Reconstructing Computer Music Works Ethos and Praxis

Computer Music is now 60 years old. During the last six decades, many systems – hardware and software – have been developed, used and abused to create musical works. Most of the older hardware is now decommissioned or in an unusable state; some of the programming languages that have been used are unavailable or not available for current operating systems. As for software, the vast majority of computer music works are now available solely through digital audio files; sometimes these are the nth generation copy of an initial analogic tape – which causes problems for the preservation of these works. With access to part of the original source code or given sufficient information of a given hardware system, it is possible to reconstruct a musical work using software and tools. On top of the technical aspects, it raises many questions, since accessing the source code make it possible to interpret an otherwise fixed musical work, thus opening up the debate on the status of the computer music work. The panel goal is to discuss the techniques that can or may be used to reconstruct computer music works as well as the (technical, analytical, esthetical, historical, ontological…) implications of these approaches.