digital mediation

As digital mediation becomes the norm for all forms of music making, operating systems, editing environments, and user interfaces take on the feeling of transparency and the forms of mediation of the creative process become obscured. As an example, consider the contemporary classical composer of acoustic art music. Sitting at her terminal, her notation software notates quickly for her everything that comes quickly to thought. The sonic success of her choices is confirmed for her by the realization of her score by sampled instruments. That an oboe is above all else a conceptual category is lost on her, and the one thing she will never discover listening back to her oboe simulacrum is what new an oboe can do. In this way the assemblage of the conditional compositional technique with machinic subjectivities, misunderstood as transparent tools to facilitate this technique, contributes to the ossification of a cultural form.