Digitial Creativity/Electronic Music Lecture

Hello and welcome to another day at the keyboard,

Today was a little different to the previous lectures as it is usually taken by someone else apparently, so we had a bit of a mixture of topics today.

We started off by watching a quick AMV (Anime Music Video)that are created by fans of the anime series that take music and create things called mashups where they take certain scenes in the anime video and match the lips of the characters to the lyrics in the music. The discussion then turned to the legality of such clips with regard to the copywrite owners of both the video and music. Basically it came down to the fact that unless the content provider particularly doesn't want their material to be used in such a way, they allow fans to continue to make these types of clips, of course also as long as they do not profit from the work.

The lecture then moved on to look at the question of what makes electronic music, electronic? Is it the process of creating it in a digital medium? Is is when the music is created using electronic instruments? Or is it perhaps the media used to transfer the music that makes it electronic?

We had a discussion on the legal ownership of media and it's copywrite, with the codifying into law the Mickey Mouse Copywrite Extension Act, this is as a result of Disney taking the law to court to allow them to extend the copyright for at least 75 years. This brought up a quick discussion on public domain music, upon which we were referred to the Project Guttenberg.

The lecture then showed a video called 'Modulation', which was about the development of the various types of electronic music. The video did provide me with a couple of interesting quotes which I found interesting. The item was that one of the DJs was combining the mediums of music and video and setting up video so that an image is matched to a particular note. So that you get a truly multimedia experience.

Another rather interesting artist in the Modulation video was the French man 'Musique Concrete' which he was playing music from his imagination not from an external source. From listening to his music, I'd have to say that he has the distinct sound of Jazz, using modern equipment, but still the very distinct structure on unstructured music.

We then moved onto the interaction of the modern drug culture and popular music and the significant effects on the way music is made and listened to, with Jungle music having been described as being due to the dark-side of the ecstasy culture.

This brings us back to the instant gratification generation, who are very self focused on their experiences in the now and the detriment of future gains.

As a closing note I found it interesting to compare the electronic music to the Disco craze of the 70's where DJ's were having to mix songs for people to dance to all night long.