This essay offers a survey of the current digital music landscape, traced through the analysis of a few experimentations that have recently tackled relevant issues posed by the proliferation of digital communication tools and the related reconfiguration of social relationships and culture. The artworks analyzed here, all realized in the last three years, have been grouped together according to the categories of Dailyscape, Naturalscape, Machinescape, Urbanscape, Mythscape. The objective is neither to set up a taxonomy of approaches, nor to offer a complete and exhaustive picture of the trends in current research. Connections will be dictated, instead, by arbitrary associations and aesthetic affinities. The resulting picture, however, may be able to stimulate a wider reflection on the state of the art in recent musical and digital media experimentation.  

Vito Campanelli, new media theorist, teaches “Theory and Technics of Mass Communication” at the University of Naples “L'Orientale”. He has published on media art; his essays are regularly published in international reviews, such as Neural. He is a free-lance curator and promoter of events in the field of digital culture and co-founder of the no-profit association “MAO - Media & Arts Office ONLUS”.