RE: [microsound] digital sound / digital aesthetics./ hyper-digital??

["ph!L @ c e n t i b e l" <hellomynameisphil@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>'hyper-digital'???? is that technical or  
>cultural/politcal?  
 
I think it's primarily aesthetic. It doesn't simply refer to
"high-bandwidth" digital audio, as you seemed to suggest, but to an
aesthetic which is highly idiomatic to the digital domain. Anything from
some of Trevor Wishart to most of Taylor Deupree (as a previous poster
pointed out very rightly, there are a broad range of "digital
aesthetics). Also tends to refer to music that's abstract and that uses
digitally-generated sound rather than samples. But not always.
  
>how do  
>small time scales and hyper-digital relate? 
 
Very interesting question. If you're an intellectual (or a masochist; or
an intellectual masochist; or whatever), you could find the answer to
that question in Curtis Roads' book _Microsound_. But to give the
reader's digest version (because I want to finish my grapefruit), it's
easier to generate (and especially control) "microsounds" with digital
technology than it is with analogue tech. Some history helps to see
this. Xenakis was actually (one of?) the first to use this term
"microsound" (see _Formalized Music_) and actually proposed granular
synthesis (a method of composing with some of the "microsounds" he
proposed) decades before it could be implemented. Also, more recently,
some have discovered that digital glitches are often more "microscopic"
than their analogue counterparts, and incorporated those glitches into
their work in such a way that they may be seen as a defining
characteristic of a "digital" aesthetic. (*A* digital aesthetic, not
*the* digital aesthetic, as a previous poster pointed out.)
 
>so is digital music a focus on the material of   
>musical representation rather than processes that act  
>to manipulate this material? 
 
Not necessarily. Both my thinking and my writing are muddled here, so
let me try to clarify for both of us. It's true that a lot of digital
music tends towards a certain kind of deconstruction of the digital
medium (whereby it makes the digital medium of the work a part of the
content of the work itself; "the medium is (one of) the message(s)").
But that's not true of, for example, most tracker music, which is very
un-self-consciously about making "dance music" that happens to be
digital. Indeed, as a previous poster pointed out, a lot of tracker
music (which is digital) sort of "disowns" its "digitality" and tries to
emulate analogue sounds. Not much deconstruction going on there.
Further, the deconstruction we do see in a lot of experimental digital
audio these days is not necessarily unique to that medium; it is
possible as well to deconstruct analog audio just as much as it is
possible for the digital medium. It's just not as common, for various
reasons.
 
"Digital music" means different things to different people, but in terms
of what AE calls "digital music", some of it is self-consciously and/or
deconstructively digital. And some of it isn't.
 
>computer to digital music 
>in the Ars Electronica. Is this partly because  
>computers are now so layered with user-interfaces and  
>user-friendly software they don't get programmed and  
>thought of as programmable-machines, but rather as  
>equipment to manipulate this 'digital'media?  
  
Interesting theory. It's true that one of the defining characteristics
of the "computer music" of yore was that it was produced on powerful
machines which were owned and operated by institutions. One of the first
computer music programming languages (Music V) was used on an IBM 7094
that was owned by an institution (can't remember if it was a business or
what). Usually in these situations, one single computer was being shared
by many individuals and groups. You got three hours to work on
programming your computer music piece on the university PDP-10 and then
you had to leave because a physicist wanted to calculate his
differential equations or whatever. Or you sent in your punch cards for
batch processing and they sent you back a digital tape; you didn't even
go near the computer itself. Even when the PC came on the scene, it was
barely useful for any kind of serious audio work (the first IBM PC had a
4.77 MHz processor, 640 KB of memory and no hard drives. Try using Pro
Tools on *that*.) But in the last 10 or 15 years, personal computers
have become so powerful that even they are more suited to audio work
than were the most powerful high-end computers just 10 years previously,
so now a wider range of people can fairly easily produce high-quality
computer music on their easy-to-use personal computers without having to
worry as much about lack of access to computing resources (if they have
a home computer) and without worrying about having to learn Fortran or
how to debug their assembler code. Languages like Csound have
accelerated this "personalization of computer music," as have GUI-based
tools like MAX, Cecilia, ProTools, etc, which are often more powerful
and easier to use than were the command-line interfaces that were so
common on insitution-bound machines. Perhaps one way to look at it is
that in some cases, "digital music" is "computer music" democratized.
That means democratiztion both in terms of the proliferation of powerful
home computers and in terms of the relative ease of use of those
machines and the tools they use.
 
ph!L
 
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ph!L (t:h:o:m:s:o:n)
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