Devachan Music - Community Room

Technology changes relationships, not just objects.

Our first instinct with new technology is to map familiar kinds of roles and relationships onto it. Electronic mail, for a long time, was basically people using email as a substitute for snail mail, or for the telephone—later on, huge conference-calls complete with flame wars (unstoppable arguments) and misunderstandings. Only now, with emergence of technology like MOSAIC and the World-Wide Web, is the general public getting the idea that the Internet and its descendants can be an entirely new medium with its own forms and new roles for people and organizations.

Technology blurs the boundaries between products as physical artifacts, events and information.

In our current way of thinking, we have live performance (concerts, dances), broadcast media (radio, television) and product media (CD's, cassettes, instructional tapes, books). These lines are going to get even more blurry than they already are. Distinctions between passive listener, performer, composer and instrument-makers are breaking down. Distinctions between events and products are breaking down.

A friend of mine, Peter Langston, wrote a little program that will take an arbitrary melody and convert it into a bluegrass banjo rendition. Some will argue that bluegrass bands have already perfected this, but the fact that a piece of software can do even a crude approximation of it has implications that are interesting to say the least. This is a small example of a phenomenon some call "intelligent instruments": software that allows users to make compositions that have certain enforced stylistic constraints and limitations. Musicians like Todd Rundgren and Peter Gabriel have put out CDs and multi-media CD-ROMs that allow the listener (perhaps now the end-user) to assemble and re-mix tracks for themselves.

In an information-saturated world, what you leave out may be of more value than what you leave in.

In a world of limitless choices, we are going to gain more appreciation for the notion of "style" and "tradition" as intentional restraint and limitation of choices. Louis Armstrong said it took him 20 years to learn what not to play. What's a little bewildering now is that all of these styles must learn to maintain themselves, not through the mechanism of lack of outside influence, but conscious choices to remain within the boundaries of a style.

For example, analog will increasingly give way to digital information, because it's just so damn convenient. But one rule of culture interacting with technology is: the outmoded becomes the specialist niche. And so there is, of course, a resurgence of interest in analog recording, among aficionados and connoisseurs at first, perhaps in new fringe technologies on the street.

Comment? Use the Tag "Technology Dynamics"

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