The Aesthetics of Failure: "Post-Digital" Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music.(Critical Essay)

The digital revolution is over.

-- Nicholas Negroponte (1998)

Over the past decade, the Internet has helped spawn a new movement in digital music. It is not academically based, and for the most part the composers involved are self-taught. Music journalists occupy themselves inventing names for it, and some have already taken root: glitch, microwave, DSP, sinecore, and microscopic music. These names evolved through a collection of deconstructive audio and visual techniques that allow artists to work beneath the previously impenetrable veil of digital media. The Negroponte epigraph above inspired me to refer to this emergent genre as "post-digital" because the revolutionary period of the digital information age has surely passed. The tendrils of digital technology have in some way touched everyone. With electronic commerce now a natural part of the business fabric of the Western world and Hollywood cranking out digital fluff by the gigabyte, the medium of digital technology holds less fascination for composers in and of itself. In this article, I will emphasize that the medium is no longer the message; rather, specific tools themselves have become the message.

The Internet was originally created to accelerate the exchange of ideas and development of research between academic centers, so it is perhaps no surprise that it is responsible for helping give birth to new trends in computer music outside the confines of academic think tanks. A non-academic composer can search the Internet for tutorials and papers on any given aspect of computer music to obtain a good, basic understanding of it. University computer music centers breed developers whose tools are shuttled around the Internet and used to develop new music outside the university.

Unfortunately, cultural exchange between non-academic artists and research centers has been lacking. The post-digital music that Max, SMS, AudioSculpt, PD, and other such tools make possible rarely makes it back to the ivory towers, yet these non-academic composers anxiously await new tools to make their way onto a multitude of Web sites.

Even in the commercial software industry, the marketing departments of most audio software companies have not yet fully grasped the post-digital aesthetic; as a result, the more unusual tools emanate from developers who use their academic training to respond to personal creative needs. This article is an attempt to provide feedback to both academic and commercial music software developers by showing how current DSP tools are being used by post-digital composers, affecting both the form and content of contemporary "non-academic" electronic music.

The Aesthetics of Failure