skip to main content
10.1145/2986416.2986432acmotherconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesamConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Making Music Together: An Exploration of Amateur and Pro-Am Grime Music Production

Published: 04 October 2016 Publication History

Abstract

This novel research presents the results of an ethnographic study, which focused upon the production of an EP created by an amateur and a pro-amateur producer. The research presents their production practices across the production workflow, from inception and ideation through to completion. The paper describes the distinct processes that occur when collaborating on the production of the EP. The exploration here discusses the use of software systems to facilitate production of a series of music tracks. We further explicate the use of technologies in the production settings, and these range from mobile devices (smartphones) through to digital audio workstations. Further to this, we start to map out how the technology used affords and supports collaboration and communication across a distributed context. We respond to our findings by presenting a series of design implications that address the research.

References

[1]
Ahmed, A.Y., Benford, S., and Crabtree, A. Digging in the Crates: An Ethnographic Study of DJs' Work. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2012), 1805--1814.
[2]
Alexander, I. GORE, SORE, or What? IEEE Software 28, 1 (2011), 8--10.
[3]
Beer, D. Making friends with Jarvis Cocker: Music culture in the context of Web 2.0. Cultural Sociology 2, 2 (2008), 222-- 241.
[4]
Benford, S., Hazzard, A., Chamberlain, A., et al. Accountable artefacts: the case of the Carolan guitar. Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, (CHI 2016), ACM.
[5]
Cecez-Kecmanovic, D. Doing critical information systems research -- arguments for a critical research methodology. European Journal of Information Systems 20, (2010), 440-- 455.
[6]
Chamberlain, A. and Crabtree, A. Searching for music: understanding the discovery, acquisition, processing and organization of music in a domestic setting for design. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, (2016), 1--13.
[7]
Chamberlain, A., McGrath, S., and Benford, S. Understanding social media and sound: music, meaning and membership, the case of SoundCloud. Digital Music Research Network (2015).
[8]
Chen, L. Improving music genre classification using collaborative tagging data. Web Search and Data Mining, (2009).
[9]
Coughlan, T. and Johnson, P. Interaction in Creative Tasks: Ideation, Representation and Evaluation in Composition. Proceedings of Conference on Human factors in Computing Systems, CHI (2006), ACM, pp. 531--540.
[10]
Crabtree, A.; Rouncefield, M.; Tolmie, P. Doing Fieldwork - Springer. In Doing Design Ethnography Part of the series Human--Computer Interaction Series. (2012), 89--109.
[11]
Crabtree, A., Rodden, T., Tolmie, P., and Button, G. Ethnography considered harmful. Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Human factors in computing systems - CHI 09, (2009), 879.
[12]
Crabtree, A., Rouncefield, M., and Tolmie, P. Design Ethnography in a Nutshell. In Doing design ethnography. (2012), 183--205.
[13]
Crow, B. Musical creativity and the new technology. Music Education Research 8, 1 (2006), 121--130.
[14]
Fels, S. Designing for Intimacy: Creating New Interfaces for Musical Expression. Proceedings of the IEEE 92, 4 (2004), 672--685.
[15]
Gall, M. and Breeze, N. Music and eJay: An opportunity for creative collaborations in the classroom. International Journal of Educational Research 47, 1 (2008), 27--40.
[16]
Garfinkel, H. Studies in ethnomethodology. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J, 1967.
[17]
Grudin, J. and Grinter, R.E. Ethnography and design. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 3, (1994), 55--59.
[18]
Hewett, T.T. Informing the design of computer-based environments to support creativity. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 63, 4-5 (2005), 383--409.
[19]
Hoare, M., Benford, S., Greenhalgh, C., and Chamberlain, A. Doing it for themselves: the practices of amateur musicians and DIY music networks in a digital age. (2014).
[20]
Hoare, M., Benford, S., Jones, R., and Milic-Frayling, N. Coming in from the Margins: Amateur Musicians in the Online Age. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM (2014), 1295-- 1304.
[21]
Hracs, B.J. A creative industry in transition: the rise of digitally driven independent music production. Growth and Change 43, 3 (2012), 442--461.
[22]
Jackson, J.L. Ethnography Is, Ethnography Ain't. Cultural Anthropology 27, (2012), 480--497.
[23]
Malmi, T. Key Concepts in Ethnography. European Accounting Review 20, (2011), 417--418.
[24]
McPherson, A.P., Chamberlain, A., Hazzard, A., McGrath, S., and Benford, S. Designing for exploratory play with a hackable digital musical instrument. Designing Interactive Systems, DIS (2016). ACM.
[25]
Miletto, E.M., Flores, L. V, Pimenta, M.S., Rutily, J., and Santagada, L. Interfaces for Musical Activities and Interfaces for Musicians are not the same: The Case for CODES, a Web-based Environment for Cooperative Music Prototyping. (2007), 201--207.
[26]
Oliveira, A.P. and Cardoso, A. A musical system for emotional expression. Knowledge-Based Systems 23, 8 (2010), 901--913.
[27]
Riche, Y., Henry Riche, N., Isenberg, P., and Bezerianos, A. Hard-to-use interfaces considered beneficial (some of the time). Proceedings of the 28th of the international conference extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, ACM (2010), 2705--2714.
[28]
Sacks, H. and Jefferson, G. Harvey Sacks: lectures on conversation. Blackwell, (1995).
[29]
Shneiderman, B., Fischer, G., Czerwinski, M., et al. International Journal of Human-Creativity Support Tools: Report From a U. S. National Science Foundation Sponsored Workshop. July 2013 (2010), 37--41.
[30]
Whitaker, J.C. Master Handbook of Audio Production: A Guide to Standards, Equipment, and System Design. McGraw-Hill, (2003).
[31]
Wolcott, H.F. Ethnography: A Way of Seeing. Forum: Qualitative Social Research 4, (2003), 22.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Identifying Key Factors for Using Ethnography in Software Requirements Elicitation: A Systematic Literature Review2024 12th International Conference in Software Engineering Research and Innovation (CONISOFT)10.1109/CONISOFT63288.2024.00020(72-81)Online publication date: 28-Oct-2024
  • (2021)Placing AI in the Creative Industries: The Case for Intelligent Music ProductionHCI International 2021 - Posters10.1007/978-3-030-78635-9_72(562-572)Online publication date: 3-Jul-2021
  • (2020)Music & Soundscapes of our everyday lives: Music & Sound-making, meaning-making, and self-makingPersonal and Ubiquitous Computing10.1007/s00779-020-01403-5Online publication date: 25-Jul-2020
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. Making Music Together: An Exploration of Amateur and Pro-Am Grime Music Production

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Other conferences
    AM '16: Proceedings of the Audio Mostly 2016
    October 2016
    285 pages
    ISBN:9781450348225
    DOI:10.1145/2986416
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 04 October 2016

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. Amateur
    2. Audio
    3. Collaboration
    4. Coproduction
    5. Creativity
    6. Digital
    7. Ethnography
    8. HCI
    9. Innovation
    10. Music
    11. Production
    12. Professional
    13. Workstations

    Qualifiers

    • Research-article
    • Research
    • Refereed limited

    Conference

    AM '16
    AM '16: Audio Mostly 2016
    October 4 - 6, 2016
    Norrköping, Sweden

    Acceptance Rates

    AM '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 40 of 53 submissions, 75%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 177 of 275 submissions, 64%

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)66
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)9
    Reflects downloads up to 13 Feb 2025

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2024)Identifying Key Factors for Using Ethnography in Software Requirements Elicitation: A Systematic Literature Review2024 12th International Conference in Software Engineering Research and Innovation (CONISOFT)10.1109/CONISOFT63288.2024.00020(72-81)Online publication date: 28-Oct-2024
    • (2021)Placing AI in the Creative Industries: The Case for Intelligent Music ProductionHCI International 2021 - Posters10.1007/978-3-030-78635-9_72(562-572)Online publication date: 3-Jul-2021
    • (2020)Music & Soundscapes of our everyday lives: Music & Sound-making, meaning-making, and self-makingPersonal and Ubiquitous Computing10.1007/s00779-020-01403-5Online publication date: 25-Jul-2020
    • (2019)Music & Sound-tracks of our everyday livesProceedings of the 14th International Audio Mostly Conference: A Journey in Sound10.1145/3356590.3356613(147-153)Online publication date: 18-Sep-2019
    • (2019)Shaping SoundsProceedings of the 2019 Conference on Creativity and Cognition10.1145/3325480.3325493(121-132)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2019
    • (2019)Semantic Web Technology for New Experiences Throughout the Music Production-Consumption Chain2019 International Workshop on Multilayer Music Representation and Processing (MMRP)10.1109/MMRP.2019.00017(49-55)Online publication date: Jan-2019
    • (2019)A Feature Learning Siamese Model for Intelligent Control of the Dynamic Range Compressor2019 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN)10.1109/IJCNN.2019.8851950(1-8)Online publication date: Jul-2019
    • (2018)An AI-Based Design Framework to Support Musicians' PracticesProceedings of the Audio Mostly 2018 on Sound in Immersion and Emotion10.1145/3243274.3275381(1-5)Online publication date: 12-Sep-2018

    View Options

    Login options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Figures

    Tables

    Media

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media