It is perhaps a cautionary tale that I have to relate to you that someone such as myself, having worked in the field for only a bit more than 25 years, starts being regarded as a 'pioneer' or 'senior artist' and is expected to comment sagely on the whirlwind of developments that have occurred over that period.
Every five years seems to constitute a 'generation' and after five of those cycles one starts sounding like a colorful 'old-timer' spinning yarns that begin with 'I remember when'. The same thing may happen to you, only sooner since the speed of technological change seems to be accelerating. The sheer pace of development, and everyone's inability to keep abreast of it, seems to produce a lack of perspective on either where we've been except to regard it as inevitably primitive compared to where we are or where we're going except for an uneasy sense of it being, as Miranda might have put it, a 'brave new world' that has such machines in it!
A more positive result of this situation is that there is a strong sense of a thriving international community, if only because we need to co-operate and help each other deal with forces that are beyond our control.
If you contribute to this community, it will give you a great deal of support in return. Just what are the forces that have propelled our field so strongly? And why is the mood almost always 'up beat' - at least in comparison to our instrumental composing colleagues where the phrase 'squabbling over crumbs' usually comes to mind.
Early on and here comes the 'I remember when' part I think the core of the energy was in the interdisciplinary confluence of art, technology and research. Our work was mainly in the labs, whether universities, research institutes, radio stations or industry, because this is where the machines were. Translating musical thinking into these environments was awkward and challenging, both because it revealed the woeful inadequacy of received musical theory, and because there was so much to learn about acoustics, psychoacoustics, audio engineering, computer programming, and so on.
