Sudden music

With the development of increasingly more expressive and interactive electronic instruments, it is easier than ever before to construct works of music out of improvised fragments, editing and piecing them together with the aid of the computer, making the musical work more like a sculpture or painting in sound which can be gradually worked on and refined over time. Such works stand clearly apart from their creator as well as the audience. The gap intensified by musical technology is an abyss which is a challenge for performers, composers, and listeners to cross. I will examine two ways this distance may be bridged: First, the new relationship between instrumentalist and sound engendered by the synthesizer, which forces musicians to program their timbres in addition to learning to play them. Second, I will analyze the use of computers as sequencers as an extension of the transformation of music brought by recording technology. Improvisation, now able to be frozen not only within records of performances but as a component of carefully fashioned pieces, will be shown to be a key to recognizing the expanded potential for human expression within the realm of the machine

Art · Improvisation · Multimedia · Musical · Musical composition · Realm · Visual arts · Computer Science · History · Music and Audio Processing · Music Technology and Sound Studies

• The Brain Opera Technology

  Joseph A Paradiso•Journal of New Music Research•1999

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• Philosophy and Technology

  J Merrill Smith, Paul T Durbin et al.•Technology and Culture•1986

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