Under the title “Letting loose, embracing the loss”, I will talk about implications of audio deterioration at the Ars Electronica symposium “… under control of music, music under control of …; composing (in) digital worlds”, part of the Sonic Saturday at Anton-Bruckner Private University, Linz.

Most of today’s media output, also music, is produced and stored in the digital domain. Although digital data are adorned by the myth of lossless transmission and migration, everyday experience does prove the existence of degradation and, ultimately, data loss in various forms. This pertains to the physical nature of storage media and playback devices as well as to media formats and software in the context of their technological infrastructure.
Usually, this loss of control over the musical material is counteracted in the personal or societal domain using various kinds of archival strategies.
In the running project of artistic research “rotting sounds”, however, we rely on the hypothesis that by gaining pertinent knowledge and developing adequate means to work with digital degradation in a constructive fashion, its inevitability can be turned from being a source of irritation into a potential for aesthetic choice.

September 8, 2018, 4pm-7pm
Anton Bruckner Private University
Studiobühne
Hagenstraße 57, 4040 Linz, Austria