Come cambiano le fonti musicali. Le risorse digitali e la ricerca musicologica

Abstract

The change in musical sources. Digital resources and musicological research

The new technologies have been operative for some time in the field of musical sources, modifying the forms of production, distribution and consultation. Music in fact is changing from an industrial and commercial product characterized by an enduring material component to being the object of a capillary distribution service where mobile communication and volatile media are its principal features.
What is of major importance is not so much possession of the medium, but connection to a distribution service.
The increased accessibility of musical information is one of the paradigms in which a radical change is realized involving both ancient and contemporary musical sources. Another element is the multiplication of technological intermediations which detach the end user always more from the original document, while at the same time there is a marked increase in the volatility and mutability of media and information.
A direct consequence of this increase of accessibility is the break-down of copyright control, which becomes always more a weak institution incapable of keeping up with technological development.
New documents appear in the study of musicology: data on the traffic of digital musical documents, coding standards, archives of messages of musical and musicological nature, and even software for managing and diffusing audio data. But also new media prove of interest for musicology, as for example digital musical document readers which are joined to the storage medium.
The individual exchange circuits and the easiness of duplication are another two factors which complicate considerably the panorama of today’s musical sources, involving numerous technical disciplines but still requiring the fundamental assistance of musicology for an exact historical-critical assessment.