Dante Tanzi’s research while affiliated with University of Milan and other places

This paper deals with the experience of time discontinuity that derives from digital practices and discusses observations by composers and inter-medial artists. Within this frame, the paper hypothesises that the digital processing of both musical time and inter-medial events lead to a subsequent loss in emotional sensitivity. Some communication theorists have explained how digital technology affects the sense of time. While digital culture reshaped the experience of time distancing it from the heritage of linear narratives, time itself has become digital. Digital time is an objective entity, a material with modifiable features, used for building and shaping musical structures. Through digital time one can modify the re-presentation of musical and inter-medial events. Since overlapping, re-scaling, splicing and reversing time affect musical consistency, they influence the elaboration of the symbolic functions that music psychologists consider important. Within the inter-medial environment, time processing may cause perceptual imbalance: and when perception requires to be frequently re-modulated the detachment provoked by time discontinuity affects the emotional sphere.

The description of the quality of musical spaces belonging to the cyberpace should take into account three different aspects: the modes of fruition of a sound object in virtual spaces; its reception in the frame of online communication; and the mutations that could eventually affect the dynamics of perception. The complex relationships between the three different aspects suggest that, in cyberspace, the activities of production and listening to music take place in forms that differ partially from the ones with which we are familiar. Whether one wants to consider listening as an individual task or as a relational path, what needs to be verified is, in fact, the extent to which the contours of recognition of sonorous objects can be related to the spatial, environmental and emotional variables of cyber-universes. As well as being modified, the musical and audio contents can be repeatedly re-contextualised, and listeners become aware of more contexts (the original one and others derived from it) during their navigation. What should be considered is, then, that musical meanings can be generated through trans-contextual readings, and from interference between ordinary and virtual spaces. Apart from the linguistic nature of cyberspace, this requires deep investigation into the meaning of the so-called ‘extended’ nature of cyberspace.

The processes involved in the digitalisation of audio-visual knowledge call for a change of perspective. This derives from diverse factors: the adaptation of perceptual abilities required for using digital devices, the change in social and cognitive profiles involved in computer-human relations, and the operational dimension of time. While networked technologies introduces a system of proximity independent of distances in physical space, an overlapping of communication channels in on-line environments is accompanied by some uncertainty and non-linearity. Consequently, within the intermedial, interactive spaces of the net, the musical objects can be processed through ways which destabilise their original connotation. As for musical navigators, between retracing contents, extracting connections and meanings, and modifying musical features, they enjoy a sort of hidden co-authorship. This paper describes how on-line technologies are gradually modifying the relationships between the authors, music and audiences, and inquires whether the production of musical meaning can remain unchanged in a distributed environment.

The majority of composers and scholars in the field of electroacoustic and computer music address their attention to the problem of achieving satisfactory relationships between new technological instrumentalities and the very sense of music making. Reflections concerning the relationships between the use of digital technologies and musical expression have assumed an increasingly important role, since they provide interpretative codes of composers' works and assume an explanatory function during the presentation of new musical pieces. Focusing on the interaction between cognitive environments, emotive dimensions and communicative set-up, this paper intends to propose an analysis of some theoretical statements, which regard the relationships between scientific innovations and the evolutionary tendencies of technologically based music.

This paper discusses temporal narratives and musical action, focusing on the decentralization trends in models, means, objects, knowledge and objectives of artistic creation on the Net. In a widespread cognitive environment, diachronic and spatial communication values have to be adapted. The development of linguistic flows, codified according to digital models, leads net users to interact in a different way. In a decentralized environment, many conditions for composing and listening to music may be subordinated to the conception of creative thought as a combination of recursive, connective, and systemic processes, which redefine not only the concept of musical object and sound space, but also that of music itself.

Focus area: music, technology and innovation Keywords: musical meaning, context transfer, cognitive artefacts, musical information. This paper will deal with the changes that have come about in the description of musical knowledge and with the ensuing needs in this field in the era of decentralisation. Throughout almost all the XX Century, musical practices continued to be expressed by a system of cultural mediations that proved to be a practical impediment to the emergence of non-conventional cultures. Electronic music in particular and its corrosive tendencies, though spread and supported by remarkable composers, has ended up being devoured by academic immune systems. Now that the diffusion of net computing has induced people to intervene in musical material, a poetics based on interference is spreading. By gaining ground on grammatical and self-referenced poetics, this trend has gradually become a palpable fact and music perceives itself as both individual writing and a production of social meaning. At present a globe-net-transfer of sound material passes through different contexts and spaces, and seems to be adapting itself to different social speeds. Through the net we can, on the one hand, replace, manipulate and re-contextualize musical parameters until a different significance emerges; at the same time randomising and hybridising musical objects can partially change our perception of the same musical events. On the other hand, music on-line databases, audio-browsers and musical queries may open the way to overthrowing, re-organising and personalising music description. This could occur at different levels and to different degrees of complexity, both as a social event and as an active, user-based combination of musical structures.

The role of science in the processes of musical creation is justifiable as a method of formalizing knowledge used for expressive purposes. The understanding of musical phenomena, however, should not be reduced to cognitive aspects or entrusted to a purely descriptive iteration; certain creative functions of musical composition go beyond the many degrees of control offered by the technologies of knowledge. The necessity of comparison with the cultural orientation of an audience, sometimes considered secondary by some, must remain integral. Our interest in qualitatively new creative and intellectual acts must not abandon the dialectical character of musical communication, which involves, among other things, a shared linguistic universe.

This paper deals with the production, representation and mutation of musical objects within digital media spaces. The influence of computer science on artistic practices and the modes of production of digital objects are treated. Besides, the ideas of Pierre Schaeffer, Giorgy Ligeti, Iannis Xenakis and Gerard Grisey relating to a frame of extra-musical reference are briefly mentioned, since each author, in the construction of the musical object, revealed a different approach. The decoding of structures from one sensorial channel to another is the next issue, devoted to Moles' research on multiple messages, functional analogies and the creation of artificial channels. An overview of how artistic-technological experimentation over the last twenty years has dealt with the conversion of digital objects within multimedial, interactive events follows. To conclude, there is a comment on the views of composers and digital communication scholars regarding the "objective status" of digital objects within the