Music in the browser or app?
Dom Aversano
As The Bard famously put it, ‘The app, or the browser, that is the question.’
At some point, your inspirational idea for digital music will have to travel from the platonic realm of your thoughts, into either an app or browser. Unless you can luxuriate in doing both, this represents a stark choice. The most appropriate choice depends on weighing up the advantages and disadvantages of both. The graphic above is designed to help categorise what you are creating, thereby providing a better sense of its ideal home.
The most traditional category is recorded music, as it predates the proliferation and miniaturisation of personal computing. In the 20th Century, radio transformed music, and then television transformed it again. In this regard, Spotify and YouTube are quite traditional, as the former imitates radio while the latter mimics TV. This might help explain why Spotify is almost entirely an app, sitting in the background like a radio, and YouTube is most commonly used in the browser, fixing your gaze as if it were a TV. Whether a person is likely to be tethered to a computer or walking around with a phone, may help in deciding between browsers and apps.
Turning to generative music, a successful example of this in the browser is Generative FM, created by Alex Bainter, which hosts more than 50 generative music compositions that you can easily dip into. It is funded by donations, as well as an online course on designing generative systems. The compositions are interesting, varied, and engaging, but as a platform it’s easy to tune out of it. This might be because we are not in the habit of listening to music in the browser without a visual component. The sustainability of this method is also questionable since, despite there still being a good number of daily listeners, the project appears to have been somewhat abandoned, with the last composition having been uploaded in 2021.
Perhaps Generative FM was more suited to an app form, and there are many examples of projects that have chosen this medium. Artists such as Bjork, Brian Eno, and Jean-Michel Jarre have released music as apps. There are obvious benefits to this, such as the fact that an app feels more like a thing than a web page, as well as the commitment that comes from installing an app, especially one you have paid for — in the case of Brian Eno’s generative Reflection app, it comes at the not inconsiderable costs £29.99.
Yet, more than a decade since Bjork released her app Biophilia, the medium is still exceedingly niche and struggling to become established. Bjork has not released any apps since Biophilia, which would have been time-consuming and expensive to create. Despite Bjork’s app not having beckoned in a new digital era for music, this may be a case of a false start rather than a nonstarter. As app building gets easier and more people learn to program, there may be a breakthrough artist who creates a new form of digital music that captures people’s imaginations.
To turn the attention to music-making, and music programming in particular, there is a much clearer migratory pattern. Javascript has allowed programming language to work seamlessly in the browser. In graphical languages, this has led to P5JS superseding Processing. In music programming languages Strudel looks likely to supersede TidalCycles. Of the many ways in which having a programming language in the browser is helpful, one of the greatest is that it allows group workshops to run much more smoothly, removing the tedium and delays caused by faulty software. If you have not yet tried Strudel, it’s worth having a go, as you can get started with music-making in minutes by running and editing some of its patches.
The final category of AI — or large language models — is the hardest to evaluate. Since there is massive investment in this technology, most of the major companies are building their software for both browsers and apps. Given the gold rush mentality, there is a strong incentive to get people to open up a browser and start using the software as quickly as possible. Suno is an example of this, where you can listen to music produced with it instantly. If you sign it only takes a couple of clicks and a prompt to generate a song. However, given the huge running costs of training LLMs, this culture of openness will likely reduce in the coming years, as the companies seek to recuperate their backers’ money.
The question of whether to build something for the browser or an app is not a simple one. As technology offers us increasingly large numbers of possibilities, it becomes more difficult to choose the ideal one. However, the benefit of this huge array of options is that we have the potential to invent new ways of creating and presenting music that may not yet have been imagined, whether that’s in an app or browser.
Please feel free to share your thoughts and insights on creating for the browser or apps in the comment section below!
Dom Aversano is a British-American composer, percussionist, and writer. You can discover more of his work at Liner Notes.
Exploring the 2023 MIDI Innovation Awards
Dom Aversano
In Jaron Lanier’s cult classic technology manifesto, You Are Not a Gadget, the writer outlines a concept he calls lock-in, which he defines as when via mass adoption a technology becomes so deeply embedded into a culture that it becomes difficult to either improve or remove it without massive effort, even if its design is fundamentally flawed. The British road system exemplifies this, with its twisting and turning narrow lanes designed for horse-drawn carts, which while somewhat charming relics of a bygone era, can make it impossible to create separated bike lanes without bulldozing entire sections of cities. Lanier provides another example, MIDI, which he perceives as a reductive and delimiting music language that shrinks our conception of music to the functioning of keyboards, yet nevertheless, that he predicts will persist as a language well into the future, due to the huge work it would take to extract it from our musical infrastructure.
More than a decade after Lanier’s book was published his prediction that MIDI would persist is vindicated, however, Lanier may have underestimated the extent to which, unlike the British road system, MIDI has the capacity to transform itself without a major uprooting, which is the intention of MIDI 2.0. Anyone who has followed the non-starter of Web 3.0 will know that technological advancement requires more than adding a number and a decimal place to an existing technology. However, this new version of MIDI offers genuinely new capabilities, such as bidirectionally, backwards compatibility, a finer resolution of detail, and the capacity for instruments to communicate with greater sophistication.
Browsing through the entrants and finalists on the MIDI Association website reminded me of the show-and-tell-type events Music Hackspace put on in its early days. There is a nice balance between slick and sophisticated products built by established companies and eccentric innovations made in a shed by a devoted individual. As is the nature of these things, most of the innovations will not make their way to the mass market (presuming they were designed for it at all) but this does not detract from the creative value of the work. It is inspiring to see people make the brave effort of taking ideas from their imagination and putting them into the real world, so providing an audience for their efforts helps motivate and stimulate this innovation, by demonstrating that it has value and importance in our culture.
For the last few days, I have had the pleasure of indulging in a kind of digital sauntering, where I have explored and browsed through the wonderful collection of innovations on display. One original-looking instrument that immediately caught my eye is the Abacusynth, which as its name suggests, is built in the style of an abacus. The synth is intended to emphasise musical timbre with its creator stating:
“Timbral modulation is arguably just as ‘musical’ as melody or rhythm, but it’s not often emphasized for someone learning music, usually due to the complexity of synthesizer interfaces”.
One aspect of its interface design that is ingenious is that by spinning the blocks it creates a modulation effect, aligning the visual and kinetic aspects of the instrument in a playful and intuitive way.
Another visually appealing instrument is the Beat Scholar, which uses a novel pizza-slice-type interface to subdivide rhythms, provoking the visual imagination and making the likes of quintuplets and septuplets subdivisions much less intimidating. It is a much more visually appealing representation of rhythm than your average piano roll sequencer, where the interface for advanced rhythms often feels like an afterthought.
When it comes to slickness Roland’s AE-30 Aerophone Pro jumps out, with the company claiming it ‘the most fully-integrated and advanced MIDI wind controller ever created.’ It uses a saxophone key layout and mouthpiece and Bluetooth connection to free up players to move. It looks and sounds like a promising alternative to the keyboard and drum machine hegemony of electronic music, but will ultimately rely on the opinion of seasoned wind players as to whether it is adopted.
Finally, a music installation that stood out for its elegantly simple design is Sound Sculpture, which uses the collaboration and participation of a crowd to move glowing blocks around, which communicate their position to build a sequencer that creates a musical pattern. Watching people collaborate with strangers in this audio/visual artwork is particularly inspiring.
“This project utilizes 25 cubes in a space typically about the size of a half-basketball court. This spatial realization of composing, with blocks, allows multiple people to collaborate, co-compose as a community, and together create structures, rhythms, melodies, and harmonies.”
Whether you are in the depths of Argentina’s Patagonia or the buzzing metropolis of Lagos, you can join online to find out who the winners of this year’s MIDI Innovation Awards are, in a live-streamed 90 minutes show on Saturday, September 16th (10 am PDT / 1 pm EDT / 6 pm BST / 7 pm CET) that will be hosted by music Youtubers Tantacrul and Look Mum No Computer.