Three musicians are proving that computer music is no longer an oxymoron.
Composing electronic music used to mean laboring for months on a mainframe to produce a seemingly random assemblage of blips and boops that would be taped and replayed in performance. Today, home computers jam. They improvise. They accompany soloists. They control automated orchestras. They swap themes over phone lines. They've even invaded the concert hall. In a field that has traditionally resisted new ideas, computers have become indispensable.
But there's a hitch. Computers are lousy things to make music on. Even the guy who wrote the book on interactive computer music - electronic composer Robert Rowe - says "computers are really not very good musical instruments." So why does everyone who's writing music today use one?
The answer is power. Computers offer musicians the power to transcend physical limitations and to explore the outer reaches of harmonic theory. Traditional instruments are limited by many factors: how hard you can blow, how fast you can move your fingers, how well the instrument itself is made. Harmonically, instruments are constrained by overtone reverberations and a fixed scale. Computers blast these barriers away.
"We're on the verge of something very interesting," says computer music maven Tod Machover, a professor at MIT and a director of the Media Lab. Unfortunately, no one quite knows what it will be. Will the computer expand the possibilities for musical expression or will it mean that people won't play music anymore because their computers will play it for them? This much seems certain: increasingly, live music will involve a joint venture between human and machine.
In itself, this is not alarming. Music and technology have always had strong links. The last new musical instrument to leapfrog to popularity was probably the saxophone, patented by Adolphe Sax back in 1846. Sax was looking for a new sound - a synthesis of woodwind and brass - and his invention was a hit with marching bands and dance hall orchestras. Beethoven wrote "Wellington's Victory" for one of the mechanical miracles of his day - the panharmonium, a sophisticated barrel organ. Haydn and Vivaldi both wrote pieces for the hurdy-gurdy.
There is also a long tradition of composers who design their own instruments. That's what Richard Wagner did when he needed a sound somewhere between that of the French horn and trombone: He created the Wagner Tuba. In our century, composer Harry Partch, who envisioned a microtonal, 43-notes-to-the-octave scale, fashioned his own instruments with oddball names like "marimba eroica" and "chromelodicon."
In the 1920s, influential American composer Henry Cowell suggested that a new tonality could be based on "the relationship of rhythm to sound vibration." Every note we hear is really a mini-rhythm - a tiny beat of sounds. Cowell theorized that playing a note (mini-rhythm) in different percussion rhythms would change how we perceived its sound.
But Cowell never could test his theory. The rhythms he proposed were too difficult for human performers to play and beyond the capacity of the mechanical marvel of his day, the player piano. But given a programmer's touch and a musician's ear, computers can play these sophisticated syncopations. "It's now possible to have four different tempos going at the same time, played in four different locations and still perfectly synchronized," says an electronics and computer-music wizard named Trimpin.
Those at the cutting edge of the computer music boom fall into two divergent groups: One uses computers to evaluate musical input and respond instantly with accompaniment or new themes and ideas. The sounds produced are artificial - synthesized, amplified, and broadcast over loudspeakers. The other group has turned its back on synthesized sound and uses computers simply to operate complex automated instruments.
Machover is the most well-known example of the first group. A child of the '60s who grew up playing electric cello in a rock band, he is also firmly rooted in the ways of classical composition. He studied with Elliott Carter and Roger Sessions, two eminent modern classical musicians, and spent seven years as director of research at IRCAM, the prestigious contemporary music factory in Paris. His career in electronic music synthesizes the pursuits of his parents - his father was a computer graphics pioneer and his mother was a concert pianist.
One of Machover's breakthroughs has been to link performers to computers. Over the past five years, he has created a family of futuristic strings - he calls them "hyperinstruments" - that allow the performer and computer to communicate on stage. His hypercello, for instance, is an electric cello hooked to a computer. The performer wears sensors that assess wrist angle, hand position on the strings, and pressure on the bow. Through these gestures the player instructs the computer how to accompany, augment, or process the cello sounds.
"You want the performers to use their musical skills and intuition as much as possible," Machover says. "The idea is that all the information should come from the performer. You should never have to type anything or send any instructions to the computer. We're trying to build something radically new, but to do that, you have to analyze very deeply what's important about traditional instruments."
The San Francisco Symphony recently commissioned Machover to wire an entire orchestra. That work is due in 1996. He's also working on two computer- assisted operas. The first (which will premiere at the Houston Grand Opera), while relatively conventional in structure, is about race relations in America. The other, sponsored in part by Fuji, will be installed in Japan and Barcelona, and is more experimental. Forget the fat lady singing. Forget the orchestra. This opera will be a synthesized, multimedia installation. The audience will walk through the space where it is performed, stopping at various rooms. The music and the story will, he hopes, grow from room to room.
Other musicians shy away from computer-generated music and tend to use the computer as an accomplice - albeit quite an adept one - to help achieve musical goals. Matt Heckert and Trimpin both have no interest in creating artificial sounds. "I will only deal with sound that I can produce physically, on site," says Heckert, one of the minds behind the techno- violence noise spectacles of Survival Research Laboratory (see Wired 1.4, page 70). "The computer is purely a means of control. There's no hidden sound coming from tapes or digitally processed samples."
Drawing on his skills as a Mr. Fixit (he started working on cars years before he could legally drive one, and still makes extra money as a mechanic and welder), Heckert has fabricated a symphony of industrial equipment that he calls the "Mechanical Sound Orchestra." Like a mad scientist, he sits calmly at his Macintosh in the middle of all his intimidating instruments and makes them play. He flicks one key and a gargantuan steel cable starts slinging around a four-foot washer. Another small keystroke and the rotolin, an industrial-looking giant cylindrical stringed instrument, starts turning and scraping.
Heckert's music is dense and primal. His machine instruments rumble and screech. Though his formal musical training involved little more than learning to play Puff the Magic Dragon on the guitar, Heckert has used his mechanical orchestra in concert with an opera singer. "I built these instruments to play in performances," he says. "I like to play them with my long electrical fingers.... Machines can be emotionally evocative things. They're not stone cold."
German-born Trimpin came to America, in part, because of the large supply of industrial cast-offs. "Boeing sells a lot of exotic materials at a discount," he says, explaining his move to Seattle.
Trimpin stumbled on computer music because of a bizarre medical condition. A woodwind and brass player since childhood, he developed a terrible allergic reaction to mouthpieces. He switched to larger and larger bore instruments, but nothing helped. In frustration, Trimpin quit music and turned to engineering. But after getting his degree, he grew bored of his new profession and returned to music with a new mission: to create instruments he could play without touching them. "I never use any kind of amplification or synthesis," he says proudly. "It is always pure acoustics."
Trimpin makes all his instruments from scratch, in his studio, and they are engineering marvels. What he calls Contraption IPP 71512 turns a conventional grand piano into a player piano for the 21st century. Though it looks like a sophisticated torture rack, it is actually an array of objects to dampen, mute, stroke, pluck, brush, and bounce on the strings, John Cage style. Trimpin controls the whole show from his portable computer.
For another instrument, which he has dubbed Liquid Percussion, Trimpin fashioned nozzles from Boeing surplus titanium. Under precise computer control, the nozzles drip water onto tuned drumheads stretched over handblown glass resonators. The effect is acoustically and visually striking. "What you see is just rain," Trimpin says, "but what you hear is like an orchestra." His latest venture is building a family of computer- assisted woodwinds that can be played by human or machine. Trimpin strives to produce more than simple auditory pleasure with his handmade orchestra; he wants his sound to resonate in a place between "hearing and feeling."
Trimpin plans to use his automated instruments to experiment with room acoustics. He'd like to put his automated woodwinds in the four corners of the room and seat the audience in the middle, to check out how sound and emotional impact relate to instrument placement. "The space is important - how it resonates," he says. "I'm interested in how we perceive music."
Investigating the psychology of acoustics. Playing scales of rhythm. What's next? Commercial exploitation of the technology, that's what. It's happening already, and elite theorists and artists fear the computer's raw ability to create what might pass as music will overshadow its background application as technician and accompanist.
Even Machover, who's currently talking with Yamaha about developing a computerized percussion instrument called Drum Boy, admits that he's worried about what will ultimately emerge. "There's a real danger that they're going to stop building instruments and just build multimedia centers," he says. "Then we'll have what I call the 'Milli Vanilli syndrome.' People will put out incredibly sophisticated studio albums and nobody will perform in public again."
