Chat rooms have a bad rap. They’ve gained a touch of the aura that used to hover around the word “hacker.” Though today it means something closer to “entrepreneur,” hacker used to be equivalent to “dangerous anti-social malcontent.” Chat rooms are social by definition, so they can’t be truly anti-social; but they still are saddled with a reputation as a locus for, if not a downright contributor to, anti-social behavior.
As a descriptor, “chat room,” however, has a broad reach, and it includes countless places where musicians meet up with like-minded peers for advice, support and, in this age of network art, even semi-anonymous collaboration. Cases in point are the em411.com community, the comment tags on posts at createdigitalmusic.com (and the forums at its sibling site, createdigitalnoise.com), and the Music Cafe section of the forums at kvraudio.com, the latter an “information resource for open standard audio plugins.”
A typical new post at kvraudio.com might have a subject line like “Topic: anyone wanna add to my ambient trombone thing?” Earlier this month, a longtime kvraudio.com member who goes by bernhardtjeff used that line to head a post of a lengthy bit of Fourth World dub, a lulling bass end that seeps out to the end of the horizon, with muted trumpet layered atop (MP3). After some discussion among other forum mates, a member named thokay posted an update. The first thing one hears in the thokay version is a clubby beat that the original had willfully avoided, but thokay has a plan, and in time the beat merges with the deep bass of the original. Thokay folds in keyboard chords and trims the piece to pop-song length. In the end, that clubby rhythm can be heard to lend a framework that helps showcase the horn while not jeopardizing the lazy quality of the original (MP3). View the full forum thread at kvraudio.com.
As one forum member responded, “It is quite remarkable how much difference another person’s ideas can make to a tune.” It’s equally remarkable how much of this sort of virtual collaboration is occurring in so-called chat rooms.
PS: Just to correct the above, the instrument heard in the material by bernhardtjeff is a trombone, not a trumpet, and no mute was employed. Sorry for my error.
My review of the new book Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture (MIT Press), edited by Paul D. Miller, is in the latest issue of Nature magazine, dated May 1 — founded in 1869, Nature is now by far the oldest magazine to which I have ever contributed. (The next eldest would be Down Beat, which was founded in 1935.) For the time being, the full Sound Unbound review is up at 
The MIT site lists the complete contributors as David Allenby, Pierre Boulez, Catherine Corman, Chuck D, Erik Davis, Scott De Lahunta, Manuel DeLanda, Cory Doctorow, Eveline Domnitch, Frances Dyson, Ron Eglash, Brian Eno, Dmitry Gelfand, Dick Hebdige, Lee Hirsch, Vijay Iyer, Ken Jordan, Douglas Kahn, Daphne Keller, Beryl Korot, Jaron Lanier, Joseph Lanza, Jonathan Lethem, Carlo McCormick, Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid, Moby, Naeem Mohaiemen, Alondra Nelson, Keith and Mendi Obadike, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Pauline Oliveros, Philippe Parreno, Ibrahim Quraishi, Steve Reich, Simon Reynolds, Scanner aka Robin Rimbaud, Nadine Robinson, Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR), Alex Steinweiss, Bruce Sterling, Lucy Walker, Saul Williams, and Jeff E. Winner. Just to be clear, some of those contributors are, in fact, the subjects of interviews that appear in the book. An added CD features everything from Sun Ra to William S. Burroughs to Terry Riley. More on the book at 