The Phenomenon of Digitalizing Music as a Factor of New Sociocultural Transformations

Abstract

The article examines the issue of interaction between classical and contemporary music
created on the basis of innovational technology, including those using digital technologies.
Analysis is made of their impact on all the stages of the musical industry, beginning with the
creation of musical compositions of various genres, their performance and ending with fixating
the result on information holders. The authors draw our attention to the historical landmarks
of incorporating the forward technologies into the art of music. The work raises issues of
culturological consequences of this implementation into the musical world, and in addition
certain aspects connected with the scientific and technological progress in music are touched
upon. The authors come to the conclusion that overall, regardless of the absence in the musical
community of the paradigm of perceiving electronic innovations, the process of “digitalizing”
music (at least in a certain part of its creation, replication or perception) is quite relevant to the
contemporary trends of development of culture in general and music culture in particular. For
this reason, when mentioning on some of the negative aspects of digital impact of technologies
on music, the authors come to the conclusion about the consistent pattern of the indicated
process which continues the tendency of perfection of classical musical instruments and the
acoustic of concert halls, only on an essentially new level corresponding to the present-day state
of scientific knowledge.

Keywords: musical composition, phonograph, synthesizer, vocoder, computer technologies,
sample, sampling, mixture.