Digital Music as Artistic Research: Practice, Platforms, and Post-Digital Aesthetics

This article approaches digital music as a form of artistic research, examining the ways aesthetic value is produced through creative practice, platform-based infrastructures, and post-digital sonic conditions. From a practice-informed standpoint, it understands composition, curation, and technologically mediated listening as primary modes of artistic inquiry, rather than as derivative outcomes of theoretical frameworks or market imperatives. Drawing on post-digital sound studies and creative arts research, the article reconceptualizes digital music as a processual sonic event that takes shape through the interaction of code, infrastructure, artistic intention, and perceptual experience. Methodologically, the study investigates a range of contemporary practices—including streaming-native composition, playlist curation, and algorithmic or AI-supported music-making—as forms of research-through-practice. Through interpretive analysis and close listening, the article demonstrates how artists and curators negotiate platform logics, algorithmic mediation, and conditions of digital circulation. In doing so, the article advances a relational, post-digital understanding of sound that moves beyond object-centered conceptions of music and offers a practice-based framework for interpreting aesthetic value in platformed music cultures. This perspective situates digital music not as a bounded object of analysis, but as an evolving field of artistic practice embedded within contemporary technocultural systems.