Electronic, aesthetic and social factors in Net music

This article presents results of a study on ‘Net music’ that was initiated in 1996 and presented in 2002 as a doctoral dissertation at Martin-Luther-Universitat Halle-Wittenberg in Germany (Follmer 2005). Since no scholarship encompassing the whole field as defined by the term ‘Net music’ has been published until recently, the study involved the collection and analysis of a broad spectrum of musical projects that employ the Internet in very different ways. Around seventy examples considered to be classifiable as Net music were chosen to represent the scope of different approaches to how electronic networks can be used for making music. The first part of this article describes three outstanding examples of Net music and their interplay with particularly important characteristics of electronic networks. The second part discusses a possible typology of Net music.