Alan Blackwell and Nick Collins. The Programming Language as a Musical Instrument. In P. Romero, J. Good, E. Acosta Chaparro & S. Bryant (Eds). Proc. PPIG 17, pp. 120-130.
Any musician who wants to be competent with digital production tools has to take on qualities of a programmer. Music notation is itself a “programming language” for human musicians, complete with loops and subroutines. Electronic music collapses composition, performance and recording into the same act.
How do you differentiate a “live” electronic performance from playing back canned sequences? One way to make the presentation into an actual performance is to include improvisation, or at least the possibility of it. Morton Subotnick is a good example. He considers his compositions to consist of his synthesizer patches and sequences. His performances, on the other hand, are mostly improvisational, deploying his preset elements as he sees fit in the moment. This is similar to the methods of jazz musicians, spontaneously recombining and hybridizing pre-learned riffs and patterns.
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