What does app music mean? How do people make music with apps? These and other related questions are fundamental for the research on musical practices with apps. Besides established forms of art using musical apps, there is a lack of empirical research of musical learning with apps. This is the reason for us initiating this call for a blog parade which aims at dealing with this topic from different perspectives.

A short video of three students working with the app PlayGround serves as the blog parade’s basis for discussion. It was filmed at the TINCON where Matthias Krebs held a workshop (german).

An advantage of the video (see below) is the split screen mode: on the left you see the adolescents playing on tablets and on the right you can see the touch points recorded by the iPad while the boys were playing. This video offers a good opportunity to deal with a short sequence of music making more intensively.

Is it appropriate to equate the process of three adolescents working with the app PlayGround with music making? If you (dis)agree, why? To answer these questions, we would like to initiate a blog parade. This call is directed to researchers, pedagogues, musicians, app developers, and all people who are interested in dealing with this video by writing a blog article. We are looking forward to your contributions up until July 15, 2016 (deadline). The articles may contain explanations of specific opinions up to detailed video analyses. There are no specific methods of observation required. In fact, our aim is to collect different views that are compared and brought together later on.

How to get involved:

• Write a blog article on how (or if) music is made in the video.
• Link your contribution to this article. This will result in a PingBack and your contribution will be linked here to the blog.
• Of course you can also publish your article here by simply leaving a comment or linking it to our Facebook page .
• All people without an own blog can send us a text which will be published under your name on the website of the network tAPP (german), or you can also leave a comment under this post.
• In order to gather a lot of different perspectives and for the sake of a lively exchange, you are cordially invited to inform others about this blog parade.
• Already published articles can and also should be commented and shared; again, in order to to provide further suggestions.

We are very excited and looking forward to many results and a lively exchange of opinions on making app music.