Freeze frame: Sound in the Era of Digital Networks: Ken Jordan and Paul Miller

From the point at which I first started getting my music from the internet till now has changed quite a bit. I was a user of Napster, the music shearing program that is synonymous for illegal shearing, but at that time no one really knew where the whole music shearing was going to go. No one had any idea that it would get so big and that the artists would start suing for their rights. Yet another example of us losing control of what we create. But the quality of today’s music that you can download is amazing.

            Just like when Jordan and Miller talk about the first try to send the word login to someone across the United States it was two low pitches and while typing the letter g it crashed, there was not enough information for us to be able to be successful.

“Online collaboration today takes many forms. Using Web-based music technologies, artists are working together to create new music. There are online studios that connect artists across great distances, and Web-based jams between musicians who have never laid eyes on one another.”

     It is interesting to read that they feel we are not listening to music but the sound of the internet, the sound of the computer. He says, “As the distinction between “artist” and “audience” begins to slip away, and we find ourselves dipping into the data flow, listening to the music that it makes, and that we make with it.”  It is strange that I have never thought about this. When we hear music now, with the electric guitar or the singer through the microphone we are hearing their music but hearing it through technologies that manipulate the original sound.

~ by beckyjay on December 14, 2007.