The challenge to tonality, the integration of mass and micro-tone, new instruments, and indeterminacy have been a part and reflection of wider philosophical and technological shifts that underpinned western art music since 1850 (Cope 1993). Many of the so-called innovations of popular music, such as the collapse of differentiation between music and found sounds had already been well worked through before the impact of digital technology (Appleton 1975, Chadabe 1997, Emerson 1986, Griffiths 1979).

The modernist abandonment of tonality and rise of alternative languages based on pitch and duration allowed real-time instrumental performance gesture to remain central to music making. The sonic palette was widened through analogue production techniques that facilitated new idioms such as live instrumental performance and tape, performance with effects, and live electronic ensembles. Despite the central nature of real-time performance gestures, however surrogate, these new languages often alienated mainstream audiences and conservative critics (Pleasants 1955, Scruton 1983).

At the heart of the modernist instrumental tradition is a formalist doctrine making language and its organisation the primary source of meaning in contrast to sound and gesture as metaphor, although these two are not exclusive of each other (Windsor 1977). A consequence is a focus on increasingly complex forms of control; an approach perfectly suited to the precision that digital technology brings. In combination with retaining the continuing practice of real-time performance, this concern is manifest digitally in the application of alternate controllers and algorithmic composition.

The removal of traditional instruments through non-standard alternate controllers posses unique communicative problems. In acoustic music, physical gesture has become associated with musical gesture because the control device built into the instrument is manipulated directly with the body and connected to the sound generator: in semiotic terms, what you see is often what you hear. The use of these new controllers coupled with the dislocation of the sound source from control often results in little connection between physical and musical gesture (Schader 1991).

The application of algorithmic composition devices often reinforces this, particularly when it is used to generate sound that has little timbral interest. Non sample based computer music falls into a similar problem and often takes it to the extreme. Negating the body through the neglect of real-time physical performance can result in gestures that are disconnected from commonly understood grammars and meanings associated with the body as a medium of interpretation. New works then often have to be explained before they are heard.

A central concern of modernism is structural meaning at a micro and macro level. Compositions are often based on intellectual referents in contrast to physical and sensual responses to music, and there is a concentration on process as communication. The question remains if increasing abstraction, or complexity of control, contributes to equivalence in the significance of overall message. The dilemma is extended in the notion of invention and innovation being the primary sources of authenticity for artistic integrity at the expense of integration. Novelty and a lack of continuity with tradition often result, undermining redundancy as a worthwhile source of communication (Milicevic 1998).