The Unfinder: Finding and reminding in electronic music

In this article we examine how we as composers of electronic music organize our material, files, samples, settings, and compositions, and how existing technologies fails to meet our expectations. This text is based on a pseudo-autobiographical pilot study, where we and one other composer wrote journal notes of a preparation for an improvisation based on previous works or other material. The notes were coded and analyzed using thematic analysis that resulted in six themes: Storage media; Date, time, and remembering}; Matured material; Structure, metadata, and collection of material; Associations; and Tool. Despite the enormous amounts of storage capacity available, the practice we use today we bear similarities to Barreau and Nardi's nearly 30-year-old article Finding and Reminding but differ on a crucial point: composers of electronic music use tags and well-developed and structured schemes to organize the material. Because current operating systems were originally designed primarily to handle text files, the file system user interface has shortcomings in allowing for the kind of diversity and plethora of methods for storing and finding audio files in current music practices. Our study indicates that in order to support the way electronic music composers work, we need a usable, dynamic, plain, and transparent storage and material retrieval system.