An early autumn festival/conference of music and technology at De Montfort University, Leicester. Hosted by the MTI2 — Institute for Sonic Creativity.
21st century musical creativity rides on the convergence of many streams of musical cultures, styles and value systems. The previous century’s passage through modernist and postmodern imperatives, mixes and meetings of cultures has propelled us into a state of glorious collision, where tradition and innovation coexist in fusion and confusion. New technologies are a central element in this creative ferment - from immersive multichannel and audiovisual environments, expressions of artificial intelligence and transmedia storytelling to human-machine interaction and hardware hacking.
How might we make sense of this multiplicity of creative endeavours? What are the tensions and synergies we feel amongst the creative approaches of practitioners and between the insights of theorists and critics? What, if anything, might we sense is our relationship with the ideals and cultural products of the past? How does the collective imagination of artists, engineers and listeners collaboratively shape the way we form our future?
We also want to address the following questions:
- In what ways has creativity been influenced by the distinctive possibilities of new technologies?
- How do we recognise what is new in our field and what makes it new?
- How might we trace the roots of electroacoustic music’s practices and theories and how might they compare across different cultures?
- Do we still have, or need, a theoretical canon in music—and did we really ever have one?
- How might notions of modern and postmodern be reflected in the sonic arts?
- Does the technology of music build bridges across musical and other artistic cultures, or has it made a wall around itself?
- What new conceptual tools do we have or need for understanding relationships between digital sound and image?
- How do we improvise with music technologies?
- Do we have, or need, new ways to write about digitally mediated music to express our relationship with it?
- Across cultures and diverse creative agendas, how do creative people find each other and form effective communities?
- How might audiences connect what they hear in electronic/electroacoustic/computer generated music with more familiar languages within popular music, folk music, classical forms, or jazz?
Do we have, or need, a map for these many new directions, or are we making it up?
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