frey

i just dug this up out of an old hard drive – it’s for a project for school, back when i was studying eloctroacoustic composition at Victoria University.

MP3

sociocultural meanings

What it does
————

Compresses digital audio signals, allowing them to be transmitted across computer networks with significantly reduced size and thus cost and technological requirements.

Lossy compression format: discards audio information considered ‘unnecessary’ to the faithful reproduction of the sound. Uses a combination of filtering systems and transforms to turn a time-domain signal (PCM waveform) into a frequency-domain signal.

How it is used
————–

digital broadcast

share files

How its function and use translates into sociocultural meaning and potential use in sound art
——————————

Reduced transmission cost radically lowers barriers to entry
- For free, anyone can share anything with anyone from anywhere on the world.
-> crude
-> defenders
-> anne westphalen?
-> sami abu shumays

Collaboration with people around the world
-> exquisite corpse

Complete shift in the relationship between distributors, publishers, and creators. Why go on to iTunes and download music for $1.99 when you can access piles of high-quality music for free?
-> westphalen
-> speakeasy

Access to vast archives
-> wax cylinders
-> intro inspection

Industry fear of this ->
Copyright strengthening, embedding of DRM into technology to support a dying industry
–> lessig
-> christina
-> intro inspection

in popular music, shift to single, unfocussed listening, loss of fan loyalty: complete commodification, further extension of capitalism into music on one hand;
on the other hand, massive democratisation: myspace

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 12th, 2008 at 12:18 am and is filed under ideas, music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.