Making music on a phone

There are lots of amazing music making apps out there for Android already. One of my favourites at the moment is NodeBeat. Smule, of course, have some wonderful instruments and social music making apps, building from and on the work of the pioneering Ge Wang.

Other music production tools, but I hope to be corrected, seem to either involve more sophisticated music production skills and knowledge, a constant Internet connection, and/or payment, of course. Those aren’t bad things at all, by any means, but there is an ethnomusicological component to this work, where conditions, expectations and approaches can be different, so let me explain that a bit further.

People making popular music in Melanesia tend to do so on PCs in the main urban centres. Music is distributed digitally, but the production is increasingly amateur. There is a growing body of songs, for example, by Melanesians protesting the treatment of West Papuans by Indonesians. Here’s an example or two:

Melanesia for free West Papua Merdeka song By Soul Jay Solomon Islands

INDEPENDENT HYPE ‘‘PAPUA MERDEKA’’ - JAGARIZZAR

Search Youtube for “West Papua Protest songs” and you’ll see lots more, with varying approaches to production. The most straightforward, of course, is just recording a live performance.

So to make most of these songs, you need some basic music hardware - a microphone, a computer, and of course electricity. And skills, but I’ll leave that aside for the moment. For many, if not most Melanesians, and certainly those in rural areas, there is no grid power. There aren’t many (usually none) computers in villages.

There are smartphones though. Imagine if people could use the microphones and software on their phones to make this sort of music? It might not have the same production values as some of the above, sure, but would certainly open up possibiliites for thousands more people to make their own music.

I think it should be easier than it currently is to do that, and that’s why this project is underway.

A simple, practical direction for design

• Listen to a subset of current Melanesian songs circulating on the Internet

• Build an app, or suite of apps, that allow that music to be created on smartphones.

• Test with Melanesian musicians during fieldwork in PNG, Vanuatu and New Caledonia, and workshops at Fest’Napuan in Port Vila.

• Bear in mind tenets from the music technology manifesto.

• So, I’m starting with the drums. The current code is getting close to being able to create a simple drum part, of chosen length, beat subdivision, and tempo.

• Then I’ll move on to the bass, then keyboard and other rhythm parts, and lead parts.

• Overdubbing vocal parts will happen last, and at this stage I’ll aim to export the completed track as a wav file, then import into another app I’ve developed called Twotrack which allows overdubbing. That has some latency issues to be fixed (or rather, worked around, sigh…), but hey, there’s lots of things to fix and work around!