It is to grow time for mobile music apps

To make their apps really compelling, should treat bands as works of art.
Photo: Duncan Geere / wired UK

Pretty much all band-related apps are the same, and they are mostly garbage.

You are filled with tour dates, lyrics, pictures, perhaps a little music, connects with Facebook and Twitter profiles, etc.. The stuff is mostly useless for a fan. Why? Two reasons: It's all on the band's website anyway and the fans are probably getting the important information on their own terms for the artist in question on Twitter, Facebook, song kick, Soundcloud, last.FM and a host of other services.

Too many bands think they need to have an app. You do not. You need a good website, with up-to-date content, which has an excellent mobile version (the few bands) and data feeds that go in the aforementioned services. This list add a pointless app is at best a waste of time and can be even a source of misinformation if it is not regularly updated.

But there is another way, apps for musicians can be useful. You can be art in their own right, rather than just bad marketing.

Modern smartphones are incredibly powerful - it is sent in your Pocket than in all computers, the people on the Moon in the 1960s more computing power into the Smartphone. You can this makes, and the variety of sensors packaged in a modern Smartphone, your songs to make the experience of hearing very personal.

Between gyroscopes, accelerometers, GPS chips, light sensors, internal clocks, microphones and even barometer, a phone knows a lot about your users and your current situation at any time. Use this information to personalize the experience of listening to music can have a powerful effect on the audience.

To find out why to bypass, it is crucial to remember you that hear the experience of the music, not the music itself is important. Someone at the front a gig exactly the same music is when listening to someone at the bar on the back in the chat, but they get a very different experience. Remember your favorite song - chances are you have bound to it an event or happy memory.

Instead of thinking of music as a record, you consider it architecture. The various elements of a song - guitar, bass, vocals, drums, etc. - form floor, walls and ceiling of a place where amazing things can happen. But the town itself, although it incredibly well-constructed, is not important - it is what happens inside, which is important. You can create a dance floor, but it is only exciting if people you dance.

So how can a Smartphone application create, which has some artistic value in its own right? It is therefore, creative and imaginative.

How about an app, the your pace from your Smartphone accelerometer and subtly the music works pace accordingly synchronized?

How about an app that worked out your walking pace from the accelerometer and subtle synchronized to the tempo of the music to match, so you always, that great feeling get in a movie?

Or how about an app that comes in two modes? A passive mode would play for music with minimal interaction, if you're in the Office. A different mode you would really a song to explore - optimizations the sound material - adjust the volume of the various sections, perhaps, so you can really deep in a track.

Or how would an app that retrieves in the weather data from the Web, and gives a different remix you depending on whether it is sunny, wet foggy or stormy, so that it matches perfectly the atmosphere of one day?

The role of the artist in these cases is shifting from the creator of which is a definitive recording to the cooperation with the boundary points. The artist retains control, decide, intelligent choose which sensors to deal with how far the listener can try out their music, and how a sensor input is translated in a change in the output. It is closer to interaction design as traditional music, but it can deliver something that can be very close to traditional music. Or far away. It is up to the musician in question.

Creative ambient artists such as Brian Eno and according to this approach to make the music of Aphex Twin, most likely. But pop or dance music could benefit. For dance music such as on an app, that is the microphone used the environment of the user example filters you through a series of effects, and then injects parts of in the music? If you sitting on a bus next to a woman with a loud phone conversation has always little bits of this conversation inserted in a heavy techno track the potential, incredible sound.

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