SADLY BY YOUR SIDE is an eight-song album, a Book and a synesthetic iOS app; a processing and remixing tool where each song can be endlessly transformed depending on the images you focus on with your camera.The iPhone is used as a window to the external world, a world that alters the perception of the album.

To listen to the song in its original form, focus the app on one of the eight images available in the book Sadly by your side.

Sadly by your side is part of a major project, called Objectify mp3, that involves all Fabrica’s creative studios, aiming to reinvent the way Fabrica produces, distributes and enhances its music. Given that music is now a largely digital experience, and physicality is removed or at least transposed, what else could we create around the distribution, discovery and listening experiences? Fabrica’s researchers started from this question, with the intention to create several new forms of music media: a self-published book, a free iOS application and a music video were born, each linked to the other through music to create a powerful aesthetic imaginary.

We started thinking how an album can be expressed through an app and how mobile devices can augment the listening experience. Mobile devices allow people to listen to music in many different places, so we thought that maybe the music can adapt to these places and give a personal listening experience. Then we created a book because we felt a lack in physicality and we wanted something tangible, trying to keep the relationship object-album alive.

Angelo got Davide, the musician behind the album, to separate his electronic tracks out into three layers: rhythm, melody, and harmony. From this data, the team’s graphic designers, Matteo Di Iorio and Claudio Fabbro, developed the visual language of the album–abstract smatterings of red, blue, and black forms derived from those three core sonic components. Angelo expanded on the idea for the app, developing an algorithm that counts the red, black, and blue pixels in whatever image the camera happens to be looking at and then remixes the music’s layers accordingly, applying dollops of distortion and delay to further transform the sound.

It makes for a unique listening experience, to be sure–assuming you deviate from the book’s pages even a little bit, the album you’re hearing will be distinctly your own. But the project’s exploring some interesting territory in terms of music making, too. As the idea came together, the team worked together carefully to figure out a product that would allow for variation without pulling Davide's musical vision too far afield in one direction or another. The songs had to be built, in other words, with a very specific bit of wiggle room in mind.

We are interested in generative music and graphics and we also wanted to design a personal listening experience that can be enjoyed everywhere and by as many people as possible.

We tried to shift the focus on the listener providing a unique listening experience modifying an album traditionally thought as a finished piece.

Conceptually we found most exciting the music composition aspect. When we were working on the music, we were thinking about a system - a system that for every input gives a music experience coherent with Davide's sound imagery. In addition to traditional notation and ways of creating music, developing a system that allows the listener to participate in the production of the music, making each listening experience unique, challenges preconceptions about what it means to compose and even listen to music. We like to think that Sadly by your side can be an inspiration for other musical projects.