I miss record stores. And I’m feeling nostalgic today.

As a kid I remember taking the bus to the three story Tower Records in Westwood, flipping through albums, searching for things I’d heard on the radio. As a teen I’d drive to the mammoth Tower on Sunset, discovering new artists via Tower’s small, but quickly growing, CD bins. In my twenties I discovered specialized stores — Aaron’s on Highland had the most amazing selection, and their staff picks were almost always obscure, imported, and amazing.

At home my collection went through a variety of organizational schemes. There were periodic alphabetization of everything, but it was the scattered piles of the “recently played,” or “heavy rotation” that really defined what I listened to. Periodically I’d comb through the larger collection and pulling out stuff as a reminder to listen to it.

As an iTunes user (or prisoner?) I’ve been struggling with the fact that my music collection is entirely digital. I don’t go to record stores any more. And I don’t have stacks of music around the stereo. Instead it’s all in a single interface — missing so much of what helped make music an important part of my life. Specifically music discovery and music organization.

Paul Lamere, of Music Machinery, gave a talk at SXSW entitled “Finding Music with Pictures: Data Visualization for Discovery.” The slideshare he posted is full of great examples of information design and UI. (There’s a Storify version, too.) It gives an overview of the complexity of communicating the relationships between artists.

Towards the end, he looks at some interactive tools for helping people discover new music. They’re all interesting — but, to me, they feel too technical. They show relationships, categorizations and taxonomies — but lack the human editorial component that brings them to life. Plus – where’s the sound? These interfaces don’t feel musical.

Years ago, while working on a music search project, I learned that much of what makes people like music is based on peer-influences. (The other big factor was hearing something multiple times.) Those influencers may be friends, people we look up to, or even a store or label we respect.

There are tools and sites that aim to bring the social to music discovery, but they’re lacking. People need better ways to embrace digital music — to discover, search, organize, and collect.

We need something else.

Maybe this makes me sound like an old curmudgeon, looking for a long passed era. But instead I think it’s a reminder that there’s missing opportunity out there. People need better ways to embrace digital music. And it would be to the benefit of artists, record labels, and users, for this topic to move from a niche category into the mainstream.

(Everything I just said applies to video, too.)

The Muffin Player

Musicbox

Hitlantis

Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music

Related posts:

1. MoodLogic Magnet Browser
2. Music Notation and Play
3. Interactive Synesthesia (part 1…)

It reminded me of this recent post, Against chrome: a manifesto — a nice rant against all the UI chrome and out-of-date metaphors that are gunking-up moderns interfaces.

Related posts:

1. Music Notation and Play
2. Underworld’s DVD-ROM
3. Interactive Synesthesia (part 1…)

In the late 90′s, Underworld was super-popular among my graphic design and new media friends. It wasn’t just Underworld’s music, it was the way they used visual design and motion graphics as part of their brand, and as a central element in their live performances. They weren’t just music – they were media! And it made a lot of sense — Underworld had deep connections with the art/design group Tomato and there was even some sort of connection to the innovative interactive group Antirom.

Rummaging through storage boxes, I recently stumbled upon an old Underworld DVD, the 2000 “Underworld Live; EVERYTHING, EVERYTHING.” What’s funny is that that it looked like I never actually played it, as the disc was unopened. So it was interesting to look at it with modern eyes, without the memory of what it was like at the time.

The disc had a DVD-ROM bonus feature, a PC-based interactive component that was comprised of two experiences:

The first, “Wongizer,” takes keyboard input and, based on the character pressed, displays a different video clip of abstract graphics. In an era when video and rich graphics were still pretty rare, this would’ve been a fun toy. But since you can’t remember which graphics are associated with which keys, there isn’t much sense of control. It’s a keyboard without the ability to really “play” it.

The second, “Headset,” lets the user select between four different soundscapes, change the audio mix between music and ambient speech, and vary the mix via a dynamic 3×3 matrix. Mixing audio was, at the time, a common CD-ROM experience, but the dynamic interactive graphics were a nice touch in a world where so much interactive content was made from static images.

Still, given Underworld’s design and interactive pedigree, I can’t help feeling that the piece was a missed opportunity. The Urban Feedback CD-ROMs, for example, had a similar moody, graphic designed, atmospheres and abstract interactions, but they felt much richer — spaces you’d want to explore further. I just wish Underworld had pushed this a bit more.

Wongizer - interface

Headset - interface

DVD - main menu

Related posts:

1. Lovedisk
2. Music Discovery and Organization
3. Interactive Synesthesia (part 1…)

There’s no reason I can’t talk about my own projects on this blog, right? Just keep in mind that this story starts in 1999, when the web was mostly just html pages, some Director/Shockwave, a little Flash, and mostly dial-up modems. The social web didn’t yet exist. Napster was being sued by everyone. And the idea of selling music online was considered crazy. But lots of companies saw that something was about to happen and wanted to get involved.

Back then Triplecode was just Pascal Wever and myself, with the occasional freelancers — a tiny interactive design studio. We were approached by a new startup, founded to help people discover new music. The company, MoodLogic (although, as we worked with them, they were also known as Emotioneering and JaBoom), was just a couple founders, a core technology (but no sense of how to best give access to it), and a rented mansion in the hills above San Francisco. It was very dot-com.

The design problem was super-interesting: People’s musical tastes narrow as they age. Whether it’s the music enthusiast, stuck in a particular style of music, or the post-teen who still listens to their high-school/college favorites. This happens, in part, because musical tastes are very peer-driven, and as we get older our social groups move away from using music as a key identifier. To make matters worse, there are no good alternatives for discovering new music. Record stores (Remember them? This was in the days before iTunes and legal digital downloads.) didn’t make it easy for people to discover new music — and their organization of albums by genres and alphabetically definitely didn’t encourage exploration and serendipity.

MoodLogic thought they could offer a solution: apply super-smart statistical analytics and analysis algorithms to a vast musical database. And they built a big one. They categorized song data across 24+ dimensions including perception-based music metadata and information gathered by automated signal processing. By the time the project was launched, tens of thousands of music listeners had contributed more than 300 million discrete opinions, and the database had over 700 million data points collected on 550,000 songs! It probably wouldn’t be a big deal these days, but back in 1999 that was a big data set!

The design challenge was to take advantage of all this data and analytical smarts and create a great user experience. How could we help people discover new music that matched their tastes and mood? It was important that it be intuitive and give results that people could believe. But there also needed to be some transparency to the complex underlying mechanism so users could trust the system. I thought the nicest, most poetic, metaphor MoodLogic used when describing their dream solution was for the system to feel like a “magical compass” that helps you find songs.

Concepting

The project began with an extensive design research and mutual-education phase. It was a “what if” process examining different user scenarios, delivery technologies, and business strategies. We worked very closely with MoodLogic’s growing team of engineers, analysts, and music taxonomers — with each group feeding ideas into the others work. It was a lot of fun. And we developed a wide range of exploratory designs dealing with possible conceptual structures of their vast music data.

Our sketches — with names like “dancing jiggles,” “6d space plot,” and “skyscrapers from above” — may have seemed crazy, but they helped us all get a grip on the complexity of the task. We wanted to break away from analytics and think more about emotional and intuitive experiences for music discovery. The sketches also helped MoodLogic’s scientists, who were mostly familiar with traditional scientific visualization tools, think in new ways about their data.

Text only

Six dimensional space plot

Early sketches emphasized user experience and flow over content and organization. And many of them were “sketched in code” — giving an interactive feel for how a user might navigate through this vast database, and how the data might restructure itself as the user moved. As things progressed, some sketches were connected to the database to evaluate their usability with real data.

Multi-dimensional timeline

"Magic Circles" early version

"Magic Circles" where the user could infinitely zoom, and as they did so songs would rearrange based on the previous choices.

Refinement

Over time we settled on an interface concept where users used a combination of “filters” and “magnets” to search and explore songs. Filters were used to limit the songs displayed, magnets helped visually arrange them into meaningful distributions. The magnets also allowed users to directly manipulate the information, providing a fluidity and flexibility that would be impossible in a more traditional page-based presentation.

In the browser’s first full implementation, magnets and filters were interchangeable — so, any search criteria could be used as either a filter or a magnet. For example, users could place magnets for “happy” and “saxophone” and the songs would arrange themselves accordingly – often in unexpected but interesting ways.

While this approach allowed the greatest flexibility in exploring, user testing found it to be a bit complicated. It took too long for people learn how to use the system. While a learning curve might be acceptable in some other context, it was definitely a problem for this web application – for just as users were not assumed to be music experts, so too they should not need to become experts in this system.

As a result, we narrowed the way in which filters and magnets were used. Filters would be used for categorical qualities of the music, and magnets for the more abstract emotional characteristics. (The magnets were arranged as a Pultchik wheel of emotions.) This made it easy for users to quickly start using the browser and enabled them to make more complex search requests as they become more comfortable with the system.

Letting users drag the magnets around – manipulating the data dynamically, and seeing their inter-relationships – created a very interactive experience. And showed very interesting relationships between songs.

Looking at the system now, I’d critique it it by saying that it was pretty quiet — especially considering that it was about music discovery. I’d love for it to be more a sonic experience, and less a visual one. But the technology and legal limitations at the time made streaming music hard.

Post Magnets

After the Magnet Browser launched, we adapted it for a wide variety of adaptations, including a touch-screen kiosk. So, what started as design research, evolved into a suite of music tools. Some were launched, while others were used for business development. Later the company launched some playlist generating tools (similar to iTunes Genius) and was eventually bought out. — but it paved the way for the current generation of music discovery software.

Did I mention that  the relationship with MoodLogic really was a lot of fun. Obviously it was a great design challenge. But it also helped us grow our business. It allowed us to hire our first full time employee, Lindi Emongou, grow into a new office space, and then hire a couple other great designers. It won us a gold IDSA award in 2001. And it lead to a lot of other exciting work (which, maybe, I’ll save for future posts.)

Sadly, most of this work was in Director/Shockwave (or require connections to the no-longer active MoodLogic server) and doesn’t run an more. If I can find a solution I’ll update this post.)

Related posts:

1. Sketching in Code
2. Music Discovery and Organization
3. Underworld’s DVD-ROM

Barneys Co-op

Yesterday I received a Barneys Co-op catalog in the mail — in which all of the photos were shot in 3D. Because they used the red-blue anaglyph method, they also included a pair of glasses. It may be an old-fashioned technology for 3D, but it’s still pretty fun. (You can also see the 3D catalog on their website.) So, I figured it was a sign for me to post some of the 3D links I’ve been collecting lately.

A couple months ago Robyn released a 3D music video online for her song Don’t Fucking Tell Me What to Do. What’s cool is that the video takes real-time twitter feeds and incorporates the text into the video. It’s a pretty low-touch interactivity, but nicely done. This piece was created by Blip Boutique and Stopp Web, with typography by Jakob Nylund.

Robyn, Killing Me

Robyn, Killing Me

Insane, and of pretty dubious utility, is this 3D bookmarklet. (By Yusuke Kawasaki.) It turns a regular web page into a 3D version of it. Sorry, no real interactivity here, but it’s crazy enough to be very cool.

Did you know that Google Street View can display in 3D? Just right-click within a view and select “3d mode on.”

Google Street View in 3D

I think my favorite 3D site, so far, is Snowdin. Made by Cole + McVoy as a holiday site in 2008, it’s got all sorts of cute games and surprises. And, the 3D is interactive! So, for example, if you jump in the ski game, the character rises up. Very charming.

Snowdin

Snowdin

Related posts:

1. Street Slide
2. Arcade Fire
3. 3D on the iPhone

Score for "Ambient #1 Music for Airports," 1978. Brian Eno.

10 Stones, 1989. John Cage.

It’s great to see this experimentation continuing today with a wide range of available apps that allow people to compose and play music. Developers/Designers are using interactivity and visualization in all sorts of new and unexpected ways. And since many of these apps run on the iPhone or iPad, they encourage an even broader range of users to get involved in innovative musical creativity.

Below are a couple of the most recent apps I’ve found. They’re a mix between composition/looping, and performance/play. Some are a bit crazy — but that’s what makes them interesting.  There are tons more out there…  they’ll have to wait for another post.

Flourish — from Create and Explore, Ltd.

Sonic Wire Sculptor 2010 — by Amit Pitaru. (And here’s a preview of the upcoming iPad version.)

DJ’s Multi Touch Light Table — (prototype project) by Gerg Kaufman. Take a look at his site and you can see sketches and paper-prototypes from the development of the project.

Rain — by Rainer Kohlberger. Simple but beautiful.

I found many of these on MOMA’s updated list of sound tools on their Talk to Me site. CreativeApplications.net has lots more (I just discovered the site – and it looks great!). The Multi Touch Light table was via Engadget

Related posts:

1. Interactive Synesthesia (part 1…)
2. My iPad
3. Music Discovery and Organization

There are lots and lots of other fantastic examples (and I’ll keep trying to insert references to them into my future posts). But finding interactive works is difficult, and they are rarely very satisfying. But… there are two, which I just recently discovered, that I think are pretty cool, and worth a mention.

The first is the iPhone and iPad app Bloom. Created by music pioneer Brian Eno, Bloom allows you to generate ambient audio, with supporting visualizations, using the simplest of touch gestures — it doesn’t try to impress with technical tricks. It’s “just” gentle and beautiful. And it doesn’t require constant interaction — so you can control the pace and intensity of the experience.

Bloom

The second, on the more pop end of the spectrum, is the website soytuaire.labuat.com for the Spanish band Labuat‘s song “Soy Tu Aire.” It’s a linear journey, in which you get to be the the conductor of the song. You don’t have any control of the audio, but your command of the visuals is very engaging. Eye blog has an interview with Rafa Soto, one of the designers of the site. The post’s author, John L. Waters, describes expressions like this as:

“Intimate experiences like this, which can be enjoyed on a laptop or iPad using headphones, are perhaps the natural successor to the involvement fans used to feel with twelve-inch sleeves, as something to dote on.”

It may not be perfect, but it’s a step in the right direction. Finding the right mix of user interactivity and artist control (ie. storytelling), so that you want to participate, but aren’t overwhelmed by choices, is tricky. I’d love to see more and more forms of this type of experience in the future…

soytuaire.labuat.com

Related posts:

1. Music Notation and Play
2. My iPad
3. Music Discovery and Organization

Piano - As Media Image (1995)

In 1996 I saw the Mediascape exhibition at the Guggenheim SoHo. A collection of digital art, some interactive, it was bold show from a major museum. It received mixed reviews — but one of the pieces there left a lasting impression on me. It was “Piano – As Media Image” by Toshio Iwai.

From the exhibition’s catalog:

[the piece] combines a real grand piano with virtual images. The player uses a trackball to place luminous points, representing musical notes, on a horizontal projection plane. The points travel slowly toward the keyboard. Accelerating shortly before they reach their goal, they generate musical notes that appear to hit the keys. … As the sound fades the illuminated image loses speed and, rotating slowly, turns into a starlike crystal.

You can see a video (even if it’s not the greatest quality) of it in action here:

Iwai’s declared goal is to open up a new field of experience by “combining physical objects and virtual images,” a project that has particular significance “in a time when the new digital technologies supplant our physical experiences with virtual, media-ted ones.”

And it really worked. The scale of the installation, the heaviness of the piano and the fullness of the real-piano sound that came from it — in contrast with the semi-transparent scrim on which the notes were projected and the delicateness of the trackball-only interaction — gave this piece a quality that would be impossible if it was purely digital.

Below are videos of some other projects of his. They’re definitely cool. But I especially like the physicality of the Piano.

Related posts:

1. Underworld’s DVD-ROM
2. Music Discovery and Organization
3. Music Notation and Play