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A View From the Bus: When Machines Make Music.
Paul Lansky
from Perspectives of New Music, vol. 28/2, (Summer 1990) When composers remove the locus of their activities from traditional musical arenas, as often happens when they begin to use computers to make music, issues which they never worried about before start to crystallize into cares and concerns. What follows is an attempt to say something about these issues. For want of a better term I'll call these concerns the social context of machine-made music. With all the junk that occupies our workbench when we enter the 'digital domain', neural nets, FIR filters, quantization errors, and so on, why worry about social issues as well? I contend that the history western music is one which is marked by consistent, and largely unsuccessful attempts to build music machines. But now that we have finally succeeded in this the nature of human musical relations is consequently changing--profoundly--and it goes without saying, that music will change profoundly as well. Fundamentally, machines are affecting the substance of music, and, for me, the essence of this development lies not so much in our increasing ability to model and invent, but rather in the ways in which we'll relate to one another in this new domain. When all is said and done, this is the bottom line. It is my feeling that as soon as we allow technology to intervene in the process of music making and communication, particularly computer technology, we radically alter the social and conceptual basis of this intercourse, so much so that we create contradictions and paradoxes if we refuse to recognize these new bases.
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