How has Digital Technology changed our perception of musical performance and progress?

1. Performance: 1) a musical, dramatic, or other entertainment presented before an audience... 6) the manner in which or the efficiency with which something reacts or fulfils its intended purpose. 7) Linguistics: the actual use of language in real situations, which may or may not fully reflect a speaker's competence, being subject to such nonlinguistic factors as inattention, distraction, memory lapses, fatigue, or emotional state. How has Digital Technology changed our perception of musical performance and progress?

3. Human Element of Performance • Instrument construction as performance (from production to coding to engineering) • Any DAW software that uses at least 32 Bit floating point calculations will be capable of processing audio without introducing unwanted distortions, frequency response alterations or any other unwanted effect that would be 'clearly audible' so as to sway opinion (DAW Wars &Audio Myths) • [Meyer and Moran's study] was designed to show whether real people, with good ears, can hear any differences between “high-resolution” audio and the 44.1kHz/16-bit CD standard. And the answer Moran and Meyer came up with, after hundreds of trials with dozens of subjects using four different top-tier systems playing a wide variety of music, is, “No, they can't.” (Emperor’s New Sampling Rate – Lehrman)

4. Human Element of Performance • “Composers have been seduced into an intimate involvement with electronic hardware and software by the need to grapple with the genie of this medium that continually changes its shape” Chris Brown • Descartes mind-body division was wrong → mind-body map that seeks to maintain an optimal grip on the world, Intercorporeality. Merleau-Ponty • Telepresence vs presence Hubert Dreyfus • “I kind of have an unusual attitude about that issue. I don't know that having more physical gestures in it is really the way to direct people more to the essence of it.” John Bischoff

5. The Hub (and Post-structuralism) • HubRengahttp://crossfade.walkerart.org/brownbischoff/hub_texts/hubrenga_f.html • Messages from the audience used as voice editing messages that trigger musical events in the system • “the non-hierarchical structure of the network encourages multiplicity of viewpoints, and allows separate parts in the system to function in a variety of musical modes” Bischoff • “The musical system can be thought of as multiple stations, each playing it's own sub-composition, which receive and generate information relevant to the real-time improvisation. No one station has an overall score.” Jim Horton • “The players can be viewed as extensions of the network” Bischoff

6. The Hub as a System • “The HUB is an example of musicians working in an open social system, using computer network as a meeting ground. Performing long-distance, they are a band of interactive computer music systems.” (Eds. PaperRenga) • “We are really trying to let the systematic nature of the electronic systems we are working with suggest what's going to happen musically” Tim Perkins • “We're the spokes and The HUB is the centre” Scot Gresham-Lancaster • “It stops you trying to emote” Thom Yorke

7. Crutch vs Tool Dave Grolsh: Crutch vs Tool

9. Conclusion The concepts of musical performance and technical performance are in collision as humans find new ways of making robots and systems perform uniquely and musical proficiency of humans becomes less important for the realisation of music. Robots improvising? • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISVhPJcctw8