Berklee Today

JUN 2012

Berklee today is the official alumni publication of Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. It is a forum for contemporary music and musicians.

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THE WORKING MUSICIAN Redefining the Album By Adam Renn Olenn Indie artists and international superstars alike are re-imagining the traditional album format and offering interactivity to fans. Over the past 15 years, there has been an unprecedented decline in the fortunes of mainstream audio media, even as music consumption has skyrocketed. Such artists as Björk, Adele, and Sting as well as independent up-and-comers are finding a new way to listeners' ears—through their eyes and fingers—via videos and interactive applications or "apps." Albums by forward-looking artists offer an enhanced experi- ence to fans through interactive features on platforms like the iPhone, iPad, and Android-enabled devices. Berklee Professor Stephen Webber When Richard Gibbs '77 built his residential studio in Malibu, California, he was pursuing much more than a pleasing sonic ambience. Past and Present During the 1980s, as compact discs displaced vinyl records, consumers enjoyed improvements in portability, durability, and ostensibly sound quality, but at the cost of many fringe benefits of LPs. Smaller packaging meant there was less room for attention-grabbing cover art, information about the musicians, and liner notes. Scott Snibbe, the lead developer on Björk's 2011 release Biophilia, says, "A generation ago, when we bought an album, we would often choose it literally by its cover, then come home and be captive to it. Sitting on the floor and poring over the art, the lyrics, and other things that came with it helped us fall in love with the record over a period of time. The digital download effectively killed the album, and now we're living in the 'casual hook-up' phase of music. That doesn't mean that it isn't a posi- tive experience, but it's shallower." Music Production & Engineering Professor Stephen Webber Musician and actress Winnie Lau of Modern Children concurs. "The iPod is the standard for the next 10 years, and it can do a lot more than it is right now. Nobody is going to pay 10 bucks for 700 MB of anything, let alone plain stereo audio files. But if you get 12 songs with 12 videos or more, that starts to be something people are willing to plunk their money down for." Webber foresees video becoming an integral part of record- ed music in the near future. "In five years, people will rarely set up a microphone in the studio without also setting up a video camera," he says. Indeed, some artists are already doing just that. Esperanza Spalding '05 has just released her critically acclaimed project Radio Music Society, which includes a DVD with short films for every song. Webber adopted the same prac- tice during production of his latest work, The Stylus Symphony, a first-of-its-kind symphonic piece that spotlights Webber as the featured soloist playing LP turntables. Looking forward, he sees opportunities for technological advances to support this sort of recording. "This could change the way we capture per- formances," Webber says. "Right now Pro Tools is king, but the next big DAW [digital audio workstation] will probably have a way to simultaneously capture and edit both audio and video in a multi-track environment." Hong Kong–based indie-rock band Modern Children has expanded on this idea. They have incorporated audio and video into an iPhone- and Android-compatible app that also gives 22 Berklee today Max Weisel developed apps for Björk's Biophilia album. users access to a colorful calliope on which the listener can play along with the recordings. "Having an app has given us a closer interaction with our fans," says Modern Children singer and actress Winnie Lau, "and it's increased our audience. We're getting people from Norway, Saudi Arabia, New Zealand, and the United States downloading our songs." Valuing Interactivity The addition of interactive elements challenges the notion of music as something that listeners receive passively. "[Interactivity] actually gets closer to music's roots, rather than farther from them," Snibbe says. "After all, before record- ings, sheet music was the canonical form of a song, and users would change it in all kinds of ways, playing it with a differ- ent feel or tempo, sometimes even changing the words to the song. Music was something we engaged with." Snibbe and a confederation of other developers took this interactivity to new heights on Biophilia. "I wrote apps that would play the music," says wunderkind developer Max Weisel, but that "would have instruments built into them that users could play. These apps can send to a MIDI output so people can use those instruments to perform their own music." This interactivity runs through all aspects of the Biophilia project, including the live tour. "I'm actually part of the band," Weisel says. "I play the iPads on stage. Sometimes they func- tion as pitched bass drums, and sometimes I can use them to modify what other musicians are doing. When [percussion- ist] Manu Delago uses effects pedals on his 'hang' [a pitched steel-drum-like hand percussion instrument whose name is pronounced "hong"], I can adjust all the parameters of those effects in real time. The audience hears the resulting sounds

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