David Emery Online

Music Plus One

7 March 2010

Web 2.0.

A phrase I think we’re all quite happy never to hear again, right? Luckily it seems to have died out – of over use, of course – of late, which is handy as no one really knew what it meant anyway.

Similarly – although a while later, encapsulating the relationship the two industries have quite nicely – we have also seen the rise of the term Music 2.0 as well, which has a similar utterly wooly definition.

By ‘utterly wooly’ I mean non-existent. It’s a poor rip-off of meaningless hype-fuel, spouted by people who don’t know what they’re talking about (see also ajax, and now HTML5).

Music 2.0 – definition-less as it is – seems then to be mostly about the Web 2.0-ification of the music industry, so things like Blogs, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, social networking and all that blah blah blah. Digital music, the ramifications of piracy and reduced barriers to entry all could and do get lumped into this vague category which pretty much covers most ‘industry’ discussions of the ‘horrific’ (read: different) future of the music business.

To me though this is all very much a continuation of the state of affairs we’ve had since the outbreak of recorded music; yes, we now have a different way of distributing music (all that ‘computers and stuff’ malarky) but that’s not a revolution just in the same way that the CD wasn’t a revolution.

So, to keep on with the hackneyed version numbers shtick we have performed music coming in as Music 1.0 and recorded music romping home as Music 2.0 – if you insist I guess we could see digital music as Music 2.1, but it’s surely nothing more then a free patch to solve a few obvious bugs in the initial release…

What’s next, then? What’s Music 3.0?

Previously music has been a one way activity – with the listener either witnessing a live performance, or one previously recorded and played back. The missing interaction in both of these activities is exactly that: interaction. Listening is – excluding dancing, or air-guitar – a passive experience, but technology has got to the point now where this doesn’t need to be the case.

The key advance is that we’ve now got to a point where the music player – and in particular devices like the iPhone or iPod Touch – is smart. And when I say ‘smart’ I really mean it – a hell of a lot of people are wandering around listening to music on devices with more computing power then a decent computer of only a few years ago.

Firstly then this can obviously have a huge effect on the ephemera that comes with the music; digital music at one time was seen as the end of album artwork – “no point doing a packshot if it’s only going to be 200px by 200px” – but it’s actually a massive widening of the format. We already have things like the iTunes LP which provides an incredibly flexible canvas on which to work with, being as it’s just HTML, CSS and Javascript underneath, although as yet they seem to have been limited to the musical equivalent of DVD extras. Maybe that’s OK though; not every revolution needs to be a huge one, but it’s certainly a new art form that could do with some artists.

What’s more interesting though then the potential for a whole new class of music related visual art, is true ‘interactive’ music. It’s a lot to get your head around, but it’s now possible to make works of art (which mostly closely slot into the definition of ‘music’) that are directly interacted with by the listener; whether it’s through a microphone, a touch gesture on a screen, specific location or any other such expression now possible by the technology built right into the very device you listen on.

The iPhone app RjDj is the perfect example of exactly this. In place of songs they have ‘scenes’, which are basically like little musical programs that create different musical works based on all sorts of parameters; you could make a scene for example that gets faster and more active based on how fast you’re walking or jogging, and maybe take that a step or two further by doing something else based on the mic input, or how far you’ve gone via the GPS module.

It’s somewhere in the area between traditional recorded music and videogames; I’d like to think we’re long past the “are videogames art?” debate (in the affirmative, or course), and that’s an artform that paints a canvas for the player to interact with, without limiting exactly what they can do in it. Maybe interactive music should be called “musicgames” – although I think that misses the mark slightly, as they’re not games as we know them – as they share a lot in that regard; it’s a (musical) canvas that the listener can interact with.

It’s early, early days though; we practically haven’t even got to Pac Man yet in videogame terms. It mustn’t be forgotten that the first early steps being trodden by things like RjDj are just that: early steps. I’m not really a fan of much of what I’ve seen and heard so far – they’re mostly frivolous toys – and I wouldn’t blame you if you felt the same, but the key thing to focus on is the possibilities – so many new doors are opened by this technology that it’s going to take a while for the right artist with the right kind of brain to come along and reveal what’s truly possible.

I think that’s pretty exciting.