| Summary: | Over the past thirty years there has been an increasing interest in the social and cultural implications of digital technologies and ‘informationalism’ from the social sciences and humanities. Generally this has concentrated on the implications of the “convergence” of digital devices and services, understood as linked to the discrete processing capabilities of computers, which rely on logical operations, binary processing and symbolic representation. In this paper, I wish to suggest that a ‘grammar of code’ might provide a useful way of thinking about the way in which digital technologies operate as a medium and can contribute usefully to this wider debate. I am interested in the way in which the dynamic properties of code can be understood as operating according to a grammar reflected in its materialisation and operation in the lifeworld – the discretisation of the phenomenal world. As part of that contribution in this paper I develop some tentative Weberian ‘ideal-types’. These ideal-types are then applied to the work of the Japanese composer, Masahiro Miwa, whose innovative ‘Reverse-Simulation music’ models the operation of basic low-level digital circuitry for the performance and generation of musical pieces.
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