"WHAT IS FMT'S MUSIC?" An Essay by TI - Part III

For Parts I and II you can read the whole series of this essay here (also linked in the list on the right).

TI: "Our music is music with electronic data, not necessarily equal to electronic music (a discussion of the difference between music with electronic data and electronic music)"

This is a different story from the "uniqueness" that has been described so far.

Although electronic music as a genre has already been around for a century, it is only in the last 20 years that electronic music as we define it (music produced only with electronic data from the beginning to the end) has emerged.

This is because the great predecessors of this conventional electronic music, such as Stockhausen, Isao Tomita, and Kraftwerk, all recorded sounds by electrically amplifying sounds made by oscillating a vacuum tube or transistor circuit. As I mentioned earlier, this is music created by assembling "sounds", and the essence is no different from combining acoustic instruments and singing to make music. I think it's simply a matter of whether or not there is electricity involved in making the sound. In fact, Isao Tomita also claimed that electronic musical instruments are "instruments that make an electric sound and are no different from acoustic instruments.

Also, electronic music and computers have a relationship that cannot be thought of in isolation. However, the use of the computer as a composition tool has been around since 1960, but due to the immaturity of computer performance, it was limited to the automatic generation of limited phrases and the control of performance information.

It has only been in the last 10 years or so that the entire process from composition to the completion of a work can be created using electronic data, as we are doing now.

However, I don't think there is still that much music that can be appreciated with "music made only of electronic data" compared to the number of music played by humans.

In addition, the music made only with electronic data is "commercial music" or "substitute for live performance" that takes advantage of the merit of being able to create in a low budget quickly to begin with, and there are a few cases that do not seek artistic value in itself.

In addition, there are not many artworks or forms of expression that are completed from the beginning (beginning of creation) to the end (completion to presentation) using only electronic data. For example, it stays in CG and literature on the Internet.

There are also a small number of people who create music only by typing all the way through, but who aspire to music that simulates a live performance.

In this context, recently (in the last 10 years or so), so-called "Internet-Music" genres like Vocaloid P (Vocaloid), Dubstep, and Vapor Wave have emerged.

These, like us, are the type of music that turns electronic data into sound. This is the kind of music that would not be possible without computers and the Internet. In that sense, I think we are finally seeing a music that can be clearly defined as "electronic music". The musicality is very different from ours in some ways, but I think the structure is probably similar to these music.

We are influenced by both Stockhausen and Kraftwerk, but as a musical genre, we don't think of them as "electronic music" (music of electricity), but rather as being closer to these "electronic music" (music made from electronic data).

What is it about categorizing our music? It is often said that "Post-Internet-Music".

One of them said that our music genre and musical stance is "Post-Internet-Music", and in that sense, maybe it's an appropriate expression.