I love music. I wanted to be a musician. I started my professional life as a musician. I played drums. I went to college on a scholarship to study music. But the Hippy years, and Viet Nam years got in the way, and I wound up doing the public service sector. But I still loooooove music.
In recent years, I have watched the net to see how it would embrace music. And though there are many examples of copying music, making videos, and some indie efforts to actually franchise music via the net, there has been little to make music the collaborative element it rightfully needs to be. Bandwidth and lagtime have prevented group creativity in music. I beleive it will yet occur, but we have to find a more equitable e footprint on the bandwidth stage, and find a better way of moving music P2P. But....
If you look closely, there are some things afoot that point in a direction that might allow music and it's creation, to become a part of this smoldering mass of multiliteracy. For a long time, instrumentation appeared to be part of the problem. Oh, I could digitize a piece via MIDI format, but it wouldn't sound exactly like real instruments. Perhaps real instrument sounds are morphing too. Sounds that didn't lend themselves to music for various reasons are now digitized and available.
To compound things, as bandwidth gets greater and greater, sound emanating from various remote points gets closer and closer too synchronization. We are still only dabbling with bit rates and band width, but we are moving in the right dimension.
Finally, all this leads me to the lesson of this post. No matter what field of study you espouse, technology and the internet are going to profoundly affect the way you do your work. If you do not become "literate" in these new technologies, then those who look to you for guidance may be cut short. I am not sure you have to know how to "do it all", but you at least have to know enough about it to identify some of the terminology and how to assist others to search the net to seek out those programs relevant to their varied projects. And as with many other arts, simply knowing one specialty will not be enough. Everything has the potential to "mashup". Certainly, audio is complementary to video...and as technology come more of age, there are likely other combinations that we do not yet know.
So many things to know. So many things to study. I think I will put on some music and contemplate this for a while.
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