Blog 11

The articles “The Aesthetics of Failure: “Post-Digital” Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music” and “Loving the Ghost in the Machine” explored how raw bare sounds and every day “noise” can be seen as digital music. Both articles also looked how the process of recording these sounds becomes digital music. Vanhanen said that when music is recorded, it starts to decompose with the use of tools. The act of recoding takes the true essence away from the live performance and actually makes sounds into data. Music becomes groves in plastic, the sounds becomes a cog in a machine instead of an actual experience. Cascone said that when we break music down and put it online it becomes less about the actual score and more about the technology and the sharing or distribution.

As a result of advance technology music has elements such as the refrain, “refrain isn’t the origin of music but rather the means of preventing it, warding it off,” (Vanhanen 2000.) The evolution of how music is now produced changes the nature of music as well. “Phonography, the art of recoding sound, allows the production of a smooth sound plane, on which all relations between its various musical elements are immanent as recoding extracts or constructs a block of time, a musical time that is present as sound penetrates our bodies but emerges as a result from an (quasi) event which is distant from use specially and temporarily,” (Vanhanen 2000.)

Music can be manufactured through a computer instead of in a thoughtful soulful way. “Phonography deterritorializes sound, flattens down the hierarchical organization of music into a rhizome, which is an open, multiple and temporal form of organization and susceptible to constant de-and recording,” (Vanhanen 2000.) The imperfections or “glitches” can be isolated and new sounds can be produced from the micro-level, a level not previously looked at or possible with out machines to break down sound and noise to a minute scope. The glitch itself can become music with the use of technology many glitches can be put together and form a new music made possible by technology. . “The medium is no longer the message in glitch music: the tool has become the message,” (Cascone 2002.) These types of arrangements or composition lead to new genres of music, like dance and techno. It can be argued that the convergence of technology that allows for this new way of making music becomes less about the actual music that is produced and more about the process or the tool.

Questions:

Does use of technology in the composition or creation of music take away from the purity of the form? Or does the form just evolve into something different?

Is it ethical to break down imperfections in music and edit them to be “perfect” through the use of technology?

Does the use of technology to compose and arrange music make it possible for more people to participate in this process or is the participation only limited to those with access to technological, tools and knowledge?

Is composition of music through technology more socio-economically limiting than creation or composition of music by access to actual instruments and knowledge of how to play and arrange music?

Is there a direction or industry leader in the field of music creation through digital technology?

Difficult concept:
I thought the readings were really interesting, but I am not sure that I see all of the future implications or connection of these concepts. What I need illustrated for me is how this affects and connects to the other things we have been talking about in class and how the creation of music through technology affects how we evolve through convergence.

Relation to research paper:
The idea that people can use tools to create music through technology and share this knowledge online has some implications for me research paper. I am really more interested in the thought process of how people make choices to find what they are looking for online – how people find music, information to make or arrange music, or even just sound samples online. I hope to be able to better answer this question after our class discussion, where I might get help with understanding how these concepts relate to the other topics we discussed in class and how the convergence of music technology has evolved the form into something new and different.