Are you an intrepid remixer — or perhaps merely curious about the way your favorite song was arranged during the final mixdown? Well, consider giving up on a consumer-centered solution to those two problems, because Google’s newly announced Inside Music experiment offers…well, neither downloadable tracks nor a strict replication of how things looked during the waning hours of a given recording or mastering session!
What it does offer, however, is a pretty sweet, outer space-y-looking interactive website/VR platform— created in collaboration with the song-dismantling podcast Song Exploder — that aims to separate songs into their constituent components (typically the various instruments that were incorporated). Users can then mute and un-mute those components, and, as Google’s marketing line goes, supposedly gain something of an insight into how their beloved song actually became whole. (That song’s actual recording session may or not have been VASTLY more complicated, as many people familiar with the process can attest.)
We probably shouldn’t expect Inside Music’s catalog of fuck-with-able songs to become super exhaustive any time soon, but the “experiment” in its current state features a song each from the following artists: clipping., Phoenix, Perfume Genius, Ibeyi, Natalia Lafourcade, and Alarm Will Sound (presumably, Google and Song Exploder got pre-approval from these artists to digitally “explode” their songs in this presumably newfangled way).
And sure, there’s a plethora of not-so-snazzy looking software tools and plug-ins on the market capable of performing a similar function…but they mostly suck afaik, so why not ride the VR wave into a basic and basically fun music exploration project? I mean, Google’s going to control our entire civilization top-to-bottom in another couple dozen years anyway. Also: Inside Music’s code is open source, so people are free to establish interactive music worlds based off their own new creations — which means we’ll have some creative freedom, even in the midst of our abject slavery; and that’s a definite plus, right?
More about: Alarm Will Sound, clipping., Ibeyi, Natalia Lafourcade, Perfume Genius, Phoenix
