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More to the point, using Csound, Music5, Cmix, M, Performer, Ovaltune, Vision, Texture, CMU Toolkit, is, to varying extents, adopting the musical vision of the designer. While the same thing might be said about playing the piano it must be remembered that the piano evolved over a period of time and had a large literature associated with it. In the past, instrument design necessarily involved generalizations. Instruments which were not sufficiently general didn't survive. The cost was too high. But now, some of these new "instruments" may have a history no longer than the builder's most recent project. On one end of this spectrum there are systems whose self-proclaimed aim is to be musically neutral. This is an absurd concept. Anyone who has worked in computer music knows immediately that the context in which you make your music largely determines the music you make. Nevertheless there is a spectrum of influence. At the other end of the spectrum there are systems whose influence is overwhelming, despite their frequent claims to the contrary. Perhaps these are rooms designed for someone else's comfort, but playing in them gives you insights into the views of the designer, and consequently expands your own frame of reference, and after all, isn't this what music is all about? Musical systems now become ways to listen, perform and compose through the mind of another. Or perhaps of many others. In ways an instrument builder becomes a subclass of composer. In other ways composer become a subclass of instrument builder. Whatever the formalization, however, it is clear that the number of ways in which the nodes are now capable of interacting has increased greatly.
Both sound giving and instrument building are essentially independent of social institutions. What is interesting is that it is now possible to incorporate the design of a social context in these activities. Musical survival now depends more on the appropriateness of this design to the music rather than the extent to which the music successfully occupies traditional venues. Consider sound installations, listening galleries, interactive systems, recording, intelligent software, for example. It is often pointed out that in a family with two parents and only one child, there are basically just three modes of social relations, while in a family with two children there are six. Similarly, in a network with only three nodes there are fewer lines of communication than in one with five. If we can begin to expand our musical-social consciousness to admit a larger variety of nodes, then we and the music we make and hear can only become richer in the process. The additional nodes I have added to the network are made possible only by technology. The elegance of this reconstruction is in the capability technology creates to recast and recolor the sending and receiving abilities of any of the nodes on the network. From this perspective the social implications of the classical model become much more cleanly aligned with the nature of the music it was designed to accommodate, and in our expanded social network the unique facilities offered by the technological agenda of computer music find a much more congenial home.
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