EMS: Electroacoustic Music Studies Network – Montréal 2005 Musical objects and digital domains

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 cyberspace