Influx

Music used to be something you just listened to, now you play with it. Companies like Apple are educating us to not only customize and have fun with our playlists, but to also make music, with tools like Garageband. However, this is still a solo activity, in the real world of music, musicians are collaborating; one adds vocals, the other a bass line, etc. Activities are undertaken individually, but centralized, sing internet based applications.

The next level of music is going to be collaborative remixing and sharing. We’ve started to see some of the sharing happening already; people are hacking iTrip, an iPod accessory that connects the unit to car radios, and extending the broadcast range from 5ft to 40-ft, enough for a group of teens to tune into an individual’s playlist, in their own cars.
http://www.engadget.com/entry/3597373383872462/

A Media Lab Europe project for wireless based music sharing via cellphones.
http://www.medialabeurope.org/hc/projects/tuna/

Engineers at Sony Labs in Paris are working on Malleable Music. This involves allowing users to share and remix a track in real time, using a handheld device like a cell phone. This transforms music from a passive activity to an active and social one. It also encourages participation, the entry cost is low, you don’t need to be a musician to play. The software has sophisticated AI that thinks for you. With a technology like this, everyone gets the chance to play DJ.
http://www.csl.sony.fr/General/Publications/BibliographyItem.php?reference=tanaka%3A04c

More muscial play from Sony. Building blocks like Dominos that you arrange to create music.

It maybe some years before this technology comes to fruition, but for those interested in playing with music today, this month’s Wired Magazine is giving away a CD of tracks with Creative Commons licenses. This allows users to share, remix and play with the tracks, without fear of copyright infringement.
http://creativecommons.org/wired/

NPR’s story about Wired’s CD.
http://www.npr.org/rundowns/segment.php?wfId=4129100

Today’s generation of young adults have the tools to play with content in ways that previous generations never had. All creators of content now have the opportunity to encourage this play, by providing ways to manipulate it for personal use.

It doesn’t take much imagination to foresee a world where you can create your own personal album of your remixes from a single artist’s tracks, or to select and deselect certain scenes from a movie, to create your own “director’s cut”.

All created content will have value, because there will always be someone who wants to and can use it. It might meet resistance from directors and record roducers objecting to the loss of creative control, but studios and record companies will be keen to unlock the value from all their unused content, while still protecting their intellectual property.

Expect to see these tools as built-in software integrated within the next generation of high capacity, copy-protected CDs and DVDs. Possibly the discs designed for use in Blu-Ray, the DVD technology to be incorporated in Sony’s Playstation 3.
http://www.gamespot.com/news/2004/08/04/news_6104095.html