Listeners have long been inspired to interact with music and create new representations of popular releases. Vinyl offered many opportunities to reappropriate chart music, from scratching and tempo manipulation to mixing multiple songs together. More recently, artists could engage their audience to interact with their music by offering mix-stems online for experimentation and sharing. With the extended processing power of mobile devices, the opportunities for interactive music are dramatically increasing.
This presentation shows research that demonstrates a novel approach to interactive music playback. The research looks at the emergent format of the album app and extends existing paradigms of interactive playback. The novel album app designed in this research presents a new opportunity for listeners to engage with recorded content by allowing them to explore alternative performance takes, renditions of a given song in multiple genres, and by allowing direct interaction with embedded mix-stems, all in real time. The resultant audio remains true to the artist and producer’s studio vision; it is user-influenced, but machine-controlled. The research was conducted in collaboration with artist Daisy and The Dark and was funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council.
