“Trying to grab attention is normally our brief,” explains composer Sam Heath, a partner at Sounds Like These. Developing a range of styles that can accompany the varied and often unpredictable cadence of a design process is hard, especially when the form it takes looks different for every team. Licensing costs and “Swifties” aside, the problem became even more complex when you start to weave in all the creative tensions inherent in the sound brief: music that’s inclusive but not bad attention-grabbing but not distracting diverse but related. “So that was one of the big challenges: How do we walk the line between being inoffensive but also being not bad? Because often those are opposite sides of the same coin.” But in a diverse group of people, some people are really not going to be happy,” says Brainerd. “Music is a very personal and emotional thing, right? If somebody comes into a room full of 20 people and says, ‘Great news, we licensed Taylor Swift and we're gonna put her in FigJam!’ some people would be very excited. After prototyping a proof of concept, he decided that while his demo was fun to build, and fun to play with, it wasn’t solving for the very real need to fill those awkward collaborative silences with something more meaningful. “I thought: Wouldn't it be great if there was a little something in the background to keep the momentum going?”įor Maker Week, Figma’s biannual tradition of taking a company-wide break from day-to-day work to make stuff, Brainerd built a music step sequencer that was integrated and interactive, but that also doubled as a sonic replacement for the silent (and, let’s be honest, sometimes dread-inducing) timer. “You have this very vibrant, active FigJam doc-everybody's talking, sharing ideas, and then you have the heads-down period where everything goes quiet,” says Chris Brainerd, who led the engineering effort on the music feature. The second is to support timed sequences in work sessions, which are traditionally supported by a silent timer that queues an alarm. This, of course, used to happen IRL, but teams both inside and outside of Figma began doing this pretty regularly to work together remotely. The first is the simple tradition of playing music to jam to at work. The concept of music in FigJam drew on two points of inspiration. A tool for composing, a composition, or both?! Thinking about music as a tool for making presented unique challenges, both for our product team, and for Sounds Like These, the music studio we enlisted to help us build out our sound portfolio for FigJam. So how do you play music in a space where a lot of different people come together to do different types of work? It turns out there’s a pretty rich compositional lineage to draw on for this sort of thing ( more on that below), which extends beyond Spotify and lo-fi YouTube playlists (though those are pretty handy, too). The wrong song can, quite literally, kill the vibe, or even worse, become a blocker. When it comes to work-and, more specifically, remote, collaborative work-this phenomenon can be a pretty effective strategy to get people on the same page and harness that ineffable collective flow. You can get more stressed, or more focused, too. There's a phenomenon called entrainment, where if you're surrounded by fast-paced sound, you tend to move faster, and do things faster. Can playing music at work build a sense of shared experience, fluidity of thought, comfort, or camaraderie? What makes music good to jam to? Are certain types of music better for different types of work? We thought about all of this and more when we set out to create music in FigJam tune in for a deep cut on our inspiration and process.
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