HISTORY 204

ELECTRONIC AND COMPUTER MUSIC

(F-11)

1. Musique concrète (1945-c.1960)

Two "classic" approaches to electronic music:

1) musique concrète records naturally occurring sounds and manipulates them electronically;

2) synthesized music creates sounds electronically

Musique Concrète – Composer records real-world sounds, then combines and alters them – could be musical sounds or ambient sounds – Made possible by evolution recording technologies, especially the tape recorder, which was developed in the 1930s-40s

Pierre Schaeffer – Sound engineer at French radio (RDF) – Began working with audio recordings on disk, treating them as musical input rather than outcome – means of manipulation: speed up, slow down, backwards, overlap – Switched to tape recorders after 1945 which made manipulations much easier - No attempt to imitate traditional, acoustic music - exploration of electronic sounds in and of themselves

Pierre Schaeffer - 5 Studies of Noises (1948) - Example of musique concrète (Schaeffer invented the term)

PLAY Supp 3/4 - What kind of sounds are these? (train and railroad station sounds - this is subtitled "Etude aux chemins de fer") - Schaeffer seeks out and emphasizes pitches and rhythms in natural sounds - He relies heavily on repetition to help the listener hear these aspects - “Etude noir” is based on piano sounds, which are manipulated similarly

2. Synthesis

Means for electronic generation of sound available since 1920s (theremin (invented by Lev Theremin), Hammond organ, ondes martinot), but limited by concept: people tried to duplicate both the sound and the playing technique of acoustic instruments

Tape recording made it possible to manipulate electronically generated sounds, i.e. use them simply as sound sources (like input to musique concrète) –Basic technology of 50s-60s was: a) generate sine waves, b) alter them by various means to get complex sounds, c) combine these sounds with tape recorder

(if time) Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928 – 2007) - Kontakte (1960) (supplementary)

Stockhausen studied with Messiaen in Paris –Worked with Schaeffer and Eimert at RDF – [See previous lecture for more bio]

Stockhausen's early works synthesized sounds, then combined them according to serial principles – Became more and more interested in the sounds themselves and all their parameters - Maintained the pretense of serial composition, but I suspect he may have created the serial justification after creating the sounds

Kontakte was based on synthesized sound but added percussion sounds processed with musique concrète techniques – What you hear most clearly is various transformations of sine waves, which become almost clichés of 1960s electronic music – More interestingly you hear the sound gradually changing along several parameters – e.g. pitch, timbre, rhythmic density etc.

PLAY Struktur X (CD 3 / 7) – A score is posted online for Struktur IX – It’s a graphic representation of sounds that Stockhausen has already created and preserved on tape

Problems with both synthesized music and musique concrète were

1) they required several steps with different sorts of equipment - There was no single electronic instrument;

2) Performance meant listening to a tape, music was not created or at least recreated before your eyes and ears

Robert Moog combined several types of electronic synthesis equipment in one machine with an attached keyboard - This allowed composer or performer to create electronic sounds quickly and flexibly - commercially available from about 1964 - Rock and jazz bands began to use Moog synthesizers

3. Computer music

Analog vs. digital electronics

In an analog device sound is converted to an electronic signal that resembles the sound – e.g. the sound A above middle C is turned into a wave with a frequency of 440 cycles per second – loudspeakers convert that signal back into sound

In a digital device the sound is converted into a string of numbers and back again – See HANDOUT on web

Computers are digital - i.e. the various elements of a sound (pitch, loudness, timbre, duration) are represented as numeric (digital) information - The computer creates sounds either by:

1. digital synthesis - constructing sounds abstractly by building up digital representations

2. sampling - analyzing real-world sounds (turning them into digital information)

Compare these to 2 styles of tape music: synthesis vs. musique concrète

Sounds thus created can be transformed (speeded up, slowed down, timbre altered, etc), repeated and combined, and finally stored as digital information on disk or tape

Computer music was first developed by Max Mathews, an engineer at Bell Labs, who wrote the programs Music I through Music V - Music V was released to the public in the mid-60s - Many more programs and interfaces have followed so that by now large numbers of people can engage in computer music composition

4. Charles Dodge (b. 1942) - Speech Songs (1973) - Supplementary Listening

Example of digital synthesis

Material is synthesized voice - Technology developed at Bell Labs for non-musical purposes (e.g. telephone information directory) – It’s at the borderline between music and non-music

Composer determines pitch, inflection, timbre, speed, etc. of synthesized voice

PLAY #1 "When I am with you"

Dodge exaggerates voice inflections to create melodies, uses repetition to create counterpoint, layers voices to create harmonies

How does this compare to composing a song?

What makes this so funny? – perhaps the juxtaposition of the human and the mechanical

(if time) PLAY #4 – “The days are ahead”

Listen for mensuration canons

This is funny, but it’s also extremely expressive – In 2 minutes it conveys the immensity of time and the universe

5. John Oswald (b. 1953) – Plunderphonics (1987/ 1989) – Supplementary

Example of digital sampling – i.e. the computer “samples” real world sounds, which the composer manipulates – You can sample trains or frogs, but you can also sample a Michael Jackson CD

Entire album based on samples of previous music – much of it under copyright – e.g. Dolly Parton, Michael Jackson, Stravinsky, Beethoven – Borrowings are supposed to be very obvious

US copyright law says that if a musical work is under copyright, you have to pay the copyright owner to reproduce and sell it – (if you perform it, you have to pay “performance rights fees”) – If it’s not under copyright it’s in the “public domain,” and you can reproduce, sell and perform it as you like – the US copyright period is currently 95 years, i.e. very long (thanks to Walt Disney and Sonny Bono) – Everything composed before 1922 is public domain, but nothing newer will come out of copyright until 2019 – Other countries have more reasonable copyright laws – For a quick review see http://www.pdinfo.com/copyrt.php

Oswald believes that everyone has a right to all music – His slogan is: “audio piracy is a compositional prerogative” – Plunderphonics was sent as a free CD to radio stations in 1987 - The record industry sued and made stations destroy all copies – But the CD still circulates everywhere

PLAY “Spring” (1987) – What is source? [Rite of Spring] – What has Oswald done with it? [emphasized stylistic traits to point of absurdity: repetition, irregular rhythms, velocity]

This recalls Stravinsky’s own quotations of earlier music, Charles Ives collages – also hip-hop and club music – Here the source of the sample is meaningful in a way that it wasn’t for musique concrète

6. Live electronics

Do electronics need to be experienced live? – So many of our musical experiences take place via headphones . . .

But music is a social activity – It has visual, kinetic and interpersonal aspects – Sitting on your butt and watching sound come out of speakers isn’t a satisfying social activity - SOLICIT EXAMPLES of attempts to overcome

Efforts to make electronics live fall into 3 classes

1) All electronic, but created in real time by a live performer – e.g. Kraftwerk, club mixes, Cage Cartridge Music

2) live and electronic instruments perform together

a) recorded electronics + live instrument

b) live electronics + live acoustics – e.g. Sun Ra

c) interactive – electronics process live instruments – live insts trigger electronics - singers and players respond to what they hear from the computer

Tom Flaherty (b. 1950) – Quartet for Viola Cello and digital processsor (1993) – Suppl. listening - HANDOUT

Example of 2b) – interactive electronics – electronics process live instruments

The viola is hooked up to a computer which plays back everything the instrument plays with time delay and transposition – How much delay and what transposition are programmed into the computer – The computer transposes a whole step down and plays back with a slight delay on one channel, ½ step up with a longer delay on another channel

Result is three violas – the live viola + two electronic violas – playing canons – plus the cello which is not processed

PLAY – beginning– listen for the 2 processed viola lines – at m.29 (1:55) there’s a shift to another texture, now we hear that the computer is also adding a pulse and fade (as indicated in the score)

PLAY around 3:45 (page 2 of HANDOUT) – dense counterpoint in 16^th notes – accents create a melodies and rhythms

Clarity of structure

segmented textures – typical of non-electronic also

audible counterpoint

rhythmic augmentation and diminution

structure not created by cadence but by pattern shifts and recapitulation of patterns heard before

This seems to be an example of Steve Reich's "music as an audible process"

(if time) Jen Wang (b. 1984) – Interstate-Luminesce (2009) – Suppl. - HANDOUT

Jen is a composition student at UC Berkeley – she composes for live instruments, electronics, and combinations thereof – this piece was premiered at UC 4 years ago

Title refers to the sounds and lights of a freeway (Jen is from LA)

For piano and digital electronics –

Electronics are contained as a series of sound files on a computer – the pianist triggers each file at the spot indicated by a number in the score in the “percussion” part

files created in advance by sampling piano and percussion instruments and also synthesized sounds – then processing them with various programs

this is “interactive” because the pianist doesn’t have to play along with an inexorable computer; instead he or she (or an assistant) controls the computer’s timing (but not the sounds it makes)

Jen has evidently aimed at electronic sounds that are very compatible with piano – At first they sound like an enhancement of the piano – then they take on more and more of a character of their own, until after about 10 minutes, the computer has a solo cadenza

Jen calls the piece “an experiment in patience and stretching ideas out over time”

PLAY beginning – electronics sound like “enhancement” of the piano

PLAY from about 10:00 – electronics take more and more active role leading into cadenza

In my opinion this was more effective in performance than on headphones, because it always seemed as though the sounds were coming out of the piano and the pianist