Poya Tavakolian and Johan Weinl
The last forty years has brought forth innovation in the way we make music and the way that we work with audio post production. The digital era is upon us and at a rapid pace we see programs and products developed to enhance and simplify the workflow of audio post production. The focus of this study is on the usage of tablet computers in this workflow and if they can help a musician in the audio post production stage to bring forth his or her aesthetic vision. We have tried to examine this area by utilizing a number of methods. A semi-structured focus group with members of a band was conducted in order to get the opinions of active musicians and see how they felt about audio post production on a tablet computer and to see if they thought that it was a feasible method for this purpose. A survey was sent out to the public to get an idea what the music makers opinion is when it comes to using a tablet computer for this means. The same survey was sent to the band that was to be in our focus group.
These methods combined with our literary study show that the tablet computer can be a strong contender in audio post production, at an amateur level and most importantly for learning. The people who were familiar with existing programs for audio post production were often uneasy with the idea of using a tablet, this because of their deep rooted knowledge in using a desktop computer. The band and the people who chose to answer our survey have all expressed that a tablet computer would be a great sort of bridge between wanting to learn about audio post production and actually learning post production, this despite the limitations performance wise of the tablet computers of today.