Social Network Music CollectiveBy David B. Queen

Introduction

My name is David Queen and I am a senior in Culture & Media at Lang originally from Canton, Ohio.

My interests include screenwriting, French movies, coffee, reading, writing short stories, traveling, soccer and music.

I am here in this class because I want to increase my compatibility with computers.

Concept

The initial concept for my project was that wanted to do something music based. I have played guitar since I was in middle school, and have played in various bands over the years.

I really like the idea of chance influencing music.

My concept is to bring this idea of chance based music to a social community; to create one ongoing piece of music with the chance and participation of an entire social network.

The Project

I am creating a musical composition through social networking websites like Facebook.

The project will consist of writing a song based on notes picked at random by anyone who wants to participate.

The song will come together completely by chance.

I want to see how random notes selected by people from all over the world can create a song through a social networking website.

Precedents

John Cage used to pick notes at random for some of his compositions.

AC/DC used to shuffle a deck of cards and let the card number determine what chord they would use.

These experiments added the element of chance to their compositions, yet I want to take this to a social networking level.

Methodology

In the end, I ended up keeping things very simple. I created a Facebook group page dedicated to my “Social Network Music Collective” and sent out about 300 invites to people I am friends with.

Within the group page, I briefly explained my intentions with the project and also outlined the rules for people to participate.

As I would receive the notes that people had submitted, I would place them on a sequencer timeline in GarageBand and see how the song was developing.

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=149985991462&ref=ts

Results

The results were actually more interesting than I thought they would be. In the end, 62 members had joined the group (including some people who just randomly found it on Facebook and thought it sounded cool) and 34 had participated in selecting notes for the song. I had hoped for more notes originally, but at least I got enough to work with.

The song itself is interesting, but does not sound that great. If I were to do over this project, I would be sure to invest some time in a more professional music sequencer and series of synthesizers since most of the ones I used sounded pretty cheesy in the end.

I would also figure out a better system to translate time and rhythm from the notes being picked. For this project, I mainly just used my own judgement based on how I felt it was sounding.

Conclusion

Overall my social network music collective wasn’t a complete success, or a complete failure. What was exciting was the fact that many people really got into the idea and were excited to participate in the project. Some, as well, even found ways to creatively pitch their notes to me in ways I didn’t expect.

The downside was that due to a lack of recording knowledge, or music theory, the song itself is an interesting record of what notes were selected in the process, but sounds pretty lousy.

The Song

Here is the final song in 3 variations(my apologies for the cheesy drums...)

* Ambient Piano

* Jazz Sax

* Orchestral Strings