Album Apps: A New Musical Album Format and the Influence of Open Works

Abstract

Since 2011, the term “album app” has been used more frequently by journalists in the music and technology fields. It refers to a new album format that at first seemed an invitation to improvisation; one could re-create a musical piece while listening to it. The result is that the roles of composing, performing and listening become nearly indiscernible in the album app context. The author also discusses the album app’s relationship to “open works,” a term that was coined and investigated by Eco in 1959, a period that disposed of different technologies to apply very similar statements.

Listening as Performance

The first two album apps in music history were released in 2011: The National Mall by Bluebrain and Biophilia by Björk. Since then, several articles have speculated on “the future of music” within the realm of the album format [1]. As Cage once questioned: “Composing’s one thing, performing’s another, listening’s a third. What can they have to do with each other?” [2] The format of specific album apps [3] answers this question—it is noticeable that these three roles are indistinguishable. The audience acts in a manner that exceeds the conventional way of listening, which is sometimes perceived as passive. In the album app format, the action of listening is dependent on inputs performed by the listener via mobile gadgets. In order to access the musical content, one must perform actions such as walking, tapping or tilting the device’s screen. Often the experience occurs while creating new versions of the songs, which I refer to here as creative listening. This is an intervention into the narrative and aesthetics of the album, executed by altering musical structures and their duration. Before the immensely debated changes introduced in the Bluebrain and Björk releases, Simon Frith had already discussed the shifting boundary between staged and everyday practices, analyzing the ways in which listeners are performing music for themselves: “[It] is not just that in listening to popular music we are listening to a performance, but, further, that listening itself is a performance” [4]. In detailing his argument, Frith considers factors such as musical pleasure, meaning and evaluation. As an interesting parallel, “listening as performance” appears as a more physical statement in the album app projects discussed here.

The open work, a term coined in 1959 by Umberto Eco, refers to “works of art that call upon performers, readers, viewers, or listeners to complete or to realize them” [5]. Eco examined the first works of this kind, which “are linked by a common feature: the considerable autonomy left to the individual performer in the way he chooses to play the work” [6]. In this case, the interpreter was provoked to perform the piece in a creative fashion. That resulted in a transformation of a mimetic reproduction approach toward acts of improvisation. In this case, the interpreter was provoked to perform the piece in a creative fashion, which resulted in a transformation of a mimetic reproduction approach toward acts of improvisation. Consequently, the listener would encounter unpredictable and unique results every time an open piece was performed.

From the 1950s to the mid-1970s, open compositions were mainly restricted to the classical music environment. Later the form was no longer limited to this select circle of people and influenced a wider number of musicians, particularly in jazz, experimental and electronic music [7]. Approximately 5 decades after Eco’s essay, we may have reached the point at which musical open works are accessible by the general public via the release of album apps. As opposed to their first appearance when open pieces were performed for limited audiences in specific times and spaces, currently similar concepts are accessible to a wider range of people via smartphones and tablets.

Björk’s Biophilia was the first album app project to provoke debate. The project was conceived mainly to teach children concepts present in nature in very simplified ways and to increase people’s interest in music-making [8]. In Biophilia, the author did not state an intended order in...