Us-Tunes: How CSCW Brings Musicians Together.

By Marek Skalczynski

So you just bought yourself a shiny new guitar. You spend a few months learning to play a few songs and suddenly you decide that you have the talent to jam with the greats. The inner rock god screams a killer vocal line, if only you had a band. You must create this song, but how? Do not fear. The field of Computer Supported Cooperative Work has grown to such tremendous proportions that it can support the weight of your brilliant ideas. The internet today, is alive, with tools that will guide you on your journey; you need only look. Soon you will be the envy of your neighbours.

One of my prime passions is music. The internet has allowed me to network and share with other artists both real-time and asynchronously. Wether trading ideas, asking assistance, or collaborating on a project with multiple people, there are ways to work socially with music. I will be detailing my experiences with a variety of social applications which I have used to communicate and collaborate with other musicians; both locally and around the world. I will talk about these softwares from both a design and technology perspective showing where they succeed and where they fail. I will also cement some thoughts for what I see in the near future, as well as avenues I would like to see developers explore.

There are certainly many software solutions out there. To start off let’s examine the CSCW groupware matrix and see how different music creating/sharing software systems fit in. One of the greatest thrills of being an aspiring musician is the ability to play at the same time with other people who share a passion for creating music. Guitar Hero: World Tour, an interactive and physically involved game for the PlayStation console, allows you to do just that. The software gives the user the option to create their own songs, record their own vocals and upload them for others to download and play. This is a true example of CSCW as cooperative play as well as being a prime example of a same time/same place application. When offline, players of the game are present in the same room and play in cooperative environment to achieve the goal of a perfect performance. The physical feel of the instruments make the user genuinely invest their emotions and contribute to the micro-community of four. However, even with the ability to create custom songs, this is not a serious music creation tool.

We can move away from the physical aspect of same time/same place and consider that a place may be a virtual. Given this, there are a few applications that spring to mind. Particularly, any application that allows the (near)-real-time transmission of sound across the internet. The most famous of these is Skype. Many a time I have used Skype to jam (play or practice together) with friends across the globe in a shared audio space. However the problem with any real-time transmission of audio over even short distances is the latency of the sound. It may be manageable in other real-time internet application domains, such as gaming, but in music it is a kill-switch. One of the fundamentals of music is timing; when two layers of a song (e.g. two instruments) are desynchronised even by a fraction of a second, the resulting combination sounds terrible. This is an example of technology not supporting the activity and instead defining the constraints on the activities that can be performed. The underlying technology is intrinsically linked to the social interactions it can support. This is a serious coordination problem for any real-time music collaboration tool to solve.

However, there is an application called Fruity Loops Collab that gives some hope. It is an extension to a music creation package that allows the user to create everything from drums to vocals and generate an MP3. The Collab extension allows the user to collaborate on a file real-time with others from different places. The key difference between this application and Skype is that Fruity Loops uses loops not streaming audio. The end result is that users modify a looping track which may contain hundreds of layers that always stay synchronised . The sound is generated by the client computer, not transmitted across the network. Only the actions on the sounds and the loops (either a sound file or a format a synthesizer can recreate) themselves are transmitted. The actions in the software are still affected by latency, but the end sound is not. Since the software has been specifically designed for music, the developers have thought about latency and engineered around it. Comparatively, Skype was intended as an internet telephone application and the designers never considered the implications of users trying their software in the music domain.

The Fruity Loops Collab add-on is a good step in the right direction to supporting the need for real-time music collaboration. However I’m finding that people are not using this tool. I know from my personal experience that music creation on the computer is a very time consuming and repetitive activity, unlike live music, where preparation is made beforehand (practicing). Since it is difficult to have long collaborations of many hours, Collab is used more as just a curiosity or a toy to play with, not as a serious tool like the designers intended. Another limitation of Collab is that it will only work for music created digitally or pre-recorded instruments. If bands wish to play live with instruments over a network, then there is no tool to support this kind of collaboration due to the latency issue.

Returning to the Groupware Matrix, let’s examine some Web 2.0 software that allows musicians to communicate at different times in the same (virtual) place. There are many sites out there that support this. These are music sharing sites specifically geared around collaboration and education, with a strong focus on social translucence. My favourite ones are CTG Music, Trax In Space and Sound-Click. They all essentially do the same thing but slight design differences shape the communities in different ways. CTG Music has a strong emphasis on reviewing songs. Users must review 3 other user’s song for every additional song uploaded on the same day. This has created a community focused around a Tic-for-Tack (“you review mine, I’ll review yours”) review system and a strong emphasis on quality. TIS (Trax In Space) has a up-front quick commenting and rating system, making it easy to just post a quick thought on a track. TIS users are more inclined to give feedback on songs compared to CTG users, who prefer to write lengthy reviews less often. Sound-Click, the third site I mentioned, has a very robust ranking system that updates daily based on plays and downloads. This has created a community obsessed with getting high on the charts and staying there. It is interesting to see how the communities are different, not because of the people, but the design choices the developers made years ago.

These sites all have a few things in common that really drive the communities to critical mass, and why they are so successful. Each user has an individual page, like MySpace or FaceBook. Users upload or link songs on this page and are then included on a micro-blog system on the main page. Whenever they update with a new song, they are added to the top of this list. Everyone can have awareness of what their friends are doing using this microblog and the inbuilt friend list feature. This allows every user to at least get some exposure, something that doesn’t happen on MySpace Music; where once an artist profile is created, it is lost to the vacuous search space, never to be seen again. The communities created on music sites are centred on sharing content and collaboration. Close friends can easily be made since they mimic the design of social networking sites. In comparison, social network sites (such as MySpace and FaceBook) have different social etiquette and this can block some interactions due to the way the system is designed. On music sites, each user is contributing their tracks to a community music library, there are more avenues for making friends as the community has a shared presence.

There is one final category in the groupware matrix. This is user interaction at different times in different places. Although it is difficult to differentiate what is the same place and what is a different place when thinking of virtual spaces, I think that Last.fm can fall into this category since most interaction happens asynchronously and in no specific location. In addition to the listening features of the site, a musician can upload their music to the Last.fm servers and have it broadcast across the internet. I’ve found this is a good way to get exposure, but the community does seem isolated among artists. This is a good application for sharing music tastes with friend’s (something that aspiring musicians do a lot), but so far I haven’t found that it that great a tool for sharing your creations. Although there is a feedback interface implemented, the system is centred on music sharing and doesn’t provide much support for musicians to collaborate outside of feedback and messaging. Rather it is more suitable for musicians to sell their albums or promote themselves.

I have examined a few applications that are out there for budding musicians to get their hands dirty. A lot of these applications have focused on a few key concepts and the communities have sprung up around those features. It is obvious that the technology involved also limits the interactions, such as Guitar Hero limiting the user to how they can contribute (due to peripherals), or Skype limiting the user to what cooperative activity they can perform. I expect that in the future there will be more interfacing between instruments and computers, and the lines will blur between digital and physical, allowing more opportunities for interactions between musicians. I think Guitar Hero is an early example of this. I also believe that near-real-time audio applications can work in the music domain if incoming streaming audio is synchronised to a tempo. I also would like to see more mash-ups to reduce the walled-garden effect. This is already happening in social networking sites, but music networking sites are definitely behind in this area – communities are happy in their isolation.

Finally, I would like to see developers taking a more active interest in how people are using their application and allow the users to effect its evolution (For example, Twitter). This is difficult given the limitations of certain technologies, but technology is always changing and many novel solutions await us.

References

Turner, B. & Turner, P., & Turner S. (2005) Designing Interactive Systems, Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education Limited.

Computer Supported Cooperative Work. Retrieved April 3, 2009, from the Wikipedia web site http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_supported_cooperative_work#Different_time.2Fdifferent_place

CTG Music. Retrieved April 3, 2009, from the CTG Music web site http://www.ctgmusic.com

Sound Click. Retrieved April 3, 2009, from the Sound Click web site http://www.soundclick.com

Trax in Space. Retrieved April 3, 2009, from the Trax in Space web site http://www.traxinspace.com