Lost in Place

 

P.S. re: the passing of R. Murray Schafer 8/2021, and his invention of the term schizophonia: "We have split the sound from the maker of the sound. Sounds have been torn from their natural sockets and given an amplified and independent existence. Vocal sound, for instance, is no longer tied to a hole in the head but is free to issue from anywhere in the landscape." There is also schismogenesis, the recombination and recontextualization of sounds split from their sources, which is what one of objectives are for Music For Places.

See also The Figure-Ground of Sound

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Computers have obviously informed music, but it is doubtful that computer or social networking has had a significant impact on creativity at the compositional or performance levels, unlike electronic musical instruments that weren't (necessarily) tethered to social media. Musicians can share sound files back and forth in the creative process, but ever since the advent of music social networking, nothing of real substance has come out of it. It hasn't made people more social or collaborative, at least by the metric of pre-internet songwriting.

There are reasons for this: our brains are naturally wired for physical spaces. Our experience of the world is spatiotemporal; there are "place" cells mapped in the hippocampus, that are associated with memory. (I know this is true because listening to music or other sound while moving, encodes the memory of the place when played again. Audio books will do this, whereas paper books, even though they invoke place in the imagination, don't get replayed in the brain when read again.) Virtual environments are like books read while traveling; it doesn't imprint your memory of the place where you were reading it. If stationary, a virtual experience probably will not invoke place memory. It will be interesting to see the effects of VR and VR audio on "brain places".