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At first glance, Laurie Spiegel might seem like an IBM programmer tinkering
on her day off. Her Lower Manhattan loft is a miasma of electronic high
technology There are tape recorders a projection television screen, an
Apple 11 computer with a video display, and a workbench littered with
solder, wire, voltmeters, oscilloscopes, transistors, and circuit boards.
But Spiegel doesn't belong to the button-down collar crowd. She is a composer,
schooled at Juilliard who uses computers and a polyphonic synthesizer
to create something that is simultaneously music and art. Her compositions
are contained in magnetic discs of binary computer coding. She slips one
of them into her Apple and flips some switches.
From the stereo emerges a series of simplistic, repetitive musical phrases,
while the room's TV screens display an analogous pattern of thin, fleeting
colored lines Gradually the music grows richer and more dense, the pace
and variety of sound expand. On the screens the images intensify in color
and movement. Soon the loft resounds in a riot of visual harmonics, images
flashing in unison to the composer's creative musical desires.
In a stark, windowless California room Craig Hundley builds unique instruments
that explore pitches and timbres he couldn't experience in his formal
music training. One of them is a 1 7-foot steel beam with 24 brass and
bronze strings stretched along its length It looks like the world's largest
and strangest steel guitar Hundley slides a shining steel cylinder along
the strings Eerie bass moans ricochet off the cold walls He replaces the
bar with a pair of fat mallets, and the room rumbles like the heart of
thunder.
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Craig Hundley (left) and his Blaster,
an instrument that |
Young composers like Spiegel and Hundley personify
a musical renaissance that promises to change the way we hear, think about,
and compose music in years to come. The computer is central to this expansion
of aural awareness, but the rebirth encompasses many other elements. For
instance, several West Coast composers known as microtonalists are using
rediscovered mathematical ratios to invent new scales with many more tones
and musical options than the traditional 12-note octave.
A host of new music-making machines, including fine-sculptured
stringed instruments, resonating aluminum beams, and primitive ensembles
made entirely from ' junk, have emerged. These unusual instruments can
play sounds infinitely more varied and dynamic than any we have ever heard
before.
Exotic performance concepts are blending music into
the landscape, broadening the definition of something called sound sculpture
Music is even generated under-
water by the brain's alpha waves and by the movements of dancers Throughout music's 6,000-year history, every available substance in the natural world has been used to produce new sounds. Today the computer stands at the forefront of musical progress, because it can produce an infinity of sounds beyond the realm of the real world. Computers have successfully broken music and vocalization
into their component parts and reassembled them as new, hybrid sounds
Voices have been transformed into emotionless tonal instruments, and trumpet
and trombone sounds have been converted into speech before your ears,
a clarinet playing a single note can metamorphose into a percussion instrument.
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Computers even have the potential to write their own
music Cyber-composers may not be Beethoven, but they might be truly creative.
"I don't hold out any great hope for a computer to write a masterpiece,"
says Douglas Hofstadter, an Indiana University computer expert and Pulitzer
Prize-winning author, "but for someone to say that all a computer can
do produce Muzak, you've got to ask, What is Muzak?"
Spiegel uses her computer
for a variety of musical tasks: composing, improvising, or overdubbing
(the machine can play melodies while she plays bass, or vice versa), and
a wide range of experimentation. "It is an incredible labor-saving device,"
she says. "I can compose in computer memory and have the final score printed
out. The computer can also play the music as I'm composing, in case I
want to change something right away With traditional composition, you
have to hear all the elements of the works in your head."
But you don't need Laurie Spiegel's knowledge of theory
to play a computer Someone who is all thumbs can do it without hitting
a wrong note "You use your intelligence, not your reflexes," Spiegel says.
"It's like one-finger typing. You can hit three hundred notes with one
push of the button. As a musical tool, the computer will parallel the
invention of musical notation."
Most musical experimentation today centers on the
collaboration between computer and musician. Dr Max Mathews, thought by
many to be the father of computer music [see Omni, May 1980], first wrote
a program to synthesize music in the late 1950s. He played his composition,
entitled Music I, on an IBM 707, a room-sized behemoth that would befuddle
today's microchip composers. Mathews recalls that musicians at first used
the computer purely as a storage device, packing their complete score
into the memory banks, then blithely pushing a button while the computer
simply played by rote. This is now changing. Musicians are looking more
ambitiously at the computer as a tool. "What we need is some way of having
the performer interact with the intelligence of the instrument, as if
the instrument were another performer"
This attitude inspired Mathews's invention of such
computer-instrument combinations as the sequential drum, a rectangular
piece of plastic that resembles a small, tightly stretched trampoline.
Beneath the skin, three sensors initiate commands to r the computer One
sensor controls a note's ~ volume, much as in an ordinary drum; the t
harder you hit, the louder the note sounds. The two other sensors control
timbre (sound quality) and sound decay (the duration of a note or musical
phrase). A preprogrammed musical pattern is stored in the computer memory
Mathews activates the pattern and strikes the drum to add flavor and nuance
to the overall rhythm.
"I tend to play a Bach sonata accompanied by a violin,"
he says, "but it can sound like anything I want." He is currently developing
a sequential violin
Programming music through a computer does not require
keyboard pyrotechnics or one of Matthew's digital analogs Joseph Pinzarrone,
director of electronic music at Northern Illinois University, transforms
dancers into musical instruments. First he devised a 'movement-sensitive
costume" with 64 mercury switches attached to various spots on the arms,
hands, legs, and feet These switches are fed through a computer to a synthesizer
During a performance, Pinzarrone sits at the computer console and works
with the dancer. whose body movements open and close circuits that control
the synthesizer sounds.
While the future of musical performance will undoubtedly
owe a huge debt to the computer which will always be around to play and
compose upon, it may be equally dependent upon a school of musicians,
composers, and instrument builders who are reshaping the mathematical
concepts of scales and notes microtonalists They ignore the musical notation
that has been accepted for centuries by Western culture, n favor of a
new, more scientific approach to sound.
The bulk of our familiar melodies stern from a 12-tone
octave the seven white natural and five back sharp/flat keys found on
the piano The microtonalists, however, have learned how to play "between
the cracks of the keys. For example, C-sharp and D-flat actually have
slightly different frequencies despite common belief, they are not the
same note By distinguishing between sharps and flats, and by adding F-flat
and C-flat (where there are no black keys on the piano), the microtonalists
designed a 19-tone scale And that was just the beginning Using slide rules
and calculators to find exact ratios and frequencies, microtonalists quickly
discovered they could play musical scales with 31, 43, or even 55 notes
in the octave.
Cris Forster, a young microtonal composer in San Diego,
began his musical career as a piano scholar, hoping to become a traditional
musician Then he grew interested in exploring new sounds On his own, he
augmented his musical know edge with mathematical theory, and today he'll
usually have a slide rule or a pocket calculator within reach while he
writes music
"Our twelve-tone scale was firmly established by Johann
Sebastian Bach over two hundred years ago when the old man was considered
a revolutionary,' Forster says 'and since I cannot walk into a music store
and buy instruments for an exploration outside of this scale, I must build
them myself "
So Forster began building instruments. The Chrysalis
has 82 strings stretched like spokes around a hub. He plays it by rotating
the strings past his fingers Then there's the Harmonic Melodic Canon,
a grooved sound board that resembles a drafting table with 48 strings
each one meter long running across it, which Forster strums standing up
Another instrument, the Diamond Marimba, has a series of glass tubes suspended
from its bars. The tubes serve as sound chambers for vibrations made by
striking the bars with mallets. Forster is working on a glass harmonica,
which will contain a rotating wheel and produce continuous sounds like
those of an organ.
He is resigned to playing the somewhat martyr like
role of musical carpenter to the new age 'As instrument builder, I am
becoming a resident of the land of 'dirty hands' and hardware stores,"
Forster says without a trace of bitterness. "I have sacrificed a possible
career as pianist, teacher, and historian in an attempt to bring opposites
like lumberyards and music, calculators and Indonesian scales, together"
The grand old man of the microtonalists is Ivor Darreg,
a composer, instrument builder, and piano tuner who lives in Glendale,
California. The former child prodigy, now sixty-three, is a leading authority
on musical far beyond the 12-tone scale
"I've tuned organs, pianos, and harpsichords for forty
years,'' Darreg says "I've always wanted to escape the music establishment's
squirrel cage. Think of what it's like to be a concert pianist and practice
the same old scales day after day Those horrible exercises were so boring."
In 1936, when he realized he wasn't using his ears
to "hear efficiently," Darreg constructed his first instrument, one electronic
musicians would envy for its prescience He found an old accordion keyboard
in a music shop in San Francisco and, adding parts from a short-wave radio,
created an electronic keyboard oboe. A musician with a conventional background
could play it, but Darreg added several buttons that produced pitches
not heard on the ordinary 1 2-tone scale they were, to an extent, new
notes.
Since then, Darreg has built five contrabass steel
instruments, ranging from six to eight feet long, which he calls Megalyras.
He has also modified and refretted many guitars, so musicians can play
in 19, 22, or 31 tones per octave. " It changes the mood profoundly by
adding four or five new musical moods to t vocabulary," Darreg says of
the Megalyrc "There are certain chords and combinations of sounds that
are impossible in ordinary twelve-tone system. Until t guitar took over
from the piano as our main instrument, it was financially and mechanically
impractical to increase the number tones. It's been attempted for two
or the centuries, but it simply costs too much '
Perhaps the piano has been supplant by the guitar,
but other microtonal is dreaming of new sounds have succeed in modifying
the keyboard The most successful designs use a series of odd shaped buttons
to accommodate 19 tone Composers call this the generalize keyboard, and
there are very few of them this country, for precisely the reason Darer
mentioned, cost.
Ervin Wilson and Scott Hacklemen applied the generalized
keyboard to clavichord they co-designed, and Motorla produced a microtonalist
organ, called it Scalatron. There are only two exist Scalatrons, one used
by George Secor California and another at Queens College where Professor
Joel Mandelbaum uses as a composing and teaching aid.
The Scalatron is an amazingly versatile instrument,
with five octaves of 50 keys each and 31 programmed pitches It loci as
if only an octopus could find its w~ around the keyboard, but once you
lea the color coding, Mandelbaum says, the instrument is almost as easy
to play as piano. The white keys are the naturals: the blacks are the
sharps: the reds are the flats the greens are the half-sharps: and the
blues are the half-flats.
As a serious composer who spent more of his time in
the musical mainstream Mandelbaum is still discovering the Scalatron "There's
an awful lot on that instrument I haven't heard. or f I've heard it, I
have yet internalized it," he says. Yet he is °l optimistic about
the legacy the microtonal school will leave. "When I m writing nor microtonal
music, I feel like I'm gathering wood n the forest,'' he says "When I'
writing micro-tonal music. I feel like 1' planting the seeds of the future''
Those musical seeds are a so being nurtured by researchers
who are expanding the computer's ability to generate truly radical sounds
Charles Dodge, the dedicate young composer who runs Brooklyn College s
four-year old research mind computer music department, is quiet pushing
the computer's musical abilities their full potential. Dodge's
work focuses on vocoding, complex method of musicalizing the human voice
following an apprenticeship with Mathews at Bell Labs, Dodge carted an
ancient, discarded Bell Labs Honeywell computer with him to Brooklyn.
The electronic beast befits the atmosphere in Dodge's lab a throwback
to a 1950s recording studio where he puts the old fashioned unit to work
creating never before-conceived aural sensations.
The process is painstaking and slow A spoken voice,
if first digitized at 15,000 samples per second, and an analysis program
reduce the speech data to a more manageable 120 frames per second Each
frame can then be altered according to desired pitch, amplitude, time,
and several filter coefficients that take into account the sound generated
by windpipe, tongue, jaw, mouth, glottis, and vocal-cord movements.
The tape of Dodge's composition "In Celebration,"
a rendition of the Mark Strand poem, contains words that are often inaudible,
but the musical range is enough to make an opera singer envious From simple
melody to complex, eerie harmonies. the musical breadth is as if the Andrews
Sisters had suddenly become baritones.
The Brooklyn College team says the computer makes
it possible to run the pitch and amplitude from one voice through the
vocal track of another voice. The result is a sort of musicalized speech
grafting "It's like taking one person s vocal cords and putting them in
someone else s mouth,' says music professor Tom Jerse, laughing at the
possibilities. "It means you can mix Mick Jagger and, say, Luciano Pavarott
onto one voice track, a literal, if somewhat bizarre, form of rock opera
Three thousand miles from Brooklyn, in Stanford University
s music department, computer experts are charting the first paths along
different musical frontiers: combining computer analyses of various instruments
with the human voice they can. for example, mix the sound produced by
a trumpet mouthpiece with the voice of a singer into one mode of expression
Stanford calls this process cross-synthesis
Researcher John Serawn says the resulting harmonics are quite spooky "You
can get a flute that sounds as if it were talking," he says
Serious composers will probably not latch on to cross-synthesis
for writing orchestral symphonies, but there is unlimited appeal for those
scoring music for science-fiction movies. "In the 1980s and 1990s you
will hear sounds of instruments playing voices, probably in Star Wars-like
movies,'' one noted Stanford computer music researcher predicts The
sounds of the future, whether generated by computers or microtonal composers,
may be presented to us in forms being created by artists who are exploring
the aural sensations of sound sculptures or sound environments
Max Neuhaus, a percussionist who has played with famed
experimental conductor Perre Boulez, is one of the leading practitioners
of the theory that sound creation has absolutely no boundary Neuhaus once
made a structure called Water Whistle A series of rubber pressure hoses,
with whistles attached, whipping around underwater in a pool, created
music that existed only in the water You had to listen with your ears
submerged. Since then, he has constructed Times Square, a set of resonating
chambers under a subway grating at that location. It produces a humming
bass blended with a pleasant high-pitched sound when activated by the
computer wind Most recently Neuhaus put 64 speakers in a greenhouse filled
with shrubbery at the Walker Art Center's New Music America festival in
Minneapolis Each speaker was connected to its own synthesizer, producing
an ever-shifting aural montage.
Also at the Minneapolis fairground, artist Leif Brush
suspended a grid of 200 speakers, each with its own sound source (one
even being the strings of a piano floating on a raft in a pond), among
the trees at the art center's exhibit. Boston sound artist Christopher Janney crafted a musical
instrument from a stairwell by attaching photoelectric cells to the steps
Breaking an individual beam generates a series of computer-stored notes.
Though practicing scales might prove exhausting, a group of people could
actually "play' the stairs. In Vancouver, Canada, composer David Rosenboom has
gone a step further, creating a participatory sound environment that uses
alpha waves generated by visitors' brains. Though it is nice to fantasize
about the possibility of playing Haydn with electrodes hooked up to your
head, sound authorities say this kind of thing is a long way off Surprisingly, some of our newest sounds have been
produced from scrap Skip LaPlante, a Princeton University graduate who
studied Mozart and Schonberg, has made about 60 different percussion and
wind instruments using thrown-away materials. Raiding kitchens and farmhouses,
LaPlante drew unique sounds from huge cardboard rug tubes, broiler pans,
cat food cans, even shards of glass "You can get really clean pitches
from cinder blocks broken into L shapes,' he says 'And cutdown wine jugs
make excellent cloudchamber bowls" LaPlante hunts for battered and discarded
wine jugs on the Bowery in New York City He has even created music by
bouncing a Superball on a piece of glass. In contrast to the computer
and other slowly crafted homemade instruments, LaPlante's sound generators
rarely cost more than $25 to build.
![]() Ivor Darreg, patriarch of microtonalist, splits
the octave in ways never before imagined. The confluence
of computers and new scales can be seen in the futuristic synthesizer.
Indeed, the homemade instrument appears to be more
important than ever as young musicians strive to create new musical forms
Hundley, for instance, has had a certain rebelliousness implanted in him,
much like Spiegel and LaPlante. Hundley is an eclectic musician with a
restless ear who dallied in several genres before directing his attention
to film scoring (The Incredible Shrinking Woman and Roadie, among many).
He was a prodigy on piano at thirteen and a self-confessed burnout at
seventeen Hundley has performed Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto as
a guest soloist with the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra and has been featured
on four jazz albums. He has vocoded disco tunes and played clavichord
in the jazz movie New York, New York. Hundley's new project is a 53-tone synthesizer that
will feature programmable tuning It will be one of the very few electronic
instruments capable of generating microtonal music Perhaps it will allow
more classically oriented microtonalists to step into the reverberating
studios of electronic musicians. if that is the path of the future, then
Hundley will surely be one of the very first to set out Undoubtedly, in the future greater economic access
to new technology will make more of us musicians. "When I went to music
school, which wasn't that long ago, they didn't even have an analog synthesizer,''
Spiegel says I think it's a shame that the general public has greater
access to this stuff than the conservatory student who is told that it
s really complicated and generally useless musically I've had this computer
for less than a year It's not that difficult to learn Before I got it.
I never heard a single orchestral score that I had written. I never even
heard my string quartets played it while I was at Juilliard Now with my
computer, I can get instant feedback on what I have written.'' Clearly, computers, mathematical explorations of new
scales, and composer-made instruments won't wipe out disco or empty Carnegie
Hall Popular music has enormous staying power, and no electronic instrument
can exactly duplicate the subtle nuances and rich tonalities of a finely
tuned violin in a symphonic orchestra Even if one could, it wouldn't necessarily
be desirable. Many people like the idea of variety, spontaneity, and human
beings in musical performance. But the new music won't be merely the avant-garde
affectation of a few snobby intellectuals Technology will I certainly
open up enough doors to make many kinds of music more accessible to all
levels of creator, player, and listener The music of tomorrow will not limit expression: it
will free it of virtually all restraints Our aural experience w 11 be
eclectic and electronic Stuart Diamond, a composer who specializes in
the lyricon, an instrument something like an oboe wired to a synthesizer,
says 'The serious composer is usually condemned to write chamber music,
using just three or four instruments. But composing on the lyricon gives
me the power of a symphony orchestra maybe not the subtlety, but certainly
the volume, force, and scope "Once any music is in a radio, it's electronic, anyway
Even a Beethoven string quartet is electronic at this point. It's been
reduced to electrons and reconstructed back into acoustical wave shapes.
Electronic music is not some weird idea reserved for the distant future It's a fait accompli .
Article from Omni Magazine |