A View from the Bus: When Machines Make Music

Abstract

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.

Deconstructing Creativity

“…This blurring of traditional creator-performer boundaries can also be seen in the wider music community. Lansky [42] challenges the overly simplistic Composer-Performer-Listener (CPL) paradigm (where "the composer writes, the performer plays, and the listener claps"), arguing for a more varied view of musical-social relations in the context of technology-mediated music-making practices. To show that the distinction between who produces sound and who creates musical content is more nuanced than one may think, he gives the example of composer Harry Partch who built and played his own instruments: "there was probably little distinction in his mind between building an instrument and composing the music for it. "…”

2007: Expression and Its Discontents: Toward an Ecology of Musical Creation

“…To be revolutionary means to fundamentally change the bases of understanding so that whatever it is that we formerly understood to be true, is not now necessarily false, but perhaps is rather no longer even a question, or an issue, or susceptible to the same logic." -Paul Lansky [21] …”

On-demand streaming services

“…Jenkins' remarks call for an interesting observation: the underlying logic of copyright protection in the centuries before the introduction of the phonograph did not include tracking down and identifying, at the level of each individual author, the collective practices that mixed and remixed diverse ideas, rhythmic and melodic phrases, harmony and tempos, tone and expressive resources, which later crystalized into different music genres. 9 To Sousa, a professional musician himself, the virtue inherent to the status of being an amateur musician did not lie in the quality of the music they were able to write, but on their participation in the music culture: the love for music, the enjoyment of recreating it, and the respect for the pieces they played. Sousa feared that music playing devices would make the amateur culture wither and turn listeners into consumers of culture instead of producers.…”