Soundcloud - Socialising through sounds

SoundCloud is the world’s leading social sound platform where anyone can create sounds and share them everywhere. Recording and uploading sounds to SoundCloud lets people easily share them privately with their friends or publicly to blogs, sites and social networks (Soundcloud, 2013). I selected this Virtual network as I have a great passion for creating original music and sharing my work with other people with similar interest in music.  

I decided to keep my own identity to allow friends and other users to identify my music as my own work and not that of a disguised persona. Using my real identity allows people to see a connection between my style of music and my persona and ultimately allows me to associate and connect with artists within the same network. Age, gender, demographics and geographic are irrelevant on Soundcloud. Connections are made through a common interest of music taste between users.

Artist can share their music and be discovered by others through this network in contrast to physical space, where artists often struggle to be heard, recongized and identified. Similar to the notion of a physical home range as mentioned by Petray (2013), the home range of this virtual network is mapped out according to the preferences and interest a user has in a particular music genre. Indeed one can venture off  into other music genres and become lost in movement in a cryptic space, where connections lead only to more connections in a never-ending mirror of non-space (Barnes, 1997). However, artists often establish a home range according to where they often visit. For example, by selecting 'hip-hop' as a preference of music on a Soundcloud, the user maps out their virtual home range and freely moves within the Hiphop network regularly.  

References

Barnes, G. (1997). Passage of the Cyber-flaneur. Retrieved from http://www.raynbird.com/essays/Passage_Flaneur.html

Pertray, T. (2013). BA1002: week 3 lecture. Retrieved from http://learnjcu.edu.au 

Soundcloud (2013), About us. Retrieved from https://soundcloud.com/pages/contact