Blog it yourself

Transparency. As the internet seeps into our homes, as we fill out more and more online forms to buy airplane tickets, our favourite singer’s album, or just to connect to the latest trendy social network, one question remains : where does the information go ? Who can have access to our details ?

“Happy Birthday, Marc. On December 2008, you will be 29. You don’t know me, it’s true, but I know you very well. You are not lucky, Marc. You were the first one who was chosen to be Google portrayed by “Le Tigre”. It’s very simple : we choose an anonymous person and we tell everything we know about his life thanks to the tracks that he left, voluntarily or not, on the internet… (…) After all, it is your fault, you should have been careful. ”

This is what Marc L. could read last year in “Le Tigre”, a french magazine.  This article was written to warn us about our lives transparency on the internet.

Among the various possibilities that the internet offers, one in particular has recently caught my attention.

I was asked to think about “the impact of the internet on world music”. As the legislation on that matter becomes stricter and stricter every day – « Hadopi2 » law passed recently in France – one would immediatly think about the negative effects of the internet on music.

It is true that by allowing consumers to download their favourite singer’s album for free, the internet has shattered music’s former business model. The web has put music copyrights in the spotlight, as lawyers from all around the world were trying to come to an international agreement.

As the media often focus on the downsides of this technology, today I would like to point at a great innovation that is going to please the music-mads of the world : online orchestras.

The idea of an online orchestra is not new, but at first it was for professionals only. It required specific satellite links that allowed a singer in Paris to record a CD with a band located in San Fransisco. Patricia Kaas CD was made that way. A new technology called MIDI (Music Instrumental Digital Interface) has made things easier for non specialists. By downloading electronic scores as files, MIDI managed to speed up the process.

A few music schools have taken this opportunity to communicate with their equivalents all around the globe. The World Band Project was created, and brought together American, Corean and German participants in a single workshop. Teachers and students could be thousands of kilometers away from eachother, and play the same orchestra.

I paid a special attention to this example, as my school is allowing us to live a similar experience in our English class. It is called e-learning. Our teacher doesn’t have to physically be in the class for us to learn. We haven’t played in a virtual band yet, but it could be an idea.

To conclude this article, I would like to post a link to a very interesting concert, that has been organized by YouTube in 2008. The aim of this initiative was to select 80 musicians among thousands of candidates in order to invite them to play at the Carnegie Hall, in New York. Musicians had to upload a video of themselves playing the Eroica Internet Symphony, a play written for the occasion by Tan Dun. 

In this case, the orchestra is not virtual as all the participants came in person to play it. But it is definitly linked to the internet, as this medium made it happen. “Classical music is federative, because it is not limited by the language barrier”, said Emmanuelle Flahaut Franc, head of the communication of YouTube. If classical music is an international language, today the internet allows us to speak it.

Being aware of media organizations’ power is important. Knowing that this tremendous power can lead to abuses is crucial. But not taking a chance to make your own voice emerge from the internet’s hoo-ha would be too bad… don’t you think ?