It?s Time for Mobile Music Apps to Grow Up

To make their apps truly compelling, bands should treat them like works of art.
Photo: Duncan Geere/Wired UK

Pretty much all band-related apps are the same, and they?re mostly rubbish.

They?re filled with tour dates, lyrics, images, maybe a bit of music, links to Facebook and Twitter profiles, etc. For a fan, that stuff is mostly useless. Why? Two reasons: It?s all on the band?s website anyway and those fans are probably following the artist in question on Twitter, Facebook, Songkick, Soundcloud, Last.fm and a host of other services, getting the important info on their own terms.

Too many bands think they need to have an app. They don?t. They need a good website, with up-to-date content, that has an excellent mobile version (which few bands have), and data feeds that go out to all those aforementioned services. Adding a pointless app to that list is a waste of time at best, and can even be a source of misinformation if it?s not regularly updated.

But there?s another way that apps can be useful to a musician. They can be art in their own right, rather than just bad marketing.

Modern smartphones are incredibly powerful ? there?s more computing power in the smartphone in your pocket than in all the computers that sent man to the moon in the ?60s. You can use that power, and the vast array of sensors packed into a modern smartphone, to make the experience of listening to your songs intensely personal.

Between gyroscopes, accelerometers, GPS chips, light sensors, internal clocks, microphones and even barometers, a phone knows a huge amount about its user and their current situation at any time. Using that information to personalize the experience of listening to music can have a powerful effect on the listener.

To work out why, it?s crucial to remember that what?s important is the experience of listening to music, not the music itself. Someone at the front of a gig is listening to exactly the same music as someone chatting at the bar at the back, but they get a very different experience. Think of your favorite song ? odds are you?ve got some event or happy memory tied to it.

Rather than thinking of music as a recording, think of it as architecture. The different elements of a song ? guitar, bass, vocals, drums, etc. ? form the floor, walls and ceiling of a place where amazing stuff can happen. But the place itself, even if it?s incredibly well-constructed, isn?t important ? it?s what happens inside it that?s important. You can build a dance floor, but it only becomes exciting if there are people dancing on it.

So how can you build a smartphone app that has some artistic merit in its own right? It?s about being creative and imaginative.

How about an app that works out your walking pace from your smartphone?s accelerometer and subtly syncs the music?s tempo to match?

How about an app that works out your walking pace from the accelerometer and subtly syncs up the tempo of the music to match, so you always get that great feeling of being in a film?

Or how about an app that comes in two modes? A passive mode would play music with minimal interaction, for when you?re in the office. Another mode would let you really explore a song ? tweaking the sound substantially ? adjusting the volume of different sections, perhaps, so you can really get deep into a track.

Or how about an app that pulls in weather data from the web, and gives you a different remix depending on whether it?s sunny, wet, foggy or stormy, so that it perfectly suits the atmosphere of a day?

The role of the artist in these cases shifts from being the creator of one definitive recording to working with boundaries. The artist retains control ? they decide how far the listener can explore their music, intelligently choosing which sensors to respond to and how that sensor?s input gets translated into a change in output. It?s closer to interaction design than traditional music creation, but it can deliver something that can be very close to traditional music. Or far away. It?s up to the musician in question.

Creative ambient artists like Brian Eno and Aphex Twin are likely to suit this approach to music-making the most. But it can also apply to pop or dance music. Taking the latter as an example, how about an app that uses the microphone to sample the environment around the user, filters it through a number of effects, and then injects parts of it into the music? If you?re on a bus sitting next to a woman having a loud phone conversation, getting little bits of that conversation inserted into a heavy techno track has the potential to sound incredible.

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Source: http://www.wired.com/underwire/2011/04/mobile-music-apps/

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