I’ve been thinking of how to engage more of a participant’s senses as they read printed content. I’d really like to figure out a way to go beyond the standard tricks or video clips and animated text.

If you are not familiar with the term, a music cue is the use of sound, usually musical, to signal a performer to “carry out an action or deliver a line.” However, the practice has evolved quite a bit. We frequently hear certain types of music to introduce a moment or event in a movie. Such a modern musical cue might be a deep thumbing tone for the villain or a quick jaunty tune for the jester.

In the golden age of sitcoms the use of stings became common. Strings are a certain bit of music used on a regular basis to signal the entry of  a character or the end of a scene. Sometimes particular stings are used to identify people or types of events.

There was one big reason why musical stings became popular. They made viewers more aware of what was going on in a show without necessarily looking at the TV. You could be eating dinner or washing dishes and when a certain tone played, you’d know to look up and pay full attention to the screen.

Image via Wikipedia

Of course, it was no coincidence that a sting would occur right before a dramatic climax or end of the scene. In other words, right before the advertisements.

In the early days of internet media, advertisements exploited our tendency to pay attention when a particular sound played. Mostly these were pop-up ads. This was a horrible idea for many reason, it couldn’t be turned off. It was annoying. The sounds were tied to advertisements and there was really no other sound on the internet, or even your computer, and participants quickly stopped being fooled.

Since that greedy misstep, no has really tried to integrate sound into our browsing experience again. I wonder, if The New York Times had started playing sounds first, would we be using an internet with an ecosystem of sound?

So what options are open to us now?

Well, quite a few. We’d want to make it clear what was going on so that people could mute a site before it started playing, but we could still bring music into the browser.

Video games have played with adaptive music for years now. With adaptive code, music can change beat and tone automatically when certain events occur.

Perhaps pages could include some soft, low-key, background music that flourishes or goes into double-time when the user hits a trigger? Another alternative might simply be a few stings played when users mouse-over a link. The sound would alert them to important elements on a page.

Sound could be triggered by:

• mouse-overs
• scrolling to a certain place on a page
• clicking through a pagination link
• timers
• focusing on a window
• other types of interaction, like highlighting.
• key shortcuts

I imagine any site that implemented this would have some sort of standard controls in a small floating div alongside articles. It’s very important that it be optional and that participants have full control over volume and whether or not music is playing. It would be really cool if participants could decide the genre of music as well.

I’d love to give it a try on this site, but I don’t know how to implement it. I’ll give it a try if anyone else can figure it out though.

Trying to reach out to the sound part of our brain would be a great way to increase attention and engagement. I think it is worth a try at least. Let’s bring a bit of music to our online reading.

Can you think of any other ways to incorporate more sound into our browsing experience?

Preview image via.

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If you haven’t been watching Kirby Ferguson’s excellent Everything is a Remix videos, here’s a quick collection and some links to the excellent documentary. We often talk about remixed media as if it were something new to our culture. However, in these extremely informative videos Ferguson traces the modern remix back to 1961 and walks you through a history of cultural reuse that is both fascinating and required consuming for anyone creating content today.

Everything is a Remix from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

Everything is a Remix Part 2 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

Robert Grigsby elaborates on Kill Bill as a remix.

Everything Is A Remix: KILL BILL from robgwilson.com on Vimeo.

Find out more about the series of videos and remix culture at Ferguson’s website. You can also find the video’s creator on Twitter.

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Image via CrunchBase

Sometimes I’m afraid that the like button on Pandora may irrevocably change my station to play music that I don’t like. How can Pandora make its interface better?

I’m a big fan of Pandora online radio. It’s a clever concept and free music is always good. However, once I’ve set my channel and I get it playing the music I want, I tend to avoid fine tuning it.

The issue is that I don’t understand what liking a song can do to my channels. After spending time using Pandora, it seems that half of the stations I create end up playing the same music. Now, I start a channel, make a few likes and try not to do anything else, I even avoid disliking music.

Transparency is needed.

When hit the like button on Pandora it tells me about certain parts of the music, funny lyrics, strong piano line or something else, that influence my channel. I’m not sure to what degree these song elements effect my station nor do I know how it compounds with other times I’ve interacted with Pandora.

I’d do things much differently. It’s clear that there is a lot of complex musical math going on behind the scenes. I want to see that. When I like a song, I want to see what it adds to the channel in some sort of value system. It might make sense to apply RPG-style attributes to each channel. This way I know that if I like a specific song, I’m adding +5 Fast Piano, +2 Rock Guitar and +1 Joke Lyrics to my channel. As the music starts playing, I’d have a better understanding of what my choices mean for the type of music I’m going to hear and a better understanding of the underlying musical theories that Pandora runs on.

It’s important, when you are developing an interface for constant use like Pandora’s, to make sure that the interactions between the user and the program are transparent. It allows users to understand what they are doing and to gain a sense of ownership over their interactions. It’s hard to invest time in something that you don’t understand.

Here’s what I’d change:

• Make the statistics that each song would add or subtract from your channel transparent at each opportunity for interaction.
• Allow users to view the channel and see what values they have assigned.
• Allow users to take only some of the values from a song. For example, Tenacious D plays on many of my Pandora channels. Now I love The D, but I don’t really want them showing up on every channel. I should be able to subtract their humorous lyrics without losing points from awesome rock.
• Represent overall statistics on the profile home page.
• Provide publicly visible achievements for hitting certain levels positive or negative in any given category.
• The manual quick mix is pretty cool, but I’d also want to provide an overall mix, a channel generated from my profile’s total added statistics.

You may have noticed some ludological elements incorporated into this UI concept. To make it clear, every good interface needs game elements. Your users should have the opportunity to explore, accumulate and represent their interactions to others.

Your interface should always tell a story to the user, or provide the ability to create a narrative. A successful interface will have the user telling an interaction story. In this example it might go something like this:

Hey man, I was able to increase my overall profile with five more points to rock guitar and discovered just the right crappy songs to eliminate nu-metal. I took points out of steel drums, god knows how I got those. Then, I got the Classic Rocker achievement, because I had enough points in Rock Guitar and Freddie Mercury-style.

Not only does this style of interface make user interaction easier and enjoyable, but creating opportunities for your users to tell a story about your product is the best word of mouth marketing you can have.

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The new Coldplay album has come with a few interesting nods to convergence culture, how to work with it, and how to exploit it.

I’m going to skip over the pre-release marketing and community building done on their website, there isn’t much new there, except for the fact that it is a major artist on a real label doing it, as opposed to a video game or TV show. I’m going to briefly mention the fact that there will be a release of the music in a Guitar Hero III DLC right after the album release, but only briefly, because it isn’t new either, just a smart way to sell music and not worry about pirates.

Of more interest are the joined tracks (or “hidden tracks” according to wikipedia) and the bonus track release strategy.

First the bonus tracks, there are a few tracks that are being released as bonus tracks. The official releases are the acoustic version of “Lost?” on the Japanese release and the acoustic version of “Lovers in Japan” on iTunes. I wouldn’t be surprised to see another localized release on-disk. Perhaps of the previously distributed B-Side “A Spell A Rebel Yell” or a yet-unheard acoustic. Also, there may be a version that comes out with the joined songs properly split up.

What’s the point of adding certain songs to be released in certain areas?

• Community Building: It forces fans to collaborate to find all the songs released in the album. This reinforces collaborative and convergence culture.
• Sales: Ooops… I guess the pirated reviewers’ copies don’t have all the songs after all. Go buy the real thing.
• Rewards: You waited to buy the real disk? You get a little something special. An idea even more important considering Coldplay released at least 4 tracks of their album to easily accessible online/published locations.
• Advertising: It creates a built-in type of Viral Advertising where fans have to search out songs, some of which have been previously released to other sources or online.
• Resale: Eventually a “gold” version of the album may be released with all the bonus songs, extra b-sides and the joined songs un-joined.

The advantage of the joined songs?

“It’s because we didn’t want to have an extra number on the CD. To keep it concise at 10 tracks,” Guy Berryman said.

“We just preferred to have less titles and more stuff. The album as a whole has got the most on it, but it’s the shortest. We wanted to make it almost impossible for you to not listen to it all in one go,” Will Champion said.

More notably, Champion talked about how “The Escapist” was meant to change perceptions of the band.

“I think with everything this time, the recording, the artwork, the live shows and videos, people will see there’s more to us than they imagine.”

That last one is likely far closer to the truth. The idea of joining these tracks together is about creating a package, one that encourages you to buy the entire album, as opposed to the iTunes model of specific tracks. This is especially important considering the big tracks on the album have pretty much already been released for free. This is about finding a way to plug into their community through free releases of tracks while still selling their music. A good swing at a new model for music sales. This choice on the album is all about packaging. Not to mention the previously mentioned opportunities for resale.

There is another notable result of this choice as well, a subtle encouragement of mashups and convergence culture. By joining these tracks, Coldplay is almost shouting at consumers to go out, grab a copy of Audacity and cut the songs up themselves. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear about the more average consumers, who wouldn’t normally even think about getting Audacity, going out and editing these songs.

This means more people with the tools to do audio mashups. I’d be interested in having someone with some music expertise look at the album and see how many of the songs have similar beats or rhythms that make them more mashup-friendly. I wouldn’t be surprised if quite a few of them did. There is already one fairly successful mashup online at Demonoid.

Even if they didn’t, it means that Coldplay is encouraging people to play with their songs. Which means more exposure for them and their album and a better deal for their community. Not a bad model, huh?

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For my fellow Guitar Hero fans, Kotaku has gotten it’s hands on the latest GH game, Aerosmith. Check out the partial setlist below. An important note, the game does not introduce any new game play elements. The Kotaku post also has a whole mess of pretty screenshots to check out.

Nipmuc High School
Mott the Hoople – All the Young Dudes *Cover
Cheap Trick – Dream Police
Aerosmith – Make It
Aerosmith – Uncle Salty
Aerosmith – Draw the Line

Max’s Kansas City
Joan Jett – I hate myself for loving you
The Kinks – All day and all of the night *Cover
Aerosmith – Movin’ Out
Aerosmith – No Surprize
Aerosmith – Sweet Emotion

The Orpheum Theater
The Clash – Complete Control
New York Dolls – Personality Crisis *Cover
Aerosmith – Livin’ on the Edge
Aersomith – Ragdoll
Aerosmith – Love in an Elevator

Half Time Show
Lenny Kravitz – Always on the Run
Black Crowes – Hard to Handle *Cover
Aerosmith – Back in the Saddle
Aerosmith – Beyond Beautiful
Aerosmith – Dream On

Moscow
The Cult – She Sells Sanctuary
Run DMC – King of Rock
Aerosmith – Bright Light Fright
Aerosmith – Nobody’s Fault
Run DMC featuring Aerosmith – Walk This Way

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On the subject of remix culture, even corporate is getting the message. I just received this press release through UWIRE. For those too lazy to read through the entire thing, Verizon Wireless has sponsored a contest to remix Linkin Park songs. The finalists get money and the campuses with the most submissions become finalists for a free campus concert from Linkin Park.

You can find the full release here.

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So, as we reach that final hour and the remix project is due, I’ve finally had an idea for it. The funny thing is that it has been sitting in the back of my brain since I first saw the Draft Lessig for Congress campaign on Facebook. Way….way back WIRED magazine did an article, it was on Lessig’s creation of the Common Copyright. This was early on and he had just started.

Now, in order to get things rolling and to popularize the new copyright format, Lessig had gone to a number of prominent music artists and asked them to put their works, or at least part of their works, under the CC system. WIRED had released a CD with a number of the more prominent artists, each having a single one of their Common Copyrighted songs on the CD. It was an impressive collection, starting with the Beastie Boys and including a number of international artists as well. I ripped the disk. It sits in a folder on my computer, shared under the title of “Legally Free Music,” and shared over every network my desktop touches.

Now, I have just recently seen Atonement (a great movie, but not nearly as good as the book. The movie just barely touched on the real core of the novel, which is narrative and meta-narrative: “How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God?” … No atonement for God, or novelists,” but back on topic…) and it had used this really nifty sounding soundtrack with a song created by typewriter noises.

On the WIRED CD was a song that was also based around typewriter noises, just waiting for someone to reuse and remix it.

There we go, I found my core.

Now…. What to put with it?

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As a gamer, I have something embarrassing to admit, I have yet to install Steam (Valve’s game vending service) on to any of my computers. The reasoning behind this is simple. I dislike the software. Admittedly, the last time I used Steam was when the service first came out years ago. I resent the software for, back in the day, preventing me from playing my perfectly legal version of counter strike (I paid good money for Half Life when it first came out) during a LAN party.

I (the nominal host of the LAN party) had to, instead, dig through a pile of CDs to find a pre-Steam version of Half Life and uninstall and reinstall counterstrike in what must have been over a dozen computers. I spat many curses at Steam that day and determined never to use the piece of sh– erm… Junk again.

However, some truly innovative games are coming out through Steam and other such services which have a very friendly profit model to smaller (or indie) game developers. So I gave in downloaded the Steam client and found–much to my surprise–that I remembered the password to my old Phifty account and logged in.

As if to mock how long it has been since I last looked in on my Steam account, I was greeted by a news item advertising a demo showcasing the amazing new game Half Life 2. The ad was copyright 2004. w00t!

In case you were wondering what exactly it took to force me into finally downloading Steam, the answer is Audiosurf. (I also discovered that, before despairing of Steam altogether, I had registered licenses with Steam for CS, DoD, Deathmatch Clasic, HL, HL:Blue Shift, Opposing Force, Ricochet, and Team Fortress Classic. Oh those heady High School days.)

I’ve always been a huge music fan and I listen to music all the time, through work, video games, reading and pretty much anything else that does not have its own music built in and a few things that do. The idea of integrating my massive music collection with what I’ve heard is fun gameplay was too attractive an idea to let go. So, Steam… here I come.

As a sort of note… we are working on Remix projects for ENGL344. I thought about it and realized that Audiosurf is very much a part of Remix culture. This is a on-the-fly combination of music (any music) and gaming content to create something unique and remarkable.

Now, to play the game… as soon as Steam finishes downloading it, that is.

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