fall down go boom?
i have lived my second life for long enough to know i don't want to live that way any longer. 
. so now i'm at the drawing board again. normally, i would go ahead with the project despite losing interest, but i'm determined to be jazzed by the projects i have to (get to?) work on. so...i'm thinking about a number of things. a lot of them revolving around music and whether or not music is considered (can be considered?) new media.
in terms of always already new, maybe music is...always already new, i mean. or maybe it's a constant remediation of the 8 note scale through various media. or are instruments media? you play a song on an instrument. if the song is the text, then the instrument is the medium? is a piano a remediation of a harpsichord? and does that, in turn, make the piano "new media" in some way or shape? Or do we think about a song as remediated when it's played with different media? Think greensleeves, for example, which is also the tune for What Child is This?--is this remediation? Do we even consider instruments media at all?
In some ways this is really confusing. Songs can be written for SSA choirs, SATB choirs, and TTBB choirs, for example. Same song, different "medium..." Or is it? The instrument is still the body, music performed through singing. What if I reorchestrate a song? Turn, for example, a vocal piece into a piece for solo harp or something...
And this doesn't even get to digital music or computer-generated music. Maybe music is considered new media when its distribution and/or production involves some kind of digitization? I'm not sure how the various theorists we've read would approach this question....Does anyone have any thoughts on this?
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Put away the ? key before you hurt yourself!
You must be in grad school....sooo many questions.....ha.
But I have lots more to use as answers to yours.
How do you define media? Would you consider the keyboard of your computer media? If so, then the instrument could be considered media, also. What would it mean for you or for music to consider an instrument as media? If you re-wrote a piece for harpsichord to be played on the oboe, that'd be a type of remediation, I'd say. When Bobby McFerrin conducts an orchestra and "sings" the part of a violin or percussion, that might be remediation, too...but I don't want to get into that topic just yet. And yes, Bobby McFerrin is that Don't Worry Be Happy guy. But he's a brilliant musician who tours with Yo-Yo Ma and others as well as performs as a guest conductor of orchestras.
Of course music can be included in new media. We in Rhet/Comp leave it out all the time coz we're obsessed with visual rhetoric. I think we've forgotten that there are other senses. As a joke, I once suggested I'd write a paper on t.v. dinners and the rhetoric of taste. Maybe it's not too late to change my dissertation topic. Sam?.....anyway....
Though I will mention that some folk who teach 106 (and other English classes) have done projects with their classes that are rooted in music. Life soundtrack, re-score a film with different music, etc.
Music has been sampled, re-mixed, covered, re-orchestrated, burned, re-burned, ripped, downloaded, uploaded...blah, blah, blah. What's the "real" music? The first time it was played live (as music is a time-based medium)? The written score? The master tapes? The "free" copy from Bit Torrent? Surely the new(er) technologies that bring music into our immediate context (like the stuff I'm streaming right now) has made not only the production of the medium invisible (I don't think about recording artists) but the way I listen to it make the recording of it invisible, too. I don't even have to put in a cd, flip the tape, line up the needle, or FF through my 8-track anymore. Maybe you could explore something related to defining music and new media?
Depending on who's definition of new media you're using you can address music as n.m. in a multitude of ways. I tend to be narrow (or Wysocki might think so) and drop n.m. square in the digital/computer type stuff. But that's me. And for the computer there's lots of music-making software you can get for free (google it). Mac has (for money) Garage Band...which I love, btw. That's how I get to pretend I'm a DJ. I'm sure Microsoft must have something, too, but I don't know. Perhaps you could fool around with some applications or whatever to see what you come up with.
That's my 2 cents.
I'm with the DJ. Think
I'm with the DJ. Think Wizard of Oz and Pink Floyd, the Gray Album, end user mixing (ala DJ Ludic), think sound in video games, there is much to be said about sound and NM.
There's a book called "From
There's a book called "From Dylan to Donne: Bridging English and Music" by Brock Dethier (2003) you could look at. It isn't new media focused but it might give you some ideas. And you could pillage the references....
love the
love the answer-it-with-an-answer tactic
right-- i'm confident about /certain/ music being new media. but as i've been thinking through this, i feel like i need to narrow down terms. figure out what it means to talk about music as a new media. i suppose i'm interested in looking back for a minute--to see how we might consider older, non-digital versions of music new media. i'm having a hard time considering digitized, sampled music before sorting out the intricacies of nonrecorded music. this may, of course, be because i've studied music and can't seem to divorce myself from more "traditional" forms. in other words, i don't see digitized much different from nondigitized in that every piece of music is a remix of the available notes.
i'm also interested in the way all (western) music is an execution of some kind of numerical system...hmmm. i'm not sure what kind of project can come out of this thinking, but i find it interesting...