Abstract

Computer Music is over fifty years old and a meditation over the relationship between music and technology is useful, possibly extending it to the social and cultural context in which this discipline was born. The planetary political system where computer music was born was characterized by a strong antagonism between two ideological blocks in which culture had a tremendous impact in western countries to demonstrate the advantages and the richness of democratic, progressive and innovative societies. The end of this antagonism has generated a steep decrease of interest in cultural investments by the owestern countries, and computer music has evolved in the present sound and music computing: a much wider interdisciplinary field which encompasses many areas where the combination of sound, music and information technologies still produces brilliant results. This paper will also develop some of the current issues at stake in the sound and music computing area: 1) the rise of the commercial Internet has revolutionized the concept of «intellectual property», enhancing the concept of authorship in contrast to the droit d'auteur and promoting a liberated distribution of knowledge; 2) the virtualization of containers will reestablish a value of contents; 3) Libre Software has had a completely unexpected development, providing many applications to music too; 4) P2P technologies which facilitate the copy of contents over networks will provide the most powerful antidote against the loss of memory, thus helping out the recovery and diffusion of musical works which would be confined into oblivion otherwise.