Hypermusic

Tod Machover’s article Shaping Minds Musically is an interesting read, summarising much of the work on hyperinstruments that have happened at the MIT Media Lab during the last ten years. The main point he is trying to make, is that music should be active rather than passive. This comes from the observation that most people’s involvement with music is from a reception side rather than from production. There is more music than ever in the air, but fewer of us actually play music, sing music, or create our own music. Music rests in the periphery, like background wallpaper, tickling our senses but not engaging our intelligence. ...

A few days ago I wrote about Nelson’s ideas on hypermedia, and I was anxious to see how these ideas have been absorbed in the musical world, and how people have been thinking about hypermusic. Surprisingly, I found very little written on the topic, and what I did find does not seem to relate very much to Nelson’s ideas of hypermedia. As mentioned previously, one paper I did find was by composer John Maxwell Hobbs and his descriptions of Web Phases a composition for the Internet. He writes ...

The ideas of nonlinear thinking and writing has developed quickly with the growth of the Internet, but dates back much longer. An encyclopedia or dictionary can for example be considered an example of nonlinear writing, with links and internal references. However, it is quite common to acknowledge the “Garden of forking paths” by Jorge Louis Borges (1941) as the start of modern nonlinear thinking and writing. In this short story he develops a notion of forking time encountering various diverging paths, which again lead to a number of potential futures: ...