The tip of the iceberg: laptop music and the informationtechnological transformation of music. Organised Sound 13 (original) (raw)
Related papers
The tip of the iceberg: Laptop music and the information-technological transformation of music
Organised Sound 13(1): 5–11, 2008
Understanding laptop music requires more than a new perspective on the configuration of a ‘mobile computer and an audio interface’ as a musical instrument for performance. It combines the strategies and traditions of electronic mediarelated music composition of the twentieth century, like reproductive music, electronic music, computer music and Net music in a single, digital, multi-purpose device originally designed for business and multimedia applications. Consequently, what we hear is mostly not a genuine laptop music, but one facet of the information-technological transformation of music that has been the result of the digital integration of these established traditions. This article gives an overview of the aesthetic implications of these traditions and with respect to laptop performance and musical style.
'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
Twentieth-Century Music, 2010
Laptop composition – the creation and performance of music primarily using laptop computers – emerged as an important musical activity in the last decade of the twentieth century. While much has been written about the cultural and conceptual significance of this new music, less has been published regarding the sonic structure of specific works. This article explores the musical structure and design of compositions by three laptop composers at the turn of the millennium: 'Untitled #2' by Oval (Markus Popp), 'Cow Cow' by Merzbow (Masami Akita), and 'Powerbookfiend' by Kid606 (Miguel De Pedro). Each piece is analysed using spectrographic images, representations of musical sound that allow for the precise measurement of frequency and intensity. Repetition and noise are revealed as musical characteristics common to all three pieces, defining both smaller-scale patterns and large-scale designs. Using the conceptual vocabulary of Paul Virilio and Gilles Deleuze, repetition and noise are framed in relation to a 'machine aesthetic' and 'difference and repetition'. With the turn of the millennium computer music has become ubiquitous. Advances in computer technology allow composers not only to distribute their music more widely (by creating sound files for instant dissemination or posting on the internet) but also to create and shape sound itself into seemingly infinite forms. From this plethora of sonic bits and bytes a new generation of composers has emerged. These composers perform in concert and create recorded tracks using the laptop computer as their primary instrument.
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.
The use of the laptop in performance causes various negative responses from the audience, who feel a loss of spectacle and performativity in the action. This occurs as a result of the lack of gesture and visual cues from the performer and the loss of focus from the audience, who have no visual object to ground their aural experience. A shift in focus from an understanding of the visual spectacle in performance to that of aural performativity is needed. Once this is understood, the audience can approach the performance with a shifted focus and come to new understandings of the aural object and contemporary digital audio. KEYWORDS: laptop, aurality, contemporary digital audio, performativity, Pimmon
2018
In the last fifty years, the musical scene has been inevitably transformed by the device that has progressively defined the operation of human society since its advent: the computer. Computing machines have paved the way for the exponential advance of humanity's capabilities, shaping the economy, the nature of labour and human interaction along the way. Likewise, computers have radically changed the music industry in terms of its creation, dissemination and consumption. Vanguard musical creation is both highly contingent on the equipment at the hands of composers, and the cultural context of the era, which is heavily influenced by the existing material and sociological factors of society. The objective of this essay is to analyse how the 'computerized' sounds found in contemporary music, predominantly in the electronic music scene, act as the preeminent artistic reflection of the current zeitgeist, defined by the increasing scope of technology's integration into people's lives, as well as the effects of digital culture in shaping individuals' consciousness and anxieties. In order to build on the argument, the essay shall look at relevant contemporary artists such as Daft Punk, M83, Deadmau5 and Radiohead. Taking account of the current dynamic of 'cyborgisation' of the human species, the essay will go further to contend that these musical creations can be conceived as lyrical counterparts to the written post-human imaginative exercise present in Haraway's figurative cyborg imagery, and as such, represent how the sounds and messages present in music play a significant role in influencing individuals' dispositions to post-humanist mentalities.
Computer music and post-acousmatic practices
Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference, 2022
This short paper considers the practices of computer music through a perspective of the post-acousmatic. As the majority of music is now made using computers, the question emerges: How relevant are the topics, methods, and conventions from the "historical" genre of computer music? Originally an academic genre confined to large mainframes, computer music's tools and conventions have proliferated and spread to all areas of music-making. As a genre steeped in technological traditions, computer music is often primarily concerned with the technologies of its own making, and in this sense isolated from the social conditions of musical practice. The post-acousmatic is offered as a methodological perspective to understand technologybased music, its histories, and entanglements.
Listening to Music in the Digital Era
The relationship between new technologies and the dimension of listening takes at least two different directions, the first dealing with the role new technologies play in the "simple" reproduction and diffusion of music materials that cannot necessarily be categorized as technological music (for example, a Quartet by Brahms heard in Internet streaming); the second concerning the listening modes inescapably involved in the reception of a music product (whether belonging to the so-called "serious music" -i.e. classical music -or to pop music), which depend on the nature of the music itself (for example, an Acousmatic work or a live-performed techno piece). Starting from this basic distinction makes it possible to avoid any misunderstanding about the correct meaning to be attributed both to technology (instrumental function or production-realization function) and to listening (mediated or immediate).
The musical process in the age of digital intervention
2000
Porter in Oxford to present keynote papers at conferences which they were organising, and I am grateful to them all. An earlier version of the text was commissioned by the Norwegian philosophical journal Parergon, but has never appeared in public.