A few days back, I tripped across a brilliant idea called Thounds, best-described via the video below:
For those of you without the requisite patience for video viewing, Thounds is a social platform for the recording and sharing of musical snippets, which can be added-to collaboratively by other users within the network.
This is not a terrifically new notion, but the simple interface enables something quite akin to rapid prototyping for musical composition, which is a really intriguing idea. Despite having dabbled some years back with a digital 4-track, I’ve no real experience in composition (collaborative or otherwise), but I’d be quite curious to hear from others with an affinity for recording music.
Something to ponder: If an individual network grows large enough, does Thounds approach something akin to crowdsourcing or even audience testing?
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In a related note, Vague Terrain posted monday about X Avant 2009, described as follows:
Inspired by ambient music forefather Brian Eno’s idea of “scenius” the festival celebrates the notion of co-operation in modern music making, as opposed to the glorification of individual genius. In contrast with the stereotype of the solitary composer locked in his attic railing against the ignorant outside world, some of today’s most innovative music is forged out of communities — through co-operation, collaboration and unexpected convergences of mutual interests and ideas.
As someone with a background, albeit in the distant past, in the music business, it’s refreshing to see some of Eno’s ideas embraced on a (somewhat) more mass scale, and without pretense. The image of the solitary composer is a very real one, and introducing the network to the process is exciting in a space that ghettoizes styles as a matter of habit.
As a side note: Cluster will be performing live. How I wish I could make it to Toronto.
Related posts:
- Inventing a Market: Tubular Bells
- Facilitation and the Sound of Cracking Glass
- Two Interviews: Piers Fawkes and Gerd Leonhard
- New is a Product of Context
- Eyeball Gestures and Connecting with Strangers via Proximity