Creative Interactions – The Mobile Music Workshops 2004-2008

This is an edited collection of five Mobile Music Workshops (2004 to 2008), an event that has defined a field of research and artistic practice. The edition brings together the peer-reviewed abstracts of the papers and posters of all five events and is illustrated throughout. The Mobile Music Workshops are a series of annual international gatherings that explore the creative, critical and commercial potential of mobile music. They are inspired by the ever-changing social, geographic, ecological, emotional context of using mobile technology for creative ends. The book features new ideas and ground-breaking projects on sound in mobile contexts. They showcase what new forms of interaction with music and audio lie ahead as locative media, ubiquitous networks, and music access merge into new forms of experiences that shape the everyday. The emerging field of Mobile Music sits at the intersection of ubiquitous computing, portable audio technology and New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME). It goes beyond today’s personal music players to include creative practices of mobile music making, sharing and mixing. The mobile setting challenges existing notions of interfaces and interaction, stretching music to new creative limits. The workshop has been at the forefront of this innovative area since 2004. The editions of the event have taken place in Vienna, Amsterdam, Brighton, Vancouver, Göteborg in collaboration with the Viktoria Institute, STEIM, Waag Society, Futuresonic, University of Applied Arts in Vienna, NIME and others.This edition includes artists, designers, academic researchers, hackers, industry professionals and practitioners from a wide range of areas, including music, technology development, new media, sound-art, music distribution, cultural/media studies and locative media that present and discuss projects, prototypes, applications, devices, performances, installations, theoretical and historical considerations. The introduction outlines the development in mobile music over the last five years and identifies key themes on mobile music that have emerged over the five years of the workshop include creating, sharing and design. Mobile music is concerned with the urban environment as musical interface, for location-aware sound art, audio annotation of physical space, and other creative applications. New form-factors and content formats explore how music and mobility can be addressed in design methods. Wider discussions have addressed relations between the body, space and sound, synchronicity, foreground/background activities, and the social acceptance of new behaviors in public space.