In Understanding Media (1964), McLuhan posits the idea that any given medium functions as kind of prosthetic which ‘extends’ the individual, acting as a bridge between the him/her and the particular activity it is being used for. Like much of the current theoretical writing on music technology, Brown’s theories incorporate the ideas of Canadian communications theorist Marshall McLuhan. It is the second of these perspectives – “the computer as musical medium” – that was of particular interest to this investigation. Ultimately this raises pertinent questions regarding the nature of composition teaching in the digital age and highlights the challenges that digital technologies are presenting to received ideas in this area.įrom a theoretical perspective, the project is a response to the issues raised in recent books by Andrew Brown ( Computers in Music Education (2007)) and Andrew Hugill ( The Digital Musician (2008)) and also slightly older texts that have provided the foundations for philosophical discussions of music technology – such as Paul Theberge’s Any Sound You can Imagine (1997) and Timothy Taylor’s Strange Sounds (2001).īrown’s book offers a useful model for understanding the effect of the computer upon musical thought, or, as he puts it, the “metaphorical perspectives that inform the use of the computer for music-making”, namely “the computer as a musical tool, the computer as musical medium and the computer as a musical instrument” (2007, p. My central aim was to gain insight into the extent to which the students themselves understood the nature of the medium they were employing and the impact it has upon their approach to writing music. However, I also include in this category score-writing programmes such as Sibelius and Finale which are moving closer to the standard DAW packages in their incorporation of elementary audio mixing and processing capabilities. To clarify: in using the acronym DAW I refer to the gamut of music production software packages which incorporate MIDI and audio editing features – namely Cubase, Logic Pro, Sonar, Live, Pro-Tools and Propellerheads’ Reason and Record. The students were selected for the project because of their interest in utilizing computer technology as a central part of their compositional process and hailed from a variety of musical backgrounds, enabling me to consider the effects of the medium in relation to a range of musical attitudes. My comments are based on findings obtained from a study of the working processes of six students that I supervised directly in a one-to-one tutorial situation between September 2008 and May 2010 at Leeds College of Music (Marrington, 2010). This paper offers observations on the effect that the DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) is having upon musical creativity in the context of the Higher Education environment.
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