Collaboration and the Creative Process (Music and Technology): Research Report
From English 194 Wiki Site
By Dan Hawley
23:45, 15 May 2006 (PDT)
Contents |
Abstract
Art is a communicative medium through which an artist can express his or her abstract thoughts. These artistic statements are meant to inspire those that pick up on them, and somehow alter their lives. Oftentimes, artists will collaborate, and for many different reasons. Sometimes it is for technical reasons, and the collaboration (see Collaboration defined) is only a means to express an individual’s pre-established idea. This is the case in movies and most of classical music, where the script or score has already been written out, and the collaboration on the part of the actors and musicians is merely a means for the physical expression of the idea. Other times, however, collaboration takes place during the creative process, and that is what I will be studying, in the field of music. With the invention of the internet and rapid transfer of information that internet allows, couldn’t it be possible to collaborate on music projects from remote locations? If so, how would this affect the finished statement of the art that it creates?
Description
Music is a constantly evolving art form. Through different stages of popular music's evolution, we can see the paradigm for collaboration change. In the age of Gregorian chant and classical orchestrated music, composed musical works were completed by one composer and then passed on to one group of - usually local - musicians. It wasn't until years after the original work was published (sometimes not even until after the death of the composer) that other orchestras or ensembles were given access to the original scores. Under this mode of composition, information is transmitted among those involved by means of written musical notation. In the last five years, however, there has been a huge boom in digital recording software and hardware, as well as the innovation of MIDI(Musical Instrument Digital Interface) technology. These modern tools can open up an entire world of uncharted collaborative power that is sitting at the tips of the fingers of any computer savvy composer today.
Analysis and Evaluation
Modern internet companies have begun delving into the possibilities of this new technology in order to cause evolution in the creative process of music composition. In early 2004, MyVirtualBand was started by Kelly Senecal (a guitarist) and Scott Mason (a drummer). Users of MyVirtualBand.com are able to create constantly evolving musical ideas using the message board interface. “Registered members collaborate online through ‘virtual bands’ to create songs by swapping recorded audio tracks of their own instrument or vocal parts”, (MyVirtualBand.com). Any member can create a message board topic with an attached sample of audio. Members are free to use, copy, and even market these samples for commercial or private use. MyVirtualBand.com takes responsibility in managing the property rights for these samples. The original messages can be replied to with questions about the track, alterations to the audio, or isolated audio files that users can work into their own creations at their own will.
The advantage of the message board is that all stages of the creative process involved in each work are documented and can be accessed by any user at any time. The drawbacks associated with MyVirtualBand.com, however, are a result of the message board format as well. Because the message board format allows users to see every stage of the creative process, and because there are so many users, the amount of information that is available to work with on MyVirtualBand.com is far too vast and disorganized to be of any use to a listener or composer. Finding a topic to work on is like navigating through an unfamiliar forest in the dark, and posting a reply is like carving your name into one of the trees. Why bother if no one is there to hear it? The message board concept presented by MyVitrualBand.com is an important part in the evolution of collaboratively created music, and in their own words, “We believe that this form of songwriting will be a big part of the future of recorded music” (MyVirtualBand.com). However, the transmission of information over the internet in this fashion is disorganized, and because of this, it falls short of producing any truly creative or innovative finished products.
After MyVirtualBand, in 2005, Ninjam seems to have taken the next step in digital collaborative recording over the internet. Ninjam software allows its users to jam online. For instance, using Ninjam software I am capable of picking up my guitar and recording with a drummer in Boston over the internet in real time! Well, almost real time. Because of bandwidth and computer latency issues, a state of the art computer system is not currently capable of precisely matching our digitally recorded music. This drawback is partially due to the way Ninjam records its files. Ninjam allows users to record any audible sound by converting those sounds into basic .wav files and simultaneously sending those files out over the internet as I record them. This takes enormous processing power, which is currently available. The sufficient bandwidth needed to transmit these files over the internet is currently unavailable. Because of this, Ninjam suffers a fatal flaw. Users are capable of hearing the recorded audio provided by others, but with a timed delay. Ninjam times this delay to one measure at best, which can be anywhere between .5 and 10 seconds, depending on the meter and tempo of the piece.
“If this sounds pretty bizarre, it sort of is, until you get used to it, then it becomes pretty natural,” (Ninjam.com). Nonetheless, even after getting used to the way it works, the quality of product that is turned out by Ninjam suffers greately, since the finished pieces sound disjunct and thrown together haphazardly when compared with the finished products of MyVirtualBand.com. The new software interface and concept driving Ninjam is unique, and Ninjam is another step in the right direction of technological collaboration among musicians over the internet. The art produced using this new technology seems to have taken a step back, however, which makes Ninjam somewhat impractical. MyVirtualBand.com and Ninjam are both attempts to get multiple composers together to work simultaneously on one project. MyVirtualBand.com falls short of this goal because of the disorganization of information and the downtime that composers must deal with because of the message board interface. Ninjam attempts to fix these problems by better organizing the information and shortening the downtime in the creative process. It accomplishes this goal, but at the expense of altering the musical perception of the artist. The next evolution in musical internet technology, eJamming.com, better solves all of these problems. Currently, eJamming.com is on the pressing frontier of musical collaboration on the internet. eJamming.com uses an entirely MIDI based recording software bundle in order to create an online live jamming environment. This eliminates the lag time that is mentioned as a serious issue with Ninjam.
MIDI, or Musical Instrument Digital Interface is a type of computerized composition software that allows the composer to access pre-recorded sounds and samples using a controller. These can be one note samples (such as the sampling of a flute, or saxaphone), and can be altered in pitch, duration, and intensity using a MIDI controller. This means that with a digital sample collection to draw from, a MIDI keyboard, a guitar, or a drum kit can be used to pull up various samples, as they are assigned to specific keys, strings, or drum heads. eJamming.com uses this concept to its full potential by transferring sample data before the session, so that all that is transferred during the performance is a MIDI mapping chart, sent as a text file including the pitch (ie. A#, B, Fb), intensity, and duration of any given note. Because far less data is being transmitted, it can be done quicker, creating virtually no lag time for users using eJamming.com.
Still, despite the amount of improved features, there seems to be a huge drawback of using eJamming.com. Because eJamming is only capable of transmitting MIDI data, non-MIDI instruments cannot be used along with the service. At present, only drum sets and pianos are made as MIDI instruments. Recently MIDI guitar patches have been manufactured and can be attached to any guitar. There are no wind instruments or other string instruments that have made the MIDI transition at this point, which strongly limits the tools that a composer has at his disposal.
Being the top of the line commercially sold software, eJamming.com suffers some drawbacks, but it still opens new doors. Using eJamming.com allows anyone in the world to be connected in real time, on the condition that they are using MIDI hardware and software. Even though this does limit the composer to certain instruments, the sound of any instrument can be feigned using a MIDI keyboard.
I postulate that there are two possible next steps in the evolution of modern music composition and collaboration. The first possible direction is that composers will begin to rely more heavily on MIDI samples and less on live tracking. Not only is MIDI easier to transfer over the internet, it also allows any composer access to a plethora of instruments at the click of a button. This step has already been taken in popular music, as demonstrated by the amount of the tracking done in rap music by artists Doctor Dre., Jay-Z, Kanye West, and many other artists using MIDI sampling.
Another step forward would be the diversification of MIDI instruments. An tuner/sensor would need to be installed in a wind instrument in order to catch the pitch as the air flows through the instrument and then convert it to MIDI information. But how would you make a live MIDI map of a vocal track? How would you record a choir? The answers to these questions are out there waiting to be discovered, as collaborative music pushes forward into a new frontier in the 21st century.
Works cited
Edited by Victoriya Filippova 13:08, 16 May 2006 (PDT)
