As a musician I trained as a classical singer, wrote chamber-pop records Homotopia and Goodbye, and spent a decade on the road and in the studio. As a researcher I look at the governance and ownership of new technology: who actually controls the systems we increasingly live inside, and how they might answer to the people who use them rather than the few who run them. Democracy in Music is a new project where those two meet, a set of open-source prototypes that imagine what instruments played democratically by communities might sound like. Aside from that I stroll around, read, care for my loved ones, and try not to get too serious about things.

Thanks for reading, enjoy the site, and wishing you all the very best,

Sam

Full bio

Sam Vance-Law is a musician and researcher whose work looks at how groups of people make things together, and who gets to own what they make. Born in Edmonton, raised in England, and based in Berlin, he trained first as a classical singer (a choirboy at New College, Oxford) before writing Homotopia (2018), a chamber-pop concept album about queer life that the German edition of Rolling Stone called the most beautiful debut of its year, drawing comparisons to Owen Pallett, Rufus Wainwright, and Sufjan Stevens. Alongside his own records he has performed as a sideman for other artists.

The same instincts, for structure, for voice, for the politics of who gets heard, now drive his second vocation. As Head of Research at the Decentralization Research Center, Sam studies the governance and ownership of emerging technology: decentralized governance, DAO legal liability, digital identity, and privacy-preserving attestations that can help defend democratic systems against AI-generated harm. His research has appeared through Harvard's Belfer Center, the Stanford Journal of Blockchain Law & Policy, arXiv, and Tech Policy Press, often co-authored with colleagues across law, computer science, and democratic theory.

He brings the two halves together in Democracy in Music, an open-source collection of prototypes for communal composition: instruments that only sound when more than one person plays, electoral systems rendered as melody, dancers who become co-composers. Each is a working experiment in how a crowd might create, and collectively own, a piece of music.

Sam lives in Berlin, where he sings with the choirs of the Berliner Dom, practices kendo, rides an old steel bike, and keeps a long-running Stoic reading habit.

Shorter version

Sam Vance-Law is a musician and researcher based in Berlin. He trained as a classical singer and wrote the acclaimed chamber-pop album Homotopia (2018) before turning to the governance and ownership of emerging technology as Head of Research at the Decentralization Research Center. The two threads meet in Democracy in Music, his open-source project of prototypes for composing, and collectively owning, music through democratic decision-making.

One-line

Berlin-based musician and technology-governance researcher whose current project Democracy in Music builds instruments out of voting systems.