[This is my fifth article for My Smart Life, an initiative by Nokia India that features guest authors from various walks of life who have made use of technology and social media in their work and life. Go to the website to check out rest of the articles there.]
Do you know what is the most used application in a musician’s mobile phone? It is a sound recorder. It is amazing how a simple application such as a sound recorder could speed up the creative process for the musicians. It is because you could not tell when a tune strikes your mind. It could be when you are in a bus or train, or when you are in the middle of something, away from home. In such situations, either you could go get your recording gear and record your tune, but it’s not easy to go get it in such situations. The next option is to wait until you come back home but the chances are that the tune that struck you is lost by the time you reached home. So you need an instant solution for such scenarios and the best possible solution is a sound recorder. As they say in the book Super Freakonomics, sometimes the best solution is also a cheap and simple solution.
The sound recorder could be useful in many other scenarios. If you are a musician who wants to create a particular sound clip – say for example, traffic buzz, or the sound of people walking in a park etc – to use in your next production, it’s much more easy now. And if you couldn’t wait to get an opinion from a friend about the new song tune or a sound clip, you could just connect online and share the audio file using your smart phone. You could get instant feedback and could record a fresh new session if you thought it needed a revision.
Most of the tunes I have composed by myself were first recorded in my smart phone. And many of the interviews I have done for my podcast were also recorded in my phone and it has helped me a great deal in bridging the geographical differences. These have enabled me in successfully drafting up a song for my music blog, for Blogswara or for my Malayalam podcast. I learned about the ease of using a mobile phone to record the songs from a musician friend. But like musicians, podcasters could also benefit from their smart phones.
That is not all. You have many music apps available in the Symbian, iPhone and Android apps galore in the market. Some of them lets you create or play music using the keypad. So it’s not just your voice but if you are somebody who orchestrates a song, these apps would help you do a rough draft of what you were thinking of for a score.
But how about the quality of recorded vocals? Well, you have many audio recording devices available today that records clear voice, and some devices are designed to capture the voice that comes within a pre-defined area. If this is implemented a mobile phone, and that is not an impossible thing if we look at the way that technology is advancing, it could be so helpful to musicians and podcasters.
With the arrival of touch screens and mobile apps, things could go even further. It wouldn’t be a distant dream to think about the leading music software companies releasing a mobile app version of their software. Imagine if Adobe Audition, Nuendo or Garage Band released a lighter version of their software to suit the on-the-go need of a musician. It wouldn’t be too much of a dream because we did not have specialized versions of mobile phones to hear music or to use for business needs a few years ago and see how many options we have in our time.
With mobile technology and smart phones, your road to success in the field of music has been made easier.