"Figuring out" Music. Strategies of Designing Audio on the Go.

The newly launched iOS app Figure, product of the Swedish music software developers Propellerhead, explicitly addresses two diverging types of sound practices: While emphasizing its ‘fun factor’ and promoting it as a pastime gadget, for the use of which ‘no specific musical skills’ are required, the manufacturers at the same time highlight its benefit for professional music producers by underlining its superb sound quality and the functionality and performance of its technical components. This opposition becomes manifest also in terms of control: The combination of an intuitive and explorative use on the one hand with a set of parameters based on a somewhat more theoretical knowledge about music on the other allows for a very particular way of working with and handling sound in a mobile environment. Starting from this point, the talk will primarily focus on questions of playing technique and the concepts of ‘music’, ‘musical instrument’, and ‘musician’ this specific media technology refers to.