real club with good sound.
Over time, it has become more than that. It has become a space where the kids can have the freedom to really create and shape something themselves. When I was a teenager, I never had anything like that! When I moved to Berlin, the club was a space where I could consume music, but I never thought about it as a possible space where I could create something myself with my friends. So it’s really about showing young people that they themselves can create something in this space, really asking them “what do you want to do?”.
So towards the end of 2019, I applied for funding for a pilot project at ACUD MACHT NEU. I was told by multiple people that I wouldn’t get any funding for a project like that. These kinds of educational formats are very unattractive in general, there is a reason why very few musicians do this kind of youth outreach. But I applied for a one-year grant anyways … and then boom, the pandemic hit (laughs)! And actually, because of that, many doors opened for us institutionally that perhaps wouldn’t have otherwise. Because with all education going online all of a sudden, the people in decision-making positions realized that actually, it is important for young people to engage with computing and technology. That really gave the project a big boost.
In the core team, there are two of us. In recent years, we’ve worked with ACUD and the Junge Tüftlerinnen, a non-profit organization that provided us with materials and know-how. For the future, we want to expand further and work with studios and more professional event spaces and clubs. We’ve been in touch with the Oram Awards in England, and we’ve also been to the Golden Pudel club in Hamburg and the Harz region of Germany in a much more rural context, which was interesting. We’ve also had a lot of support from Korg and Ableton, the guys from Korg Berlin donated to us very early on, which gave me a lot of confidence, to get that support from the industry. I also really enjoy working with SchneidersLaden. It’s all a connected cosmos and these networks need to be strengthened, and it’s important that young people are included.
With the Error Music Festival, that was an expansion of our regular projects and open to young people of all genders. We thought it was important to also do something with our female/nonbinary team that was accessible to everyone. Otherwise, it feels too exclusionary to me. There are valid reasons for targeting specific groups, but I think it’s cool that we have an annual event that’s for everyone. There were 200 young people, and it was very mixed overall, with lots of different kids, both younger and older. Everyone found their way, regardless of how they identify. One kid brought a small synthesizer and a hat and then he was busking at the entrance, that was really cute (laughs)!
Can you elaborate on this idea of “error culture”? Is it about seeing errors and mistakes as something that is essential to the creative process?
That is something I myself only really learned to understand over the course of this project! First of all, it’s just a good thing to be able to tell our participants that making “mistakes” isn’t a bad thing. So we always say, “if something unexpected happens, just keep going!”. And then if something just doesn’t work, how do you handle that? We want to understand the error as something positive that can actually fuel creativity. We’re all so afraid of making mistakes, of trying something new that has the potential for errors. Many girls in particular will often just say “I just can’t do this!” before they’ve even really tried it. And even our teachers would sometimes almost give up because they thought the kids just wouldn't be able to do it. But if you keep at it, then eventually, through these mistakes, there are successes!
So within the project's first three days, we always slowly build a foundation by building instruments and recording sounds. And then at the end, there’s a performance. It’s a very open performance concept, we try to not dictate anything, which can lead to some really magical things happening — even though most of the kids don’t know each other beforehand, they know nothing about music production, they might have a difficult life at home, but they grow together during that week and then perform without performance anxiety. We’ve never had a performance where someone ran off the stage or anything like that (laughs)!
The performance is usually almost like some kind of TikTok live stream because there’s just so much in there, we just integrate all these influences that reflect what they’re listening to. We now have a recording, a 30-minute “Best of” of our performances, and it sounds like something that could be performed at the Berlin Atonal festival (laughs)! Because there’s none of these considerations of form and genre and “professionalism” that most adult musicians would have. We just throw everything in and see if it works. When a mistake happens, they learn how to find a way to deal with it.
We have worked with many professional producers and musicians to help us teach during the project. And quite a few of them have really struggled to deal with this idea that things don’t have to be perfectly planned or executed, they couldn’t let go of their own ideas of what the musical process should be. It is fascinating how we, as adults, can be so stuck in these rigid conceptions of what music “should” sound like. So even just being there and watching what happens when you just let these kids do their own thing, that can be a really enlightening experience.
It is fascinating how we, as adults, can be so stuck in these rigid conceptions of what music “should” sound like.
Do the kids you work with engage with what we would consider to be electronic music in their daily life? Like, do they listen to techno on TikTok? (laughs)
Some of them do listen to techno! They also really just listen to everything. But they often have absolutely no idea how any of this music is made. They don’t know what a beat is. So at the beginning, we always walk them through what electronic music actually is at its basic level. We talk about the history, we build a theremin, and give sound examples from pioneers like Wendy Carlos and ask, “who are these people?” Through that, they can get closer to the world of electronic music.
I find that fascinating, because electronic music is so passively omnipresent today — there’s hardly any genre of music left where you don’t hear synthesizers. But the context for why and how any of this exists seems to be missing.
That’s the thing! They listen to music all day, especially through TikTok. But more often than not, they don’t know what any of that music is, they have no contextualization whatsoever — perhaps because they listen to so much more music than my generation did. I mean, I was listening to music as often as I could, but I didn’t always have this thing that can play all the music in the world in my pocket, and for them, that’s just how it is. So when you ask them questions like “how was this made, how did this get on your phone?” they often just have no idea because it’s all just this constant audio-visual stream that’s on their phone 24/7.
But of course, there is some curiosity. So they might be like “I like that one song, what’s that thing that goes like [beatboxes the drum solo from ‘In The Air Tonight’]?”, and I’m just like “you mean Phil Collins?!”, and they’re like, “yeah, exactly, that one, the one that goes 'in the air', or something!” (laughs).
We always want to see what they like, what they’re actually listening to. There were times when Billie Eilish was really cool, and now she’s not cool at all anymore. They think Rosalía is awful. So it’s really interesting. When we try to play something that we think they might find cool they usually hate it (laughs)!
“Oh, I’m sure they’ll love that one”! (laughs)
… and then of course they’re just like, “ugh, this totally sucks”! (laughs)
But what they’re into really varies a lot in general. It’s also heavily influenced by what their parents are into. For example, at the MiniBooth [the SuperBooth's sister event for children and adolescents] I found it interesting that those who are knowledgeable about electronic music often have parents that have a connection to it. We had one girl who thought Krautrock was really cool because her father was friends with Klaus Schulze (laughs). So if they know what something is, it is often because of their parents.
Otherwise, it really is mostly about consuming music in this very contextless sense where you no longer have to actively engage with it, because you’re in this constant algorithmic stream where everything is just fed to you.
Yes! Although I also find it interesting how these algorithms can create totally new connections, like when someone who would have never found out about experimental music otherwise suddenly starts listening to musique concrète, or something (laughs).
That side of it is definitely super fascinating! For example, one of our kids might listen to Gloria Estefan, and another will only listen to Japanese video game soundtracks or something (laughs). So we always say to them “dare to play what you really listen to”. We want to know what and how they’re listening, so we can try to contextualize that and ask, “where do these sounds you are listening to actually come from”? We want to show them how they can make something that is like the music they are listening to. Of course, it won’t sound exactly the same, but we try to give them tools to try and recreate that song or that beat.
We also have them build a theremin and a little analog synthesizer, so that they have some idea of what this stuff actually looks like on the inside. That’s important too. And of course, there's the big question of how music might be made in the future — what role will humans play, with AI and everything? We try to touch on that as well. These are topics they really aren’t confronted with in their regular music classes.
Do they even still have music class in school these days? (laughs)
Rarely, it’s being cut more and more!
When I think back to my own experience of music class from when I was in elementary and high school, it was still all about the history of European classical music, the circle of fifths, just all this stuff that no one could really connect with in any meaningful sense.
I even dropped music as a subject in high school! Looking back now, I find that kind of crazy. I went to school in the Marzahn district of Berlin, and yeah, there were also these six so-called great composers hanging on the wall as oil paintings. That was what it was all about. But I went back recently, and suddenly they had some MIDI-synthesizer stuff that we played with …
I remember we had these digital Yamaha piano keyboards — not really synthesizers, but they had some presets with sound effects. And every time before the teacher came in, 30 kids would just be going crazy with the air horn and helicopter sounds (laughs). We were supposed to be seriously practicing the piano, but we all found that much more interesting!
And the thing is, in our project, they’re allowed and encouraged to do that! There’s no fixed curriculum. In school, you’re automatically in this corset of constraints. The teacher says, “it has to sound like this!” and then it has to sound like that. When they make music here, they can learn to just try things out for themselves and no one will just say “that won’t work!”
We also make an effort to go into actual high schools in order to reach the widest possible cross-section of young people. We do project weeks during the school holidays or they get time off from school for the project. That really doesn’t make our work any easier, but we do reach kids who wouldn’t have just come on their own, and that’s important to us.
Have you gotten any feedback from kids that have attended, where after attending they then started playing around with Ableton on their own or something?
We make it possible to do our program multiple times, so they can come back and learn more if they want to. But it is difficult, you only ever really reach a small percentage. But if even one kid says it meant a lot to them, then that means a lot to me. And everyone on our team always says they would have absolutely loved to do something like this as a kid. We’ve been doing this for three years now and we’ve had one group of girls that came back and told me, “look, we’ve been doing something with Sonic Pi [a live coding music software] on our own for the last year”. And I just went, “huh? I thought you found that super boring!” (laughs). They really kept doing it on their own, and it meant a lot to them.
I want to go back to this notion of “I can’t!”. It seems like especially with girls, there’s this phenomenon where it’s not even so much that they’re actively being disqualified by others, but they’re already disqualifying themselves from the start. Do you have any strategies for dealing with that mindset?
Often you just have to say, “come on, just do it for five minutes!”. That first step is really crucial, having someone that takes your hand and motivates you to just give it a try. So often it really just is about sparking that initial motivation. If they say they can’t do it and you just go “uh, okay”, then of course nothing happens. But when you get them to try it, almost always, something happens!
That first step is really crucial, having someone that takes your hand and motivates you to just give it a try.
We always have them work in pairs, which is also how a lot of programming works in real life. And we encourage them to just copy and take things, like, “psst, just copy this code in here, and then something will happen!”, and then that’s already a success. I think you need these kinds of low-threshold experiences of success right from the start. We also do a lot of crafts, like designing buttons for a synthesizer. And at first, they’re like, “ugh, crafts, lame!” but then they start doing it and they’ll be like “awesome, we’re making a SpongeBob button now!” (laughs). So that also gives them another way in.
There are a lot of very accessible, low-threshold learning opportunities today, like Ableton’s Learning Music web tutorial. But most kids would never just do something like that on their own, at least not at first. I think part of the reason is just that they are exposed to this constant audio-visual input that gives you little space to do your own thing, and to them that’s just how things are.
That makes sense! Like, back in the day, when someone could only afford one album with their pocket money or whatever, then of course they’d also go deeper into it, look at the liner notes and start thinking about who made that, and so on.
Totally! And you no longer have to actively engage with these things, because everything’s right there and you’re bombarded with so much stuff all the time. Here in Berlin, there are a lot of youth centers with sound studios and opportunities for kids to make music — and they’re all empty! Back in the day, someone like Kool Savas [an influential German rapper] started making his first albums at the Alte Feuerwache [a Berlin youth center]. But you don’t just go there on your own, especially today.
To me this also leads to the bigger question: why do you even have to do any of this at all? What will our future role as musicians be? When everything is always done for you, when your phone already does everything for you. Kids are already using ChatGPT in school now. So it’s also about these very fundamental questions of what our needs and our wants are.
... why do you even have to do any of this at all? When everything is always done for you, when your phone already does everything for you.
How long did it take for you to be comfortable with sharing your music?
It took a long time before I really showed anyone the productions I made on my computer. I showed them to the band, and one of them thought they were cool, but someone else said “maybe you should stick to singing” (laughs). And then it just took a long time, but I eventually found people in Berlin who were making similar music and had a similar attitude to me. That was really important for me; it was like I had found a family. It’s really about finding someone who understands you, because there’s always someone out there who gets what you do!
So that’s why I released my debut album so late in my career. But it was well received and sold out, and that was an important experience for me. I think that really gave me the confidence to want to give something back and start this new project with Error Music. But again, if you don’t meet the right people and just get told “no one will ever give you any funding for that” you might just give up. But I didn’t give up, I pushed through! You do need the confidence to do these things.
How did you learn GarageBand, did you teach yourself?
I’ve always just taught myself everything, because I’ve always had this approach of just being like "you can make anything with anything!". When I came to Berlin, I didn’t know much, but that lack of knowledge was also a good way to discover things. You have to make your own rules. The less equipment you have, the better, because you’re more limited. For me, that was always better than just having everything. And that’s helped me with teaching as well, because when something is missing or doesn't work, I’ll just be like, "don’t worry, just use your phone to record" or something. So in the end, that DIY-spirit of "just do it!” can get you really far, I think!
Yosa’s new album Gut Buster is out on vinyl, digital formats and streaming. You can find out more about Error Music over on the project’s website and also find Yosa on Instagram.