Re: [microsound] music in the digital age

[sediment@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]

> Sediment's response was one I expected to receive on this list and fair
> enough, but his/her preference is not one that is the focus of my piece.
> An
> album or cd cover is a conceptual interface - as Alex points out the view
> that it is to do with branding is way too simplistic and reductive, it is
> much more personalised and subtle in many/most cases. That layer of
> communication is lost with iTunes and mp3s.

It seems to me that you should be buying CD's.  Though I'm not exactly
sure what you are trying to say, it sounds as though you are describing a
virtual CD shelf.  Why not use a real one instead?

> I find it strange that computers have predominantly
> impoverished rather than enriched music by reducing it
> to the status of a filetype,
> subject to an unimaginative filing system,

Is that any less enriching than reducing it to a plastic disc?  I think
that any medium which makes the music more accesible and cheaper to
reproduce will lessen it's impact.  How valuable was the sound of music
when there was no such thing as a speaker?  When you could only hear it if
there were people around to play it?

> and failing to provide a standardised set of functions which might
> facilitate the imaginitive exploitation of the multimedia opportunities
> afforded by the availability of so much processing power.

what are you talking about here? an new kind of encoding?  a particualr
player?  I can imagine a filetype that stores all the audio of a CD in
addition the CD art.  That would be interesting.  You could also make
something like CDdisplay but for CDs instead of comics where it would read
a .rar or .sit file that contains all the art and mp3's and serve them up
together.

slightly OT:

I wonder what hypothetical extraterrestrials who have been-there-done-that
with digital computing might have to say about our software design
techniques.


-- 
http://noiseusse.org

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