Added: 09/19/2005 |
Digital music - past, present and futureDigital music and transformation of sound have been an integral part of the musical development since the 1950s. It came with the invention of a magnetic tape during the post war period and the loudspeakers later on. The ideas of recording and reproducing music gave a rise to the employment of the digital technology in playing music and synthesizing its sounds and the first music samples to use the technology were rock and pop. Dance tracks are the clearest representatives of digital music with digitally created sounds, digitally recorded and edited processes.
The digital editing technology has had an enormous effect on pop, rock and rave music in the use of sampling and repetition. Sampling, the usage of extracts from previous music recordings and those of celebrated speeches, has become a new area of artistic development; repetition is a very important part of the rave culture, giving an impression of trance-like melodies. The development of jazz includes taking rock rhythms in the 60s, digital sounds and editing in the 80s and 90s. One of the first samples of jazz digital music is the track "Song for Barry" (Return of the Becker Brothers (1992), which begins with a short rain-forest Pygmy melody, played on a digital marimba. Following digital recording and editing, there comes inter-active music, where the digital technology becomes a competent participant in a live performance.
Digital technology for the inter-active musical creation is widely used in contemporary classical music, where engineers, controlling the electronic transformation, join instrumental musicians. The disadvantages of digital music go together with the advantages. The first question is what many of the live musicians should do in the case, when all the live performances are exchanged for digital ones; supposedly, it will not happen, or it will be necessary for each musician to study computer programming; at least, it is important to know it. The second question lies in aesthetic aspects of live and digital music, as many people do not distinguish already the sound of a live piano from the digital one. However, the advantages of digital music are enormous. The musicians and singers have the greatest opportunities to make their performance sound perfect due to the usage of the digital technology. Listeners can enjoy any piece of downloadable music via Internet without any international boundaries. The audience of each musician or singer is larger than ever if his recordings are published in the world network. The listener, as the ultimate constituent of a musical process, is provided with all the comfort, when, instead of buying commercial CDs at the music store, he can create the album according to his own preferences, arrange the order of tracks and participating artists. The composer can sit at the keyboard, play, edit and record his creations.
This is a real digital revolution, which brings about many great changes into the music production and enlarges the speed. Take the UK as an example: it has the most advanced digital market in Europe, where there were 5.7 downloads per user last year, compared with virtually ones in 2003. There is no difficulty to trace further development and growth of downloadable and digital music.
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