mp3 konzert archiv research project

Conclusion

What's all that for?

The exhibition "mp3 konzert archiv" leads to some very interesting conclusions of cultural shifts in the upcoming 21st century. The things that happen to music now will in similar form happen to text, video, art and other cultural belongings. Music plays a leading role in the techno-cultural development, that's why this conclusion also reflects the culture as a whole.

Cultural interfaces

Digital music looses its haptic. It looses artwork. It looses performance. Digital music archives are mostly pure lists of titles, ready to be browsed. Cultural interfaces will play an important role in the perception of music. The experience and the knowledge of a special cultural interface shifts the perception of music. Like the meadow of music flowers showed: the picture of flowers that spray music like smell did the work. The people intuitively understand the way to browsing sound. The transformation of the room into artificial nature made the visitors very silent and curious.
On the other side the shooter-game "le fonque vol" mostly worked for younger people only. Most older people weren't familar with games in that sense to intuitively understand what happens there to the sound.

Further research should make a broader picture of cultural interfaces, both analog and digital. Interaction design and technology research are sciences that have to come close together.

New ways of interfaces and interaction: data becomes fluid

We have to re-think the terms archive, data and user-interface. Datastorage space constantly increases, while single data-files are beeing compressed. Everyone owning an iPod carries so much music around, like a lifetime collection of LPs. In contrast to real vinyl the data has no weight and no space. You don't need big buildings to store huge collections of sound. Current trends in the technological development are going into wireless music, ubiquitous computing and steady internet access. Archives are loosing physical dimentions and "hide" itselves in the networks. What does this mean for browsing data? What does this mean for accessing archives?

Due the new fluid nature of data we have to forget about ancient archiving strategies. Categories have no longer meaning for eternity. Categories become emergent and dynamic. The big chunks of data are too big to be reviewed by a single person. We have to face a massive data-overflow. That's why we have to think of new ways of treating data. Another important issue is the role of access restriction.

AI-based music browsing vs. human-based suggestions

The applications at the exhibition showed that both AI-based music browsing and suggestions of humans really work well. That are two strategies in general that can cope with the mass of data. AI-tools process data by speed and calculation power. People process the mass of data by experience, intuition, collaborative working, neigbourhood and preference. The goal of both systems should be quality over mass market.

Both artificial intelligence tools and human suggestions make up the new realities of data. AI-based social systems like Audioscrobbler stand in opposition to music magazines. And both complement one another. We should face the end of "mathematical derived music suggestions" from algorithms that only pay attention to toneheight and rhythm. We also should face the end of experts trying to find new genre-definitions where there aren't any. Of course inventions of new genres like "grime" has a right for its own, but it is directly associated to the human-made cultural invention transportated by a term, distributed by music magazines.