Serial Port: A Brief History of Laptop Music
By Marc Weidenbaum

[artículo @ newmusicbox.org]

_index:
# Fast Backward: A brief prehistory of laptop music
# Tool or Toolbox: The laptop’s ever-changing role
# Plastic Devices: Critical laptop innovators and recommended CDs
# The Incredible Shrinking Computer: Music in the palm of your hand

[…] Computer music is nothing new, though it has certainly blossomed in the past decade thanks to the rapid spread of personal computing. The question is: What’s «laptop music»? How does the fact that the technology now is portable alter computer-enabled music? More than anything, the laptop has brought computer music not only out of the closet, but out of the house. And thanks to the laptop’s compact size and ease of use, it’s triggered several successive waves of adopters. «Laptop music,» as a result, isn’t really a genre, and since the laptop can run such a variety of music software, it may be inappropriate to simply call it an instrument. What is it? A phenomenon.

The laptop is a proverbial black box—well, generally speaking, a silver one, usually in this context affixed with a glowing Apple logo—and it has many inputs and outputs. The same could be said of its history and its future. This overview of so-called «laptop music» is an attempt to see what led up to this moment, to highlight some leading figures, and to look ahead to what «mobile music» might constitute down the pike. The laptop’s a bit like an SUV. It’s expensive and powerful and nice to look at, but how many people actually take it over really rigorous terrain? Well, plenty, in fact, from the microsonics of Tetsu Inoue, to the augmented field recordings of Christian Fennesz, to the spatial immersions of Carl Stone, to the fractured dance music of Autechre, all of whom have made the laptop computer one of their primary tools. […]

Joshua Kit Clayton