At City of Sound, Dan Hill has posted a transcript (and slides) from a talk he gave on "New Musical Experiences" at The Future of Music Seminar in Helsinki. All over the map (in a good way), but dealing primarily with the loss of metadata ("aka contextual information around music") in mp3 players (compared to vinyl and CD packaging), ironic because the Web provides so much of it.
So the physical experience of vinyl (and its related media) afforded a close connection of music context and music experience. The record player delivered a user interface which was both flexible and expressive, and crucially meant a direct engagement with contextual information explicit and implicit. Explicitly, sleeves were constructed to carry vast swathes of information around the music; implicitly, the grooves in the record conveyed information about the length of track, the number of tracks per side and so on, even the sound itself if you were obsessive enough. The needle-drop method of previewing music - bumping the needle across the record from track to track, or within sections of a piece - provided real control over sampling the music contained therein.
Comparatively, with today's music experience environment, we see a shift away from the music towards devices and services. In iTunes, there are only expressive visuals in the context of a 'sell'. With the iPod Shuffle, there is no visual at all, no screen to display any contextual information whatsoever. Whilst it's a fascinating, useful device, in terms of conveying context, knowledge, learning or the most basic information about what one is listening to, it has nothing to offer. Witness the marketing around the iPods and we can see that visual seduction is now at the device level, not with the music. The design of the device is what people covet, rather than the design around music itself.
[via metafilter.com]
Posted by johndanseven at January 4, 2006 01:03 PM