Our articles about the LA-based pop band “Lights Over Paris” have attracted a lot of attention. Read the articles below to see why.
Marshall McLuhan’s my homie.
I’ve always been really interested in the way music is represented. A post on my Echo Bloom blog Scratch posited that:
In the digital age, the distribution mechanism becomes the media. All artists employing this distribution mechanism exist within this new media, and its accompanying new set of boundaries. What does this mean? There’s no such thing as an Internet musician. A media must be exploited for art to be successful, and the Internet cannot be exploited by sound alone. All artists releasing music on the Internet are by nature multimedia artists, with all of the opportunities and pitfalls inherent.
This was relative mostly to the release strategy and marketing of a large recording project last year. But I’ve been thinking about it more lately from a content production standpoint. Lately I’ve come around to the idea that it’s not enough to change the way we market music relative to its mechanism – that mechanism defines its very format, which, at this point, has to change. But it’s OK – it’s actually a really good thing for musicians.
Why?
Because all art tells half of a story. The resonance of a piece is dependent on how a viewer/listener internalizes it – when they do that, they add their half to the piece of art and complete the shared experience. With music now frequently being consumed via computers and over the internet, an interactive solution allows a more communal experience to develop – the snake of the production/viewing process swallows its tail – the interaction and internalization move to a different stage of the artistic development – the streams cross. You get it.
So. What I’m proposing is a new way to consume music – an interactive, visual way that allows the audience to take part in the process of creation. I don’t yet know exactly how this is going to work, but I have my eye on a few of the tools:
- Max/MSP/Jitter is “is a graphical development environment for music and multimedia developed and maintained by San Francisco-based software company Cycling ’74.” It’s an ideal way to create music that can be generated on the fly. It’s intuitive, visual, and very fun. It’s also existed primarily as a runtime application – so we’ll also need:
- FLOSC (or Flash Open Sound Control) – Max/MSP is a great tool for controlling audio, but it’s not the best for doing motion graphics, or representing content on the Internet. What’s really good at that? Flash – BUT – there has to be an interface that allows the two to effectively communicate. FLOSC might be it. FlashServer might be another fit.
There will definitely be new concerns to address with this approach. You can’t be all things to all people, and as audiences continue to splinter artists will find it to their advantage to create multiple versions of their pieces of art that are context specific (kind of like Flash and HTML versions of webpages) – for audio this means interactive versions, static versions, versions encoded for MP3 playback on shitty iPod headphones, etc. Also – would money from interactive art come from advertisements? Subscriptions?
I’m looking forward to developing this idea more in the month to come – I’d love any of your comments.
Comments
Pretty interesting idea, and would make a fine experiment no doubt. Inviting the audience to participate in the music may yield some really wonderful results. However, opening up things to the Internet may have adverse effects. This comes to mind:
http://forum.nin.com/bb/read.php?9,731489
Still, I think it is inevitable for music to evolve into something more interactive.
Thanks for the useful info. It’s so interesting