Bringing Digital Music to Life

Abstract

in which it exists, and call into question our very ideas about musical progress. Is the state of the art to be judged aesthetically on the music that identifies with it, or materially on the technology it has delivered to the musical world? I think it makes more sense to accept that computer music is not a single type of music, but a musical instrument technology that applies to many kinds of music. I would ask two other questions, What effect is the use of computers in music having, globally, on the vitality of musical art, and What are we as musicians and explorers in this medium doing to enhance the computer's role in our work? By focusing on the ways that computer music has changed our relationship to musical instruments, we may increase our understanding of its role in the changing nature of many different musical practices. In the 1970s there was an expectation that technology would liberate the composer from the practical limitations of acoustic instruments and human performers. What wasn't perhaps foreseen was that by making the relationship of sound to creator an arbitrary one, music is stripped of its context, and becomes a more clinical and less meaningful activity. Thus, instead of freeing composers from instruments, composers have become more involved with the design and implementation of instruments. Perhaps implausibly, hobo/carpenter/composer Harry Partch has become a role model for the computer musician-the construction of instruments from currently available materials, the found-objects of the current state of music technology, have become an important aspect of the composition process. Composers have been seduced into an intimate involvement with electronic hardware and software