Aspects of the ontology of the musical work in the digital age.

What is it about?

The article discusses the conditions underpinning the creation of musical artifacts in the digital technology era. Through a discussion of, inter alia, Heidegger's understanding of technology, it especially seeks an insight into the changes that the absence of proper texture, a consequence of digital technology’s category and format, causes. In the attempt to define these conditions, it incorporates considerations of the impact on the understanding of the musical artefact and its manifestation as a sounding phenomenon of some of the technological formats that historically precede the digital environment.

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Why is it important?

With digitization is it no longer meaningful to talk of causality in the Aristotelian sense; the causality is a planned and fixed shaped illusion. The digital builds a self-contained, substance-less reality that acts in the world as a parallel universe causing fundamental changes to the materiality of the musical work.