This research project is an unusual example of a social study in the arts. It is based on a sociological survey conducted by the author. Forty-five composers from 13 countries in America, Asia, Australia and Europe, including both coasts of the U.S., were interviewed in the course of the project. The chosen respondents had been active in the field before and after introduction of MIDI regardless of their degree of involvement with the MIDI-based tools. The results of the study accurately reflect the attitudes and experiences of the sampled group of composers. The methods used for conducting the study make it very likely to encounter the same trends existing in the entire possible population.
The study was published as the author's doctoral dissertation at CCRMA, Stanford University. It is available in print from CCRMA. Readers interested in evolution of our field over the last two decades are encouraged to acquaint themselves with the full text of work as it presents a legacy of electroacoustic art music in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s: its methodologies, tools, and practices. Each conclusion of the study arrives supported by a wealth of quotes from the interviews as well as statistic data calculated upon the survey completion.
The interaction between art and technology comes to a particularly intense point in the studied case. A new generation of tools led to the extinction of previous media for electroacoustic composition and produced wide-ranging reactions from its users and numerous effects on methodology and artistic results. The survey's results expose complex matrix of reception to the new phenomenon and also presented a diverse panorama of existing compositional methodologies and practices.
The composers' reception of MIDI tools was always a compromise between demands of the individual style and advantages and limitations of the MIDI equipment. Advantages of the protocol (its real-time communication, compatibility between the tools, control capabilities and precision) contrasted its limitations (event-oriented paradigm, low data transfer rate, fixed scales of values and one-way communication limited in the number of channels). The features of the protocol were implemented into the design of the MIDI instruments and combined with other technologies, not directly related to MIDI. Often the same feature could be both limiting to one composer and beneficial to another. In some cases the limitations of MIDI equipment and satisfaction of working with non-MIDI environments has led to the total exclusion of MIDI from the compositional setup. Control over the development of continuous processes, a staple in pre-MIDI electroacoustic music, is particularly problematic with MIDI. The technological tradeoff made for the sake of enhanced user-friendliness and affordability in the larger commercial market limited synthesis capabilities and access and therefore disappointed some composers. However, one can see the emergence of new methods, new practices and new performance solutions that were not present in the pre-MIDI era.
The relative democratization of electroacoustic music is clearly one of the positive effects of MIDI revolution. The affordability of the new set of tools led to the appearance of home computer/electroacoustic music studios. MIDI also had a positive effect on concert practice. Also, MIDI marked the beginning of active commercialization of the field.
About a half of the surveyed composers had practiced some kind of live (non-tape) music before MIDI. MIDI gave a boost to this genre, providing reliable, portable, storable devices and connections and raising the number of composers involved into live interactive music. Meanwhile, tape pieces have continued to be the principal performance genre among the art composers just as software synthesis continued to be the major source of timbres after the introduction of MIDI. The evaluation of these preset synthesized sounds in MIDI instruments is unfavorable. In particular, the opinion on the quality of acoustic simulation in such sounds is utterly negative.
As the study has shown, the influence of MIDI is multifaceted. The conflict between the origins of MIDI and the pre-existing compositional practice has not been entirely solved. Instead, the results of this investigation show the incorporation of the new tools into the existing tradition, compromise in some elements of interaction, rejection of others and development of new practices.
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