![]() ![]() Focusing on the conceptual rather than methodological dimension of interdisciplinarity, the present article looks into the selected writings of pioneers in the psychology of music including Hugo Riemann, Johann Friedrich Herbart, Wilhelm Wundt, and Gustav Fechner. What might be more significant, however, than this shared aspiration is the change in the conception of the human mind itself: The question to be addressed is how the human psyche, the agency of musical listening, was conceptualized with the advent of new perspectives in mind science. ![]() Studies of both the mind and music had been recently institutionalized as independent academic disciplines, both aspiring to be scientific. The mutual relationship between German psychology and music theory in the late 19th century has been generally understood within the context of the positivist movement of this same time period. Departing from this, this article explores artistic and cultural manifestations from the 1960s and onward in the light of the signal in order to analytically grasp the changes or supplements to the sign that in a contemporary culture is bringing new forms of events and affects to the fore. It is thus a key point that technological implications could never be causal to aesthetic variations and cultural modes. ![]() In this article, as well as in the following articles, the term signal is above all applied in its broader sense to explore possible signaletic modes and characteristics in contemporary art and new media culture. The electronic signal is a technological fact dating back to the telegraph that in a substantial way set the agenda for contemporary (popular) culture (electronic music, youth, and performance culture) and further facilitated the digital code and the Internet. As the term "sign" was formerly developed from linguistics, the term signal was developed from Norbert Wiener's writings on mathematics and cybernetics. This introductory article to the following "cluster of articles" proposes to apply the term "signal" as a theoretical and analytical category for a new approach to the bearings of electronic and new media in particular. Through a series of examples implicating both soft and hard dimensions of what constitutes computers, we provide a preliminary survey of practices calling for the need to rethink the conceptual divide between analog and digital forms of creativity and aesthetics. Specifically, we argue that computers, regardless of their technical specifications, are not only ‘black boxes’ or ‘meta-tools’ that serve to control music software, but are also material objects that are increasingly being used in a wide range of musical and sound art practices according to an ‘analog’ rather than ‘digital’ logic. In this article, we contend that given the ubiquitous presence of computer units within contemporary musical practices, it is not simply music software that needs to be reframed as musical instruments, but rather the diverse material strata of machines identified as computers that need to be thought of as instruments within music environments. Recent scholarship has offered particularly useful re-evaluations of computer music software in relation to musical instrumentality. The process of creating computer-based music is increasingly being conceived in terms of complex chains of mediations involving composer/performer and computer software interactions that prompt us to reconsider notions of materiality within the context of digital cultures. ![]()
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