Snapshots: New Possibilities for Social Digital Music-Making arising from the Storage of History

In this paper, we propose that digital music systems need to be designed with a view to collaborative, social, ‘noncochlear’ musical engagement. In order for digital music to become more truly social, performers and audiences alike need to be able to see to some extent inside the ‘black box’ of the systems being used. This is particularly important in the case of electronic improvisation, where a lack of understanding of the processes being manipulated and how they are reflected in the sonic result can lead to a sense of alienation for audiences and performers. We propose that the capacity for storage of history represents a powerful tool for the design of interactive musical systems. We introduce ‘Snapshots’, a fully generic OSC-compliant multi-threaded storage and retrieval system, which is capable of storing independent named streams of OSC messages, as well as a novel query language for the bespoke specification of interesting stream subsets or sub-streams. ‘Snapshots’ can be used with any physical interface that is OSC-compliant, making it compatible with embodied approaches to digital sound control. The system could also be used to create semantic visualizations of the patterns being used in the manipulation of the data structures. We argue that this is an important step towards making digital more comprehensible, communicative and ‘non-cochlear’, paving the way for a social and collaborative digital music. Music engraving by LilyPond 2.15.39—www.lilypond.org Riff A Figure 1. Converting the contour of a previously-played riff into a generic control signal. 1. MUSIC AS SOCIAL BEHAVIOUR: TOWARDS ‘NON-COCHLEAR’ MUSIC