Effortless Mastery and “Musical Wonderlands”: The Politics of Fun and Friction in Multi-Touch Music Interfaces

Effortless Mastery and “Musical Wonderlands”: The Politics of Fun and Friction in Multi-Touch Music Interfaces
Victoria Simon (Felician University, Assoc. Prof. of Communications)

Since JazzMutant’s Lemur arrived in 2004, followed by a wave of popular iOS music apps, multi-touch interfaces have carried a transformational wish: to do away with established, often cumbersome forms of music-making. In their place, they offer an experience touted as natural, intuitive, direct, and, above all, fun. But what happens when making music is designed to feel effortless? What kinds of users, practices, and forms of musical knowledge become imaginable when difficulty itself is treated as a design problem?

Drawing on developer interviews and analysis of interface aesthetics and sensory design, this talk traces what fun meant to the people who built these instruments, and the cultural and social consequences of equating musical engagement with effortless mastery. Building on frameworks in STS, game studies, and disability studies, it shows how the norms of fun and delight encoded into these interfaces rest on, and reinstall, an idealized user modeled on Apple's design guidelines, the ideology of the iOS platform, and designers' own self-image.

Against this vision of frictionless creativity, the talk turns to earlier cybernetic forms of musical interaction and theories of play in game design, where recalcitrance, difficulty, and friction can be defining features of interaction. Rather than treating friction as a failure of design, these approaches invite us to consider what difficulty might make possible. What might they offer us now, as generative AI promises to eliminate ever more of the labor of music-making, and as a nostalgia for friction has begun to take hold?

About the Speaker

Victoria Simon is an Associate Professor and Communications Program Coordinator in the School of Arts and Sciences at Felician University. She is also a Visiting Research Fellow in the School of Communication at American University. She holds a PhD in Communication Studies from McGill University and an MA in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University.

As an interdisciplinary scholar, Victoria examines the histories and cultural politics of technological interfaces and software industries, drawing lines between the practices of developers, identity, disability, and democracy. She has a special focus on music, sound, and the social implications of AI, and is currently working on her first book, From Difficulty to Delight: An Archaeology of Musical Screens. Her writing has appeared in Television and New Media, Communication, Culture, and Critique, First Monday, and Amodern, among others.

Supported by Soundspace, a transdisciplinary research center exploring the interplay between music and technology. Co-sponsored by Humanities Center and Graduate Program of Visual and Cultural Studies (VCS)