The Digital Tools for the Hyperorchestra: MIDI, Virtual Instruments, and Digital Music

With the digital revolution, screen composers have abandoned pen and paper as their main tools for writing music and have embraced a spaceship-like studio workspace environment governed by the Digital Audio Workstation. The chapter is an aesthetic survey of the key digital technologies for screen composers in the first decades of the twenty-first century, along with their connections to the real and the virtual. In addition, it presents a set of suggested taxonomies to classify and conceptualize virtual instruments, which are arguably the most numerous addition of music-making tools in history.