Notated Music in the Digital Sphere

instrument, new types of representation in addition to traditional notation became useful – piano rolls, sonograms, spectrograms, computer code as text, and graphic representations of computer code in Max, PD and KYMA, to name a few high-level programming environments.

What were once contemporary practices has now been converted into digital heritage, and the rapid march of technological development makes preservation crucial. Using the above example of Kolberg’s pioneering work, The Emperor’s New Tie, the piece has already become difficult to read and impossible to realise – the synthesiser that made the sound has been dismantled, and a computer interpreter for the code does not exist. Fifty years from now, if not sooner, the same will most probably apply to today’s practices if adequate preservation measures are not taken.

Interactive and collaborative practices The development of technology-based music did not stop with what is now described as “old-school” works that are typically performed from stable media such as magnetic tape, CDs, DVDs or hard disks. The old dream of interacting musically with the computer in real time came steadily closer to realisation during the 1990s, shaped as mixed music and improvised performances where musical sounds were generated on the fly. With the opening of the Internet for non-academic use, the Internet rapidly also became an arena for artistic exploration, and webbased music and art became new genres; their essence being generative and dependent on input from visitors via browsers. (The desire to interact musically across distance has had clear historical precursors in Norway, too, and a work such as Arne Nordheim’s Forbindelser (1975) should be mentioned. Musicians in several cities performed different parts of a musical work, and these musical “streams” were brought together in a TV programme celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK).

The first musical collaboration on the Internet with participation from Norway was Res Rocket Surfer, an internet band of several hundred musicians across the world. The musicians sent and received 121