What does music look like? It's a question many artists and innovators are struggling to answer. Does it look like a list of MP3 files? A page on a streaming music service? A – horror of horrors – Compact Disc? Or does it look like a deck of NFC-enabled cards? A gown woven with digital fabric, and a 3D hologram?
If you're Beatie Wolfe, it's all of the above.
The singer-songwriter told WIRED 2015 Next Generation that "creating musical stories... that make people see music" is one of the principal driving forces behind the bleeding edge of digital art. "What I love to do is redefine what a song or an album can be in the digital age," she said.
Wolfe's 'Eight' album was the first album released as a 3D hologram – requiring an iPhone and a mirrored accessory to experience. A tour with Apple followed, and then she started to think about her next record. Really think about it.
Wolfe told attendees of NextGen a tale which stretched from meeting 'James Bond's tailor' (Anthony Sinclair) at the Royal Albert Hall, to finding herself inside 34 Montagu Square, the house where John Lennon and Yoko Ono first lived and in which songs like "Eleanor Rigby" and "The Wind Cries Mary" were written.
"It felt like discovering the secret Abbey Road," Wolfe said. That same week she met Beatwoven, a textile artist who codes music into textiles, including a chair based on Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds, and in a burst of inspiration saw how her new album should appear, literally. The final form is complex, and devastatingly simple – a live recording, made at 34 Montagu Square – turned into a digital fabric by Beatwoven and in turn cut into a gown. The result, Wolfe joked, the first "truly tailored" album.
In less than a month Wolfe said she had finished, turning around the album in record time (pun intended) and even collaborating with Moo.com to develop a deck of NFC-enabled business cards that can be played via an Android phone. "For me it made sense as such a great example of innovation, a synthesis of music and history," she said.
Wolfe also spoke about another project she is involved in, which also touches on the interaction between stories and music, The Power of Music and Dementia – the first study of its kind to prove that new music can be as effective as familiar music to "reanimate people living with dementia" she said. "Music as long as it exerts an emotional pull can be incredibly powerful way to unlock people who would otherwise be disconnected," Wolfe said.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
