Comments

• richardyot

  March 2017

  Haha, poor Althea is about to fall down the rabbit hole of buying music apps. She will end up with about hundred synths she never uses on her phone....

  There's no doubt that tech is making music more accessible, and that's a good thing. The majority of people will probably be causal dabblers, and a few will get a bit obsessed like we are here, and maybe one or two will even write some great stuff. I thought the tunes Althea wrote in that piece were pretty good, and she also has a decent voice.
• brambos

  March 2017 edited March 2017

  @richardyot said:
  The majority of people will probably be causal dabblers, and a few will get a bit obsessed like we are here, and maybe one or two will even write some great stuff.

  I reckon the casual dabblers will be a minority as well. The great majority of users don't want to create anything at all (or at most apply an instagram filter to snap) or quickly lose interest when they find out it takes <gasp> effort to make "music".

  Actually, scientific research indicates that most online communities can be broken down into:

  • passive consumers (~90%)
  • active creators (~9%)
  • role models/trend setters (~1%)

  I suppose this could be safely extrapolated to the bigger iOS wielding community too.

  
• u0421793

  March 2017

  It depends what you mean by "write". It also depends what you mean by "everyone". It also depends what I mean by "depend".

  I don't think it is possible to be productive on iOS. There's too many synths.
• lukesleepwalker

  March 2017 edited March 2017

  I agree with @brambos. The technology is as accessible as ever but can't supply motivation and intent. My kids were enthralled with Figure while I showed them and haven't used it on their own. My oldest has taught himself guitar and drums (with a little assistance from dad) but prefers GB and Live for digital production. The difference between him and the others is that he is driven to play and create music.
• realdavidai

  March 2017

  Yes everyone can write "a" song. One and done for the masses I reckon.
• db909

  March 2017

  technically anyone could grab any old tape recorder or whatever and with a combination of whistling, humming, beat boxing, record an entire album with no formal musical knowledge. But the mainstream doesn't consider that "real" music nor are many motivated to do so. Hey wait a minute ...
• Thomas

  March 2017

  Well, everyone _can _write a song; even before iOS, but iOS has really leveled the playing field and made it really easy to make decent sounding music. Can't do much for lyrics though.
• kitejan

  March 2017

  Anyone can write a song (always have; always will). Question is will anyone else listen to that song?
• Bkrafty

  March 2017

  @kitejan said:
  Anyone can write a song (always have; always will). Question is will anyone else listen to that song?

  Sure they will, just turn on the radio...all kinds of garbage coming out on that thing
• Enkerli

  March 2017

  Glad @richardyot and @brambos mentioned dabblers. There’s a whole lot to be said about casual musicking, yet the emphasis of many of the “everyone can write music” apps tends to be about becoming something of a musician. One example is Auxy, in the way @lenberg explained it, a few years ago.

  The notion is, the app will produce something great. But how about the fun of dabbling, noodling, musicking? If you’re enjoying what you’re making, an audience isn’t that necessary. Of course, it’s really nice to connect to an audience. But that’s a very different motivation from musicking itself.

  As a sax player and ethnomusicologist, much of my attraction to iOS music creation apps is about casual musicking. Sure, like @richardyot says, ended up getting loads of unnecessary apps, cluttering my devices. But it’s so fun to experiment with ThumbJam, Loopy, AC Sabre, GyroSynth, Remixlive, Launchpad, Blocs Wave, Figure, etc.! (Really miss RjDj, wishing H__R were more like the old app.)

  At the same time, there’s a whole dimension of this “sphere of agency” which is about workflow. Many people use individual iOS apps as part of a much broader process. Audiobus itself is a great enabler, in this respect. So are Studiomux, Inter-App Audio, TouchOSC, Virtual MIDI, AUv3, Dropbox, Ableton Link, SoundCloud, AudioCopy, AlliHoopa, and all sorts of export formats (including Ableton Live projects).

  Serious musicking like this and musical dabbling aren’t mutually exclusive, of course. Some apps work well in both. But neither of these approaches is about “creating the next techno hit but tapping a few buttons in a single app”.

  Going back to my ethnomusicologist hat, just wish there were more affordances for music which isn’t based on lead, pad/chords, and drum & bass boxed-in patterns in 4/4 time at constant tempo and diatonic scales based on 12TET. But that’s just me. Besides, there are plenty of apps (say, “DJ” ones) which afford broad musical diversity, with minimal tweaking.

  Now, gotta go back to my dabbling musicker ways.
• Enkerli

  March 2017

  @brambos said:
  Actually, scientific research indicates that most online communities can be broken down into:

  • passive consumers (~90%)
  • active creators (~9%)
  • role models/trend setters (~1%)

  Y’know, this is worth revisiting. It’s been said many times in the past 10–15 years, often based on secondhand comments. A bit like the Milgram’s “Six Degrees of Separation” or, much worse, Gladwell’s reappropriation of Anders Ericsson’s “Ten Years or 10,000 Hours” (via Levitin’s This Is Your Brain on Music). You’re right to bring it up, @brambos, but it still affords further investigation.

  This one almost sounds like Pareto’s Elite Theory (commonly known as the “80/20” rule). With a bit of Rogers’s Diffusion of Innovations. It may well be that online group members are still distributed in the same way. But maybe it’s a bit more complicated.

  As you say about Instagram, people do in fact create things actively. Sure, posting a selfie on Snapchat may not sound to many of us as much of a creative endeavour. But the original research into online activities was mostly about content, especially about writing vs. reading. This was at a time when “lurker” was a common label and forum stats provided a lot of the data needed for this kind of analysis. (Not sure this type of research was meant to be “scientific” in the strictest sense. Might have been an early Pew result.)

  Turns out, people do produce large amounts of “stuff”, of varying quality. We don’t really talk about “user-generated content”, anymore. In part because the original UGC services became much more commercial (cf. YouTube) and in part because UGC is now part of very mainstream social activities. So, in terms of images, you could say that the proportion has shifted quite significantly, with a very large proportion of users of image sharing services being both producers and “consumers” of those pictures. In some cases, as with selfies, much of the production is unbalanced and people would rather not “consume” other people’s “products”.

  Having said that, the proportion of “trendsetters” is probably as small as ever, in the image sharing world. So, we end up being drowned in a lot of material which isn’t necessarily meant to be consumed as high quality products. Which isn’t to say that a lot of creativity doesn’t emerge from this. Just that the “signal to noise ratio” would appear to be low to anyone looking for the highest production value, the most intense creativity, the most novel uses of technology, and the most subversive approaches to art.

  Soooo, going back to musicking. My hunch is that the aforementioned breakdown does work for music: the overwhelming majority of people think of music as a “spectator sport”. Since Attali’s seminal work on the political economy of music, there’s been a clear trend towards music as a commodity, as opposed to musicking as an activity. In the small group of people who do engage in musical activities, a very small fraction could be considered “trendsetters”. Some of their work appears on PalmSounds and/or discchord. Some of them may be (or become) “stars” in their own right. But it remains very unlikely that someone with no musical training whatsoever (formal or informal) will suddenly move to the forefront of a completely new musical genre. Even among those artists whose work affords widespread recognition many, as @Bkrafty points out, produce stuff which isn’t that incredibly novel to some sophisticated listeners’ ears.

  If apps do end up “levelling the playing field” enough, we may end up in a musicking world more similar to the photo world than to the current scene of musical creation. Lots of people playing with music, producing things for their own enjoyment. Not sure it’ll greatly increase the number of “trendsetters”. But maybe that’s not really the point.

  Music, to us, isn’t a spectator sport. We may not care about a rock-influenced guitarist’s self-indulgent noodling or about a wannabe Hip Hop artist’s casual approach to loops. But there’s soooo much fun to be had in any musical activity, from dancing to sampling, curating to singing.