In Your Own Time #1 – A mobile music app

07
Aug
2012

I’ve been working away over the last few months making an app for a masters, which is similar to the works I’ve been covering in my ongoing posts about Mobile Music. I’m really excited about the possibilities of creating music in that way and wanted to give it a go myself. I hadn’t been able to try most of the works I’ve been writing about so I was interested in to create a musical experience that I would be happy with as a listener and that I could make available to other people.

I started working on the music using the RjDj app to put together ideas and to create the relationship between the listener and the music. This enabled me to focus on creating a musical experience that was linked to the listener and the listening environment without getting bogged down with the technology. While it was a great way to get started there are some downsides. The main one is that it’s not possible to release it. I used the version of the app created with RjDj as the submission for my masters and in the mean time I’ve managed to enlist the help of a designer, Shane Finan, and a developer, Mick Cody, to help me implement it as an independent app. We’re working on recreating the experience for Android and testing and improving some of the features of the previous version based on the feedback gotten.

You could think of this as the adaptive music equivalent of releasing a single. It’s an app that lets you listen to a piece of music that adapt to what you’re doing and to the sounds around you with each listen. Once the app is finished it’ll be available for free, through Google Play. I’m really looking forward to getting feedback about what people think of experiencing music in this way. If you want to know what it sounds like here’s a fixed performance of the music accompanied by the cellist Kate Ellis at the We Have Two Ears show.

I’ll be doing more in depth posts about the app’s progress and musical experience in the next few weeks so if you’ve any questions or ideas let me know in the comments.

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