Alec and Nick finally discuss the processes of music consumption and distribution through smart phones, and the means of production of "sounds" on TikTok, Instagram Reels, and other video sharing social media platforms. Picking up a quandary from past episodes about digital music, the duo ask if TikTok sounds are, in fact, music—and conduct an inquiry into the form and processes that TikTok sound sharing has redefined in our musical lives and experiences. Spanning Phonk music, millennial woop glockenspiel music, Gen Z bed room folk, 80s Muzak commercial music, and more, the conversation analyzes a dark Dostoevskyian worldview of new commercialized music on smart phones—and how this underpins a capitalized sadness enframing the music's focus on the daily grind, the hustle, and success. The episode reviews new populisms, cultures of embarrassment and professionalization, Alec's practice of dredging the depths of Spotify, "out of timeness" and "out of tuneness," the haunting quality of various sonic spaces on the phone, and a comparison between the social experience of cell phone music and Opera. The episode serves as an initial material and cultural review of algorithms future episodes may expand upon.

Alec and Nick examine the emergence and proliferation of digital music technology in the 1980's as it maps onto a "solo-doloistic" turn in our increasingly individualistic music listening and production habits. First discussing this transition through the lense of conceptual innovations by Robert Ashley and other Sonic Arts Union composers, the episode charts commercial and cultural implications for digital media distribution on CD, .MP3 and so on, and constructs a historical arc for the relationship of experimentalists to this technological paradigm. Topics include: personalized media experience, television, Yasunao Tone, George Lewis' jazz to computational music arc, sampling, Noise, tech complacency, electronic music sub-genre accession and the creative thresholds of digital workstations and resulting aesthetic commonality across genre.

Alec and Nick complete a series of discussions on foundational music discourses — classical music, sound systems, and in this episode: musical temperment. Defining temperement as the organization of the acoustic harmonic series, applied in performance, engineering and musical epistemology, the conversation expands on historical nuances in the aesthetic, technological and cultural implications of this evolving theoretical construction over time. Anchored with a comparison of J.S. Bach's equal tempered proof-of-concept — "Well-Tempered Clavier" (1722) — and LaMonte Young's 1964 rebuttal in just intonation, "The Well-Tuned Piano" (1964), the discussion extends the broad history of temperement into the realm contemporary music and inquires into the affect of digital sound production on this discourse. Topics include: Pythagoras, autotune, Vincenzo Galelei, Harry Partch, John Cage's works for prepared piano, the evolution of the western orchestra, Indian classical music, Noise, and more.