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Concert of Collaboration: Making Music Together
- By barbara mountjoy
- Published 04/27/2008
- Technology
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barbara mountjoy
I’ve been writing ever since I was a little girl, unable to control the words that wanted to percolate through my fingers into the keyboard. I’ve had some moderate success, but I’m still working hard, with my ultimate goal to have novels in print. In the meantime, I’m keeping my day job as a family law attorney, my night job as parent to three children with special needs, and writing when I can. If you'd like to know more, see http://awalkabout.wordpress.com
View all articles by barbara mountjoy
The creation of the Internet has opened many doors for users to reach outside their hometown spheres and connect with others, such as reading news from around the world, finding a harmonic spouse who may live in a distant city, and learning about –well just about anything. One such opportunity is the chance to collaborate musically with musicians you don’t know and may never meet, creating new global melodies in an uncommon place—the online studio.
Take, for example, the Fruit Projects, where, through the medium of electronic music, an album will be birthed over the course of the next 12 months. During this gestation period, the site’s owner, Zaki Rostom, will pull together snippets of sound to create a 10-track album, each themed around a particular luscious dessert (with recipes!) which symbolizes “a certain mood/tempo/style/genre/theme.”
“The Fruit Projects are sort of a ‘work in progress’,” Zaki said, “a place where different musicians can come and work together, whether by sharing loops or MIDI files, or contributing in the mixing and editing process.”
A DJ since 1998, Zaki’s experience sharpened his keen interest in music, and prodded him to travel from his home in Egypt to London to study digital audio production.
“While attending the course, I came across many different musicians with lots of talent. Their main complaint was that there aren’t many channels whereby they can meet other musicians to work together and collaborate on a track and eventually market it.”
Technology, he says, makes this magic possible. “First of all, in terms of software, there are many varying softwares available dedicated to digital music production, some even fine-tuned to a certain genre or style of music. The programs are great in that they can match and synchronize the tempo of different audio samples and loops. In simpler terms, they basically allow an instrument player to synchronize an audio track with another vocalist's recording.”
This expands to allow perhaps a drumline from one artist to blend with synthesized elements, multiple vocals from others—essentially an endless variety of different permutations from a single set of digitized sounds.
“For those who are looking for a simple, basic program - the vocalist looking for a composer or the instrument player looking for a band, for example- the MAC OS Garage Band (that comes installed by default in most MAC OS systems) does the job, but there are many others. What is great about these programs is that they are really very easy to use, especially for those artists out there with little or no experience in digital mixing and editing, with fears of not knowing how to practice recording or how to actually record and send a vocal or instrumental loop across the Web.”
This element levels the playing field. In the real world, musicians meet for a jam, they bring their instruments, their certain level of playing skill and create a piece of music in real time. Using synthesized music on the Net, creating melodies underlaid with a beat and complex layers doesn’t require the same level of skill or time frame.
In a joint paper on Contexts of Collaborative Musical Experiences published in 2003, Tina Blaine and Sidney Feis point out that “a wave of new types of collaborative interfaces and group experiences has emerged for collective music making with the potential to include people with little or no musical training….
Making collaborative interfaces relatively simple and easy to learn facilitates ‘flow’ for novices.”
The paper identifies “flow’ as a psychological state achieved by engaging in a deeply satisfying experience that alters one’s state of consciousness; the term was first coined by psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. In his model, he envisioned the concept of group flow where parallel, organized working and a target group focus, like in Zaki’s work above, were conducive to fulfillment of both the group and individuals’ needs. For Csíkszentmihályi, existence of differences among participants represents an opportunity, rather than an obstacle.
While some musicians who have worked hard to perfect their craft may complain that some dues-paying is being neglected, Blaine and Feis suggest that one of the primary motivating factors for the collaboration is the participants’ experience rather than the sheer quality of the resulting product. Zaki’s method and that of other sites like Splice allows people of all levels and skill the chance to upload their bits of sound, music, vocal or otherwise, for inclusion in a larger piece and use by others in the furtherance of their own work.
Splice, recently selected as a finalist in CNET’s Webware 100 Awards, is a free site where people of all skill levels can experiment with creating music. Users can upload and record sounds, use sounds others have posted in a common sounds library, and listen to music other Splicers have created. A step-by-step video demonstrates how to operate the software, and there are also forums for newbies to get their questions answered and share their experiences in a more social setting. Who know, this is where the new Sonny might meet the new Cher!
(Here’s a song—my first ever—that I made at Splice in about half an hour, with no training whatsoever: The clip runs about 38 seconds. bjm )
Zaki’s site also has access to tips for musicians using various programs, even some at the more professional level for people who are actively composing, editing and mixing. “For these purposes, Logic Apple is great, it really has provided a user friendly interface - simplified - where you can manage and edit your music.”
What do you do with your musical bits after you’ve recorded them? “The Internet holds many free file hosting sites where you can upload your samples or loops, sort of like a virtual hard drive where you can upload and share your audio files in different file formats making it accessible to a much wider audience,” Zaki said. “This offers a great opportunity for artists who are not yet signed under record labels, or who are still experimenting or just want their music to be heard to share it with others.”
The first artists are getting on board for the Fruit Projects, according to Zaki’s site, so there is plenty of time to become part of the “and friends” group. Now that the themes are chosen, Zaki and team will be moving on through the summer to collect samples of instrumental tracks, then the artists will work together to edit samples for the tracks. In the fall, the composers will survey the material received and consider their placement with the given themes. Arrangement and mixing will take place thereafter, with the finished product available in March 2009.
Take, for example, the Fruit Projects, where, through the medium of electronic music, an album will be birthed over the course of the next 12 months. During this gestation period, the site’s owner, Zaki Rostom, will pull together snippets of sound to create a 10-track album, each themed around a particular luscious dessert (with recipes!) which symbolizes “a certain mood/tempo/style/genre/theme.”
“The Fruit Projects are sort of a ‘work in progress’,” Zaki said, “a place where different musicians can come and work together, whether by sharing loops or MIDI files, or contributing in the mixing and editing process.”
A DJ since 1998, Zaki’s experience sharpened his keen interest in music, and prodded him to travel from his home in Egypt to London to study digital audio production.
“While attending the course, I came across many different musicians with lots of talent. Their main complaint was that there aren’t many channels whereby they can meet other musicians to work together and collaborate on a track and eventually market it.”
Technology, he says, makes this magic possible. “First of all, in terms of software, there are many varying softwares available dedicated to digital music production, some even fine-tuned to a certain genre or style of music. The programs are great in that they can match and synchronize the tempo of different audio samples and loops. In simpler terms, they basically allow an instrument player to synchronize an audio track with another vocalist's recording.”
This expands to allow perhaps a drumline from one artist to blend with synthesized elements, multiple vocals from others—essentially an endless variety of different permutations from a single set of digitized sounds.
“For those who are looking for a simple, basic program - the vocalist looking for a composer or the instrument player looking for a band, for example- the MAC OS Garage Band (that comes installed by default in most MAC OS systems) does the job, but there are many others. What is great about these programs is that they are really very easy to use, especially for those artists out there with little or no experience in digital mixing and editing, with fears of not knowing how to practice recording or how to actually record and send a vocal or instrumental loop across the Web.”
This element levels the playing field. In the real world, musicians meet for a jam, they bring their instruments, their certain level of playing skill and create a piece of music in real time. Using synthesized music on the Net, creating melodies underlaid with a beat and complex layers doesn’t require the same level of skill or time frame.
In a joint paper on Contexts of Collaborative Musical Experiences published in 2003, Tina Blaine and Sidney Feis point out that “a wave of new types of collaborative interfaces and group experiences has emerged for collective music making with the potential to include people with little or no musical training….
The paper identifies “flow’ as a psychological state achieved by engaging in a deeply satisfying experience that alters one’s state of consciousness; the term was first coined by psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. In his model, he envisioned the concept of group flow where parallel, organized working and a target group focus, like in Zaki’s work above, were conducive to fulfillment of both the group and individuals’ needs. For Csíkszentmihályi, existence of differences among participants represents an opportunity, rather than an obstacle.
While some musicians who have worked hard to perfect their craft may complain that some dues-paying is being neglected, Blaine and Feis suggest that one of the primary motivating factors for the collaboration is the participants’ experience rather than the sheer quality of the resulting product. Zaki’s method and that of other sites like Splice allows people of all levels and skill the chance to upload their bits of sound, music, vocal or otherwise, for inclusion in a larger piece and use by others in the furtherance of their own work.
Splice, recently selected as a finalist in CNET’s Webware 100 Awards, is a free site where people of all skill levels can experiment with creating music. Users can upload and record sounds, use sounds others have posted in a common sounds library, and listen to music other Splicers have created. A step-by-step video demonstrates how to operate the software, and there are also forums for newbies to get their questions answered and share their experiences in a more social setting. Who know, this is where the new Sonny might meet the new Cher!
(Here’s a song—my first ever—that I made at Splice in about half an hour, with no training whatsoever: The clip runs about 38 seconds. bjm )
Zaki’s site also has access to tips for musicians using various programs, even some at the more professional level for people who are actively composing, editing and mixing. “For these purposes, Logic Apple is great, it really has provided a user friendly interface - simplified - where you can manage and edit your music.”
What do you do with your musical bits after you’ve recorded them? “The Internet holds many free file hosting sites where you can upload your samples or loops, sort of like a virtual hard drive where you can upload and share your audio files in different file formats making it accessible to a much wider audience,” Zaki said. “This offers a great opportunity for artists who are not yet signed under record labels, or who are still experimenting or just want their music to be heard to share it with others.”
The first artists are getting on board for the Fruit Projects, according to Zaki’s site, so there is plenty of time to become part of the “and friends” group. Now that the themes are chosen, Zaki and team will be moving on through the summer to collect samples of instrumental tracks, then the artists will work together to edit samples for the tracks. In the fall, the composers will survey the material received and consider their placement with the given themes. Arrangement and mixing will take place thereafter, with the finished product available in March 2009.
