Pet Sounds: Creating Music using Social Media and Mobile Technologies

The proposed project seeks to explore the ways in which the power of social media and social interactions-whether online or in the real world-can be harnessed to create digital music. The core methodology of the project is to develop a mobile app, Pet Sounds, which will be used to study these interactions. Pet Sounds will enable users to create a musical self-portrait or 'musical selfie', a musical representation of the user that reflects social experiences. In order to modify this composition, users must engage in different kinds of social interactions. These interactions might take place via social media like Facebook or Instagram. For example, chatting with another user might result in one kind of musical outcome, while tagging friends in a photo might result in another kind of musical outcome. The composition can evolve only through these kinds of social interactions, as well as by undertaking real-world social activities with friends. The musical selfie logs these interactions via different kinds of compositional transformations. For example, the composition might grow longer or shorter in duration; it might add a new voice or voices; it may change timbral qualities, tempo, rhythms, harmonies, and so on. The sounds and music will be generated almost entirely via social activities. Users will be able to share their musical selfies with each other, and collaborate with other users in developing their compositions.

This study entails an interdisciplinary collaboration that spans musicology, ethnography, and composition and software design. The researchers will develop Pet Sounds in the context of workshops with diverse groups of participants who have varying backgrounds in music, music technologies, and social media use. The app will be designed to appeal to specialist and non-specialist users alike. While the app itself will not be released as an output during the lifespan of the project, its prototyping will provide the basis for studying socially-based musical interactions. These interactions will be studied via critical perspectives in musicology, sound studies, composition, and interaction design. The outputs of the project will include a co-authored journal article, conference paper, public presentations and performances that will examine the many creative, critical/theoretical and technical dimensions of the research.

The research team will be based at the Sonic Arts Research Centre at Queen's University Belfast, the University of Oxford, and the University of Bristol. Workshops will take place at the Pervasive Media Studio at Watershed, Bristol. This non-academic partner will be important in attracting a diverse community of creative practitioners, technologists, and general audiences. At Watershed, the research team will conduct a series of Design and Play Workshops, and a Lunchtime Talk. In Belfast, the research team will partner with the Junior Academy of Music to reach music educators and young people aged 12 to 17 years in the context of workshops on 'App-ifying Music'. Other key elements of impact will include hosting a panel for media artists and technologists at an international media arts centre, and a presentation for creative industry professionals at a major industry event.

The aim of the research is to show how music making can evolve as a social activity using new digital technologies. The proposed project will be playful, collaborative, interactive, participative and fundamentally social. In this way it diverges from projects in music technology that either require a great deal of skill on the part of the performer or expertise on the part of the listener. Pet Sounds will show that 'new music' and digital music cultures can be inclusive, engaging, and friendly. It will further show that users or participants themselves can play a large role in collaboratively creating compositions that are musically interesting and that draw upon users' own experiences in meaningful ways.

Pet Sounds is a playful and inclusive project that aims to connect with people in ways that reflect everyday life experiences, social activities, and common uses of ubiquitous technologies in creating music. Therefore our impact strategy is developed with this in mind. We aim to reach a variety of groups outside academia, including the general public with interests in digital music and social media, music educators, young musicians, media artists and creative technologists, and creative industry professionals. Each of these groups has a different stake in the potential of our project to transform digital music cultures.

The general public with interests in music, including musicians as well as those who have no prior training in music, can benefit from our project in a number of ways. In the first instance, they can create music and develop a musical identity in the form of a 'musical selfie,' by using the Pet Sounds app. Although a public release of the app is an intended output of the project, we will use pilot versions of the app at workshops with participants who will be engaged at different stages in the project. These participants will have significant input into the design of the Pet Sounds app, which we will seek to release in the future via follow-on funding. Design and Play Workshops will take place at the Pervasive Media Studio at Watershed Bristol, a non-academic partner of the project. At Watershed we will also deliver a Lunchtime Talk, aiming to reach a wide and varied audience of creative technologists and the general public.

We will reach music educators and young musicians in the context of workshops co-delivered with staff at the Junior Academy of Music (JAM), a music programme for children based at Queen's University Belfast. At JAM we will deliver a three-hour workshop to local music educators on using apps for music tuition. These educators will be able to apply the knowledge gained from this workshop in the context of individual and classroom teaching. We will also engage a group of young people aged 12 to 17 years in the context of a daylong workshop co-delivered with staff in JAM FOUR, which is focused on Creative Music Technology. These young people will learn about composing in performing with digital music apps, and they will present a public performance at the end of the day, thereby gaining an opportunity to perform with new digital music technologies.

We will aim to reach an international community of media artists and creative technologists in the context of a panel at a major international centre for arts and technology. This panel will focus on creating music via social media, and will present new perspectives from music, interaction design, and humanities-based research.

Finally, we will aim to present our project to creative industry professionals at the SXSW Interactive Festival. These professionals, representing a wide range of people who work in high-tech creative industries-whether as designers, entrepreneurs, software developers, investors, etc.-will benefit by hearing about the challenges and successes of our project. Since our project represents a new merging of social media technologies, mobile media technologies, and digital music technologies, our presentation-as well as our informal discussions as facilitated by SXSW Interactive Festival activities-will benefit a large international group of potential stakeholders who have interests in these areas. Similarly, we will benefit from this networking opportunity, by meeting potential collaborators and investors who will support the project beyond the lifespan of the grant, when we will aim to produce a public/commercial release of the project through the PI's interactive music label Optophono.