EFFECTS AND PROSPECTS OF MUSIC DIGITALIZATION: A PHILOSOPHER’S VIEW
Authors:   South Ural State University (national research university), Chelyabinsk, Russia, Kwiatkowski G. Y. , Prilukova E. G. ,   South Ural State University (national research university), Chelyabinsk, Russia, Rakovsky D. V. ,   Nosov Magnitogorsk State Technical University, Magnitogorsk, Russia
Published: November 2022

Today, digitalization is increasingly becoming an object of scientific study and viewed as a kind of challenge to the modern world. This challenge is not so much about new technologies and forms of storing and representing of information, but rather about changes and transformations in consciousness. “Digitalization” has rapidly entered into all spheres of society and has become a specific socio-cultural network context of human development. Reality subjected to simulation places a person in various multi-valued worlds. With the spread of digital technologies, art is changing and many new forms of its creation, replication and perception are appearing. Art is acquiring a “machine” character and the same can refer to music. Art became the object of digitalization in the 1960s. Initially, the role of digital sound was reduced to improving the quality of sound material and expanding the capabilities of the performer, but later composers and listeners found that it was a new opportunity for them to collaborate interactively, create their own music streams, use services that create generative music, etc. At the same time, the influence of digitalization became the subject of discussion in the field of social sciences and humanities. In this connection, the priority topics for discussion were music piracy, creation and application of new technologies for composing and performing music, opportunities for manifestation of subcultures’ interests provided by new technologies, etc. The authors analyze changes in music under the influence of digitalization processes, focusing on its formal and meaningful changes. The research problem is caused by incompleteness of knowledge about the social effects of music digitalization. The aim of the study is to describe the formal and meaningful changes in music that arise as a result of the digital revolution. The methodological basis of the research was the provisions of B. Latour’s actor-network theory, existential analysis of music and reflections on the musical experience of modern music performers. The approach of the Frankfurt school widely used in research of the music industry seems heuristically weak due to the political engagement of its founders and changes in the nature of political confrontations reflected in music. The main issue of the study is connected with the changes of human interactions, built on the basis of musical material, under the influence music digitalization. The most noticeable effects of digitalization of music, which are closely associated with changes in the media of musical information, are the creation of an illusion of a desacral eternity, the increasing tension between technical capabilities and non-discursive expert knowledge, leading to the elimination of this knowledge in the field of music in favor of natural musical inclinations, narrowing the range of representation of the human in music, highlighting the text, the transition of music as a value to music as an ideological instrument, the expansion of the illusory freedom of a person playing music creatively, reinforcing the negative understanding of freedom and human dependence on technoreality. Thus, these changes in music give rise to rethinking of social interactions created through music, in terms of B. Latour — “reassembly of musical and social”, mutually conditioning each other.