Music, Sounds, the Stradivarius and the Computer: a dialogue between the music-maker and the music-listener (original) (raw)
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The process of creating computer-based music is increasingly being conceived in terms of complex chains of mediations involving composer/performer and computer software interactions that prompt us to reconsider notions of materiality within the context of digital cultures. Recent scholarship has offered particularly useful re-evaluations of computer music software in relation to musical instrumentality. In this article, we contend that given the ubiquitous presence of computer units within contemporary musical practices, it is not simply music software that needs to be reframed as musical instruments, but rather the diverse material strata of machines identified as computers that need to be thought of as instruments within music environments. Specifically, we argue that computers, regardless of their technical specifications, are not only ‘black boxes’ or ‘meta-tools’ that serve to control music software, but are also material objects that are increasingly being used in a wide range of musical and sound art practices according to an ‘analog’ rather than ‘digital’ logic. Through a series of examples implicating both soft and hard dimensions of what constitutes computers, we provide a preliminary survey of practices calling for the need to rethink the conceptual divide between analog and digital forms of creativity and aesthetics.
Technologies of Music, Technologies of Self
New technologies of music-recording, synthesis, sampling, and editing-are often said to have transformed music, made it thoroughly pervasive in modern life, and brought new forms and practices into being. [CLICK] In most statements of this kind "Technology" is taken to mean gadgets or devices for producing or reproducing sounds, and "music" refers to the sounds themselves. It's become relatively commonplace to hear statements that the cultural and social growth of Rock came about through Electrical amplification and recording, or that social musical events where sounds on disc provide the entertainment constitute a new socio-technological form of music, or that MP3 and the iPod have revolutionized private listening and tastes. These observations and the new technologies they refer to have raised or intensified all sorts of challenges to our concepts of music, performance, and instruments. Is what a band or an orchestra does in the recording studio a "performance" in the same way as a concert that has an audience physically present, even if the ensemble produces the same sounds? Does "music" consist in a composition, as Eduard Hanslick would have it, or a set of sounds that recording devices can capture, as Richard Branson might prefer? Or is there a sort of ideal music that scores and performances each reflect in different ways, or is it a social practice that embraces all these and more? In an organology seminar it might be appropriate to ask if a device such as an LP turntable, when used to manipulate prerecorded music in live performance, can be classified as a musical instrument. Will turntables will appear in the musical instrument museums of the future or only in museums of the history of technology? So while there's a general sense that new technology has changed music, and that this is an interesting development, how this has happened is a very complex issue with links to wider questions. Those questions reach far beyond the world of music and musical instruments to address what technology does in human life and how technology and society interact.
Composing with Computers: Meg Makes Music
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about Abstract The young composer described in this case study used various exploration and development strategies while creating her music. Her exploration and development strategies changed over time, and her use of specific musical gestures became recognizable as her signature or style. She grew more fluent and used a wider variety of composition strategies as she gained experience, and her fluency as a composer was linked to works that appeared more satisfying to the participant and more musical and imaginative to the observers. Concurrently, she demonstrated an increasing awareness of the qualities and functions of sounds and gestures within her works, as well as a growing ability to hear her music internally and to use that ability while composing. An assertion from this case study is that time, tool, and technique are interactive in the composition process.
Tools and Outcomes: Computer music systems and musical directions
1999
In the changing context of computer music composition where the computer becomes a commodity rather than a novelty, this paper examines the composers' relationship with the computer and how that relates to music making. Computer music making has a history of close association between tool making and music making. This relationship was first forged out of necessity, then out of interest and a dedication to new ways of composing and performing. At the turn of the century, after 50 years of computer music, computers are becoming just another musical instrument. With the development of a wide range of computer music software and hardware, tool making is no longer a necessity for computer music making, nor perhaps even a badge of honour.
A View from the Bus: When Machines Make Music
Perspectives of New Music, 1990
When composers remove the locus of their activities from traditional musical arenas, as often happens when they begin to use computers to make music, issues which they never worried about before start to crystallize into cares and concerns. What follows is an attempt to say something about these issues. For want of a better term I'll call these concerns the social context of machine-made music. With all the junk that occupies our workbench when we enter the 'digital domain', neural nets, FIR filters, quantization errors, and so on, why worry about social issues as well? I contend that the history western music is one which is marked by consistent, and largely unsuccessful attempts to build music machines. But now that we have finally succeeded in this the nature of human musical relations is consequently changing-profoundly-and it goes without saying, that music will change profoundly as well. Fundamentally, machines are affecting the substance of music, and, for me, the essence of this development lies not so much in our increasing ability to model and invent, but rather in the ways in which we'll relate to one another in this new domain. When all is said and done, this is the bottom line. It is my feeling that as soon as we allow technology to intervene in the process of music making and communication, particularly computer technology, we radically alter the social and conceptual basis of this intercourse, so much so that we create contradictions and paradoxes if we refuse to recognize these new bases.
'OK Computer: Mobility, Software and the Laptop Musician'
In this paper I address some images, categories and open-ended trajectories of the laptop in music production. The aim is to explore the laptop’s increasing presence in the sites of music, from cyberspace to live venues, as well as the relationship between music and mobile computerized space. Implicit in the paper is the claim that the laptop is a neglected device, but that close attention to its position in cultural networks and everyday settings is one way of examining some possible ways into the complex entanglements and layerings of mobile space. The first part of the paper explores the laptop as the archetypal nomadic machine of the digital age, inserted into mobile networks, hubs and flows. The laptop mediates mobility and by doing so not only serves macro-processes of social and economic change, but also opens up creative possibilities for the musician beyond the studio and the home. The second part of the article examines the role of software in activating the laptop’s capabilities. The growth of music software and Virtual Studio Technology in the early 2000s, it will be argued, represents a major transformation in music production. A case study is made of a single application, Ableton Live, to show that new forms of music software encourage norms of creativity and play that take it beyond emulations of hardware studios. A residual distrust of the laptop’s automative capabilities, however, reprises an anxiety in the history of popular music around questions of creativity and musicianship. The final part explores this anxiety and argues that the laptop is a place-holder for conflicting meanings about what belongs in music: productivity and creation, reality and virtuality, play and work, the cybernetic and the organic. It thereby reveals socio-technical imbroglios in action, where digitized music and software code meet the material properties of technologies and the practices of users in complex, networked societies. Keywords: laptops, music, digital, mobility, software, technology
Understanding Human–Technology Relations Within Technologization and Appification of Musicality
Frontiers in Psychology, 2020
In this paper, we outline a theoretical account of the relationship between technology and human musicality. An enactive and biocultural position is adopted that assumes a close coevolutionary relationship between the two. From this position, we aim at clarifying how the present and emerging technologies, becoming embedded and embodied in our lifeworld, inevitably co-constitute and transform musical practices, skills, and ways of making sense of music. Therefore, as a premise of our scrutiny, we take it as a necessity to more deeply understand the ways that humans become affiliated to the ever-changing instruments of music technology, in order to better understand the coevolutionary impact on learning and other aspects of musicality being constituted together with these instruments. This investigation is particularly motivated by the rapid and diverse development of mobile applications and their potential impact, as musical instruments, on learning and cognizing music. The term appification refers to enactive processes in which applications (i.e., apps) and their user interfaces, developed for various ecosystems of mobile smart technology, partake in reorganizing our ways of musical acting and thinking. On the basis of the theoretical analysis, we argue that understanding the phenomenon of the human-technology relationship, and its implications for our embodied musical minds, requires acknowledging (1) how apps contribute to conceptual constructing of musical activities, (2) how apps can be designed or utilized in a way that reinforces the epistemological continuum between embodied and abstract sense-making, and (3) how apps become merged with musical instruments.