Exploring Social Mobile Music with Tiny Touch-Screen Performances

Abstract

Touch-screen musical performance has become commonplace since the widespread adoption of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. However, mobile digital musical instruments are rarely designed to emphasise collaborative musical creation, particularly when it occurs between performers who are separated in space and time. In this article, we introduce an app that enables users to perform together asynchronously. The app takes inspiration from popular social media applications, such as a timeline of contributions from other users, deliberately constrained creative contributions, and the concept of a reply, to emphasise frequent and casual musical performance. Users' touch-screen performances are automatically uploaded for others to play back and add reply performances which are layered as musical parts. We describe the motivations, design, and early experiences with this app and discuss how musical performance and collaboration could form a part of social media interactions.