In 1957 … the first computer-generated sounds were heard at Bell Telephone Laboratories (or Bell Labs, as it was called) in Murray Hill, New Jersey. Max Mathews had joined the acoustic research department at Bell Labs to develop computer equipment to study telephones. With the aim of using listening tests to judge the quality of the sound, he had made a converter to put sound into a computer and a converter to get it back out again, which according to Mathews, “turned out to be a very successful way to do research in telephony.” Mathews went further:

“It was immediately apparent that once we could get sound out of a computer, we could write programs to play music on the computer. That interested me a great deal. The computer was an unlimited instrument, and every sound that could be heard could be made this way. And the other thing was that I liked music. I had played the violin for a long time …”

John Pierce, also at Bell Labs, lent crucial support to the music project. As he explains, “I was executive director of the communication sciences division when Max used the computer to produce musical sounds-I was fascinated.”

In 1957, Mathews finished Music I, his first sound generating computer program. The first music produced with Music I was a seventeen second composition by Newman Guttman, a linguist and acoustician at Bell Labs. The composition, called In the Silver Scale, used a scale slightly different from the diatonic scale so as to have better controlled chords. Mathews said, “It was terrible.” Pierce said, “To me, it sounded awful.” But, as Msthews continues, “It was the first.” In fact, the chords were never heard because Music I was a single-voiced program. As Mathews recalls, “The program was also terrible-it had only one voice, one waveform, a triangular wave, no attack, no decay, and the only expressive parameters you could control were pitch, loudness, and duration.”

Music I was the first in a series of sound-generating computer programs collectively referred to as the Music-N series. Music II followed in 1958, with improvements of four voices and arbitrary waveforms, and it introduced the concept of the wavetable oscillator. Music III, which followed in 1960, was, as Mathews puts it, “when things really came together.” Music III introduced the concept of modularity, or unit generators, so that one could put together “orchestras” of “instruments.” It introduced additional possibilities for shaping sounds and it introduced the concept of a “score,” where notes could be listed in the order of their starting times and each note was associated with a timbre, loudness, pitch and duration. [1]

The computer music research at Bell Labs and other institutions provided the backdrop to the first round of creative musical work with computers. From the beginning, John Pierce and Max Mathews had been eager to make contact with musicians, and in 1961 Pierce hired composer James Tenney to come and work at Bell Labs.

Tenney worked at Bell from 1961 to 1964 and completed several compositions during that period. His first was Analog #1: Noise Study, finished in 1961 and inspired by the random noise patterns he heard in the Holland Tunnel on his daily commute between Manhattan and New Jersey. His interest in randomness at that time included using the computer to make musical decisions as well as to generate sound. In Dialogue (1963), Tenney used various stochastic methods to determine the sequencing of sounds.

Tenney continued to develop his stochastic ideas in Phases (For Edgard Varese) (1963), in which different types of sounds are statistically combined. His techniques resulted in sounds with continually changing textures, similar to a fabric made up of a variety of materials in various shapes and colors.

In 1963, Mathews published an influential article on computer music titled “The Digital Computer as a Musical Instrument” in Science. Jean-Claude Risset, at the time a physics graduate student in France, read the article and became so excited by the potential of computer music that he decided to write his thesis based on research he planned to do at Bell Labs. Risset came to Bell in 1964, began research in timbre, returned to France in 1965, and came back to Bell in 1967. He completed Computer Suite from Little Boy in 1968 and Mutations in 1969. Both compositions contain sounds that could not have been produced by anything but a computer.

Meanwhile, at Stanford University in 1963, John Chowning also came across Max Mathews’s Science article and became inspired to study computer science. Chowning visited Bell Labs in the summer of 1964 and left with the punched cards for Music IV. He subsequently established, with David Poole, a laboratory for computer music at Stanford. The lab would eventually become the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), a major center for computer music research. Chowning later went on to develop frequency modulation (FM) as a method for generating sound. His approach to FM, in fact, was licensed by Yamaha in 1974 and was the basis of sound production in many Yamaha synthesizers through the 1980s.

Chowning’s early compositions Sabelithe (1971) and Turenas (1972) both simulated sounds moving in space. In Stria (1977), Chowning used the Golden Section to determine the spectra of the sounds. The results were otherworldly–magical, strange, icy, and unlike anything that one could imagine coming from an acoustic instrument. [2]

1. Chadabe, Joel. Electric Sound, 1997. 108.
2. Chadabe, Joel. “The Electronic Century Part III: Computers and Analog Synthesizers.” Electronic Musician, Vol. 16, Issue 4 (April 2000).

This month we consider Conway’s latest brainchild, a fantastic solitaire pastime he calls “life”. Because of its analogies with the rise, fall and alternations of a society of living organisms, it belongs to a growing class of what are called “simulation games”–games that resemble real-life processes. To play life you must have a fairly large checkerboard and a plentiful supply of flat counters of two colors…

The basic idea is to start with a simple configuration of counters (organisms), one to a cell, then observe how it changes as you apply Conway’s “genetic laws” for births, deaths, and survivals. Conway chose his rules carefully, after a long period of experimentation, to meet three desiderata:

1. There should be no initial pattern for which there is a simple proof that the population can grow without limit.

2. There should be initial patterns that apparently do grow without limit.

3. There should be simple initial patterns that grow and change for a considerable period of time before coming to end in three possible ways: fading away completely (from overcrowding or becoming too sparse), settling into a stable configuration that remains unchanged thereafter, or entering an oscillating phase in which they repeat an endless cycle of two or more periods.

In brief, the rules should be such as to make the behavior of the population unpredictable. [1]

This article spawned a massive amount of research into making cellular automata into musical automata. This notably includes work by Eduardo Reck Miranda and Peter Beyls. Less notably, it includes about a thousand youtube and vimeo videos.

I am personally grateful to Martin Gardner for showing the world that math can be fun.

Notes

[1] Martin Gardner. “Mathematical Games: The fantastic combinations of John Conway’s new solitaire game ‘life’.” Scientific American. Iss. 223 (October 1970): 120.

[2] Yam, Philip. “Profile: Martin Gardner, the Mathematical Gamester (1914-2010).” http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=profile-of-martin-gardner. Accessed on 5/23/2010.

Cunningham’s work with Cage began relatively early in Cage’s career.

By the summer of 1948, Cage and Cunningham were well on their way to forming what was eventually called the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. They had been giving joint recitals since the spring of 1944, and much of Cage’s music of the later 1940s was triggered by the needs of Cunningham’s choreography. Their collaborations were already premised in the notion that music and dance should be created independently and only brought together at a late stage in rehearsals, this being made possible through micro-macrocosmic structuring. (Nicholls 2007, 42)

As their collaboration continued, Cage and Cunningham continued to explore the idea that music and movement need not have the direct relationship that was traditional. Cage and Cunningham showed that the only necessary relationship between music and dance is that they exist in the same space, at the same time. This idea fed into Cage’s thinking about an interconnected world, and led him to his anarchic compositions such as Reunion and Musicircus.

Cage’s use of simultaneity after 1962, on the other hand, does not require any common characteristic among the various parts. In Reunion, there is no given relationship among the various musics of Behrmann, Cross, Mumma, and Tudor (other than Cage’s inviting all of them).

Instead, Cage asserts here that it is the simultaneity of the various performances that constitutes their relationship. Rather than have independent parts performed simultaneously because they are related to one another, Cage here relates independent parts to one another by performing them simultaneously. This concept of simultaneity-as-relationship can perhaps be traced to the manner in which Cage was accustomed to working with Merce Cunningham. Beginning in the 1950s, the only relationship between Cage’s music and Cunningham’s choreography was that they took place at the same time and in the same space. As Cage put it in “Where Do We Go From Here?”: “Neither music nor dance would be first: both would go along in the same boat. Circumstances – a time, a place – would bring them together.” In these dance productions, the complete independence of elements extended to the lighting, sets, and costumes, as well. In Reunion, the same approach is taken to the four musicians who perform together. (Pritchett 1993, 154)

Cunningham helped many other young composers by commissioning new works for his dance company. Composers like Gordon Mumma and David Behrman had opportunities to create new interfaces and new performance situations for his dancers.

In Spring 1966 Tudor, Cage, and Cunningham invited Mumma to accompany them on a tour of Europe. They offered him a commission for a new piece (Mesa) and sought his expertise for their production of Variations V, a work in which the actions of Cunningham’s dancers activated sound through an elaborate system of electronic sensors. That summer Mumma left Ann Arbor to begin a collaboration with the Cunningham company that lasted eight years and led to numerous innovative works. (Miller 2003, 21)

Cybersonic and related technology has continued to play a major role in Mumma’s art. His MESA (1966) is a particularly interesting application of these ideas, in this case to a large concertinalike instrument called a bandoneon. Completed for his first tour with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, it was written for his fellow tour musician David Tudor, whose talents include bandoneon as well as piano. Mumma was able to rig both sides of the bandoneon with microphones and set the two outputs to modify each other as well as themselves. The results were distributed about the hall quadriphonically. An un- expected side effect of the phase-shift circuitry incorporated in this particular cybersonic console is the occasional impression of changes in “acoustical dimension.” The listener actually senses that the speakers are being moved or the shape of the room somehow altered. (James 1987, 375 – 376)

For David Behrman, the Cunningham commision was an exciting opportunity for a young composer to meet and work with some of his creative idols.

…in 1967, Cunningham commissioned David Behrman to compose music for Walkaround Time, a repertory dance piece based on Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass. Behrman used photocell mixers and recordings of himself walking around Niagara Falls on an icy day, or driving his Colkswagen Beetle, and of all the women in the Cunningham Company reading texts of Marcel Duchamp which described Large Glass. The premiere was in Buffalo in March 1968. As Behrman recalls, “Duchamp came up and took a bow onstage, and since I was the young composer who had been commissioned to do the piece, I was up there – it was a very exciting thing…” (Chadabe 1997, 101)

Cunningham was devoted to new electroacoustic music, and his devotion changed music. He supported innovators and iconoclasts, and he helped electroacoustic music reach new audiences. Cunningham was a terrific choreographer and dancer, without a doubt, but we shouldn’t forget that he was also an unmatched promoter of electroacoustic music.

Bibliography

Chadabe, Joel. Electric Sound: The Past and Promise of Electronic Music. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997.

James, Richard S. “ONCE: Microcosm of the 1960s Musical and Multimedia Avant-Garde.” American Music. Vol. 5, No. 4 (Winter 1987): 359 – 390.

Miller, Leta E. “Once and Again: The Evolution of a Legendary Festival.” Liner Notes from Music from the ONCE Festival. Visibility Music, 2003.

Nicholls, David. John Cage. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2007.

Pritchett, James. The Music of John Cage. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1993.