Maxime's Reflections on Collins

Karen Collins’ research explores music semiotics, or the way music can be conceived as a language. She argues that interactivity between users and music increases music symbolism by providing a different experience to users, who are usually passive listeners. For example, sound effects in a slot machine may induce players to believe they are winning, when in fact they are losing by getting less money than they are betting. Interactivity in this case comes from the relation between the sound produced by the machine and the players’ input. Furthermore, Karen Collins also seems to argue that interactivity may cure the music industry modern ailments and that artists should embrace this new trend.
Interactivity may indeed enhance user’s experiences with media or their environment more generally. It has the potential to create a unique soundtrack for each individual in a particular space and time, adapted to their actions and their (often unconscious) needs or desires. Karen Collins insisted on the importance of interactivity in the video games industry, but I think it could go beyond this area. For example, museums may embrace interactivity and create technical devices which would provide visitors with a musical experience adapted to their perambulations. The Montreal Fine Arts Museum has already taken steps in this direction by creating a music soundtrack for its exhibitions, but it could go further and implement an integrated interface between visitors, music and pieces of arts through movement detectors and ingenious composition.
However, I don’t agree with Karen Collins views that the future of music lies in interactivity. I think interactivity between music listeners and musicians will stay a marginal trend, as it already is. A handful of musicians may be ready to integrate their fans' input during the creative process or even when their final piece is completed, as AIR has done, but I think most musicians would not agree to relinquish their control over their creation. Musicians who primarily live from their art tend to see music as an expression of their intimate self that they reveal to their public. They may accept to enter in a dialogue with the public over the quality of their creation, but letting the public modify it, even slightly, is a completely different matter.
The emphasis on interactivity advocated by Karen Collins involves a transformation of our conception of music: from a self-standing art, it becomes a mere tool that accompanies and enhances other experiences. But music is an experience in itself and I think that its complete dilution with other sensorial experiences would be a loss for musicians and for their public. As a music listener, I do not necessarily feel an urge to be involved in the music I am listening to, as I would not want to change a book that I like, even if I feel that I would have done things differently. Therefore, although interactivity may change our interaction with different activities, I do not think it will change our relation to music itself on the long term.