Interactive pop songs

Evolving technology has had a massive impact on how we make and experience music. Many of the changes have been driven by musicians themselves in terms of the creative aspects of music-making, but consumers too pushed the music industry in new directions. Of course, while genres wax and wane in terms of popularity, the underlying technology, at least in the popular context, is always looking to find the next big thing, the next more than one-hit-wonder.

Writing in the International Journal of Arts and Technology, a team from Taiwan discuss one of the next evolutionary steps in popular music – the “single” with interactive lyrics and composition. In the age before recorded music and to this day in the realm of live music, each performance is unique, a song reborn each time a singer or musician counts in the band, a conductor taps their baton, or the pianist tinkles the ivories. In the world of recorded music there are different options, there is multi-tracking, overdubs and retakes, samples and loops, many different ways to restructure the sonic landscape for greater listening pleasure.

Musician David Byrne, the erstwhile singer and guitarist with American new wave band, Talking Heads, predicted many years ago that technology would soon be available to allow listeners to remix the songs from their favourite artists. In subsequent years a whole other wave of bedroom-based record producers and mix DJs emerged as genres such as electronic dance music (EDM) and hip-hop developed. In a parallel world and contemporary with Byrne’s forecasts many years before the world wide web and the mp3, other big-name, exploratory musicians such as Peter Gabriel and David Bowie were looking into the multimedia potential of the technology for their music.

Of course, there was and is much innovation taking place well beyond the USA and Western Europe. Indeed, in South Korea, Taiwan, China, and elsewhere, big changes have taken place in music-making and music consumption that are being enjoyed by hundreds of millions of people. The West may well eventually catch up with the advances taking place in Asia, but that is by the by from the commercial standpoint. Kuei-Yang Chiu and Wen-Hung Chao of the Department of Digital Media Design at the Asia University in Taichung, Taiwan, explain that there are many opportunities for Chinese popular music offered by technological progress and internet penetration.

The team has now developed a popular music single that has interactive lyrics and composition. The approach uses innovation diffusion theory and interactive movies with a non-linear narrative to develop the music and associated video. The basic concept is not dissimilar to interactive storybooks that give readers different options for plots to follow at pertinent moments in the story. The music system can then be experienced on an interactive web application. The team has had a positive response from test audiences. Importantly, from the commercial perspective, they have found that the “replay” function can engage users. Moreover, listeners who usually pay to listen to music rather than using illicit file-sharing services, were more inclined to have a positive experience with the system.

Chiu, K-Y. and Chao, W-H. (2021) ‘Research on the development and experience of popular music single with interactive lyrics and composition’, Int. J. Arts and Technology, Vol. 13, No. 2, pp.137–160.