* Illustration: Martin Venezky * If you could plug a speaker into my brain, I think it would sound a lot like Curtis Roads' music. Here's what you'd hear: a thousand marbles bouncing on a tile floor, a swarm of bees, and some Morse code — all at the same time and all in a cave. Roads is the foremost composer in a genre called microsound, where notes are broken into barely audible fragments as short as 1/1,000 of a second. It's a demanding field: Years of effort can yield only a few seconds of music. Roads has been working on one arrangement for more than 20 years, and so far it's only six minutes long.
I'm listening to that piece at his home studio in Santa Barbara, California. A dense wall of sound reverberates from a pair of $8,000 Bowers & Wilkins speakers. Roads shakes his head sadly — it just doesn't sound right to him. At this point the only thing he's sure of is the track's title: 1987, the year he started to compose it.
Back then, Roads was editor in chief of the MIT-based Computer Music Journal. He was also one of the leading proponents of electronic music at a time when raves were beginning to popularize it. Still, he felt that rave music wasn't going to deliver the masterpiece the genre needed if it was to be taken seriously. "The ravers create some beautiful sounds, but they don't have a narrative," he says. "That's what separates the men from the boys."
Roads wanted to be a man, so he stepped down from the journal's top spot and set about crafting his magnum opus. But he couldn't just start composing. While Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven could simply sit at the piano and create masterpieces, Roads first had to invent his own instrument. He needed to code programs that could break open the note and manipulate the resulting shards of sound. He felt like a physicist searching for subatomic particles. His Cloud Generator software — a program that produces a startling range of sounds, from strange clicks to ethereal chirps — contains about 30,000 lines of code and took about a year to write.
Armed with this new instrument, Roads selected his favorite millisecond-long fragments and began arranging them bit by bit in the audio-editing app ProTools. His indie-label debut, 2005's Point Line Cloud, brought critical accolades but few listeners. To many, his music remained inaccessible. The piece that would transform computer music from obscure, nerdy noodling to crowd-awing Wagnerian epic has thus far eluded him.
But Roads remains committed. He pushes back from the mixing board, rolling his chair across the slick wooden floor. A few taps on the Mac keyboard pull up another unfinished track. Thousands of sonic pinpricks fill the screen — the computer's hard drive makes loud crunching noises as it loads the file. Roads presses Play and I hear what sounds like a car crashing off a bridge. The title doesn't bode well for its completion: Never.
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