4/23/1999
Interesting program on WBEZ ("Odyssey") about how recordings changed our perception of music. It's sort of ironic that recordings were first used only to archive music. The double irony is that we return to the original idea and now we use the archive to make works of art that we replicate in the archive. Steve Albini made the interesting point that digital sound will degrade over time, unlike vinyl recordings which last much longer. He liked the idea of having the recording as a physical object rather than having just the data on some drive somewhere. This way we keep a time capsule. But it's also an interesting idea that we let culture mutate on its own through cyberspace—anathema to the idea that things are preserved. In such an atmosphere, archived copies can only be relics. He made the interesting point that digital sound will degrade over time, unlike vinyl recordings which last much longer. He liked the idea of having the recording as a physical object rather than having just the data on a hard drive, as a type of 'time capsule'. It is also an interesting idea that we let culture mutate on its own in cyberspace—anathema to the idea that things are preserved [in a fixed form]. In this scenario, archived copies become relics. *** April 23, 2009: Digital media is already degrading and precipitously disappearing. The only thing perpetuating it is the fact that it is collaged into other works. *** April 23, 2024 AI and the Blockchain are now in the loop of digital preservation. If a digital instantiation is "tokenized" (made into a building block) it can be endlessly "modded". In music, it has been called a "cell" for hundreds of years. Classical composers like Beethoven, Haydn, and Mozart all worked modularly. But I think it's an interesting possibility to scale that out to the internet. In music you can create a one-bar phrase, a 2-bar phrase, or 4-bar phrase that repeats, then share that out. Some are selling them as NFTs of loops or samples where they indicate what the tempo is and what the key is and that would be the building blocks. You could extrapolate that further by making the modules the section of the song: verses, choruses, the bridge, outro, etc. and ideally, you could string those together in some way. I think it's an interesting idea but I don't know how that's going to scale or work in a musical fashion.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorLee Barry, Musician/Content Producer Archives
May 2024
Categories
All
|