ABSTRACT
This chapter emphasizes that the medium is no longer the message; rather, specific tools themselves have become the message. The Internet was originally created to accelerate the exchange of ideas and development of research between academic centers, so it is perhaps no surprise that it is responsible for helping give birth to new trends in computer music outside the confines of academic think tanks. The chapter provides feedback to both academic and commercial music software developers by showing how current digital signal processing (DSP) tools arc being used by post-digital composers, affecting both the form and content of contemporary "non-academic" electronic music. Poets, painters, and composers sometimes walk a fine line between madness and genius, and throughout the ages they have used "devices" such as absinthe, narcotics, or mystical states to help make the jump from merely expanding their perceptual boundaries to hoisting themselves: into territories beyond these boundaries.
