Lesson 6 – Introduction

In the 1950’s, composers and pioneers started experimenting with mechanical means to record and playback sounds. In the following document “histo_plan2“, I have tried to draw a timeline of the main compositions, groups, and composers by year of their apparition. In the new Spotify Playlist L6, I have collected most of the relevant composition and composers mentioned in the document. Use both of those resources for reference and inspiration.

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One major problem that, as sound designers and composers, we have is to understand what changes computers have brought to the way we create and experience sound. What type of relationship is there between compositional strategies for composing music and compositional strategies for composing music with computers? In what do they differ?

It is the aim of this chapter to indicate the possible ways in which the computer could provide the expansion of your compositional methods.

There are no violins, trumpets, or woodwinds to use, the computer allows access to the direct manipulation of the inner components of sound. The many schools of orchestration –Rimsky-Korsakov, Casella-Mortari….- taught us how to combine traditional instruments and more in the most subtle and extraordinary combinations. An incredible number of works by Wagner, Brahms, Rimsky Korsakow, Ravel, and Debussy are simply masterclasses in the creation of colours with orchestras. With computers, the harmonic content of a sound, its type of attack and body are not anymore predetermined by any instrumental acoustical characteristic but have to be established piece by piece through signal processes.

Sample playback, wavetable look-up, and synthesis are techniques to be used not only to perform sounds, create harmonies and melodies, but also to build the very sound texture and timbre. We have seen with additive synthesis how by adding simple sounds together, with different and sometimes contrasting envelopes, more complex sounds are created.

The computer can make compositional decisions, to integrate or expand our chosen compositional techniques. Two very interesting resources in this respect are Eduardo Miranda’s Composing Music with Computers and Todd Winkler’s Composing Interactive Music, which can give you respectively  theoretical and practical introduction to the use of computers for composing.

From Greek music and Gregorian to Palestrina and Monteverdi, from Bach to Debussy (two men, two revolutionaries, I would confidently say) we can trace the extraordinary evolution of tonality. The beautiful melodic world of the early examples (up to Palestrina) integrated with the solid design of a system of tonality organisation (Bach, Well-tempered Klavier), a method so powerful and inventive that set the basis for the following 200 and more years of music. Secondly, the development of a function of harmonic relations, that, for example, with Debussy sees a dramatic shift from the way it was used by Mozart, Beethoven or Brahms.

The work of Schoenberg and his idea of serialism occupies an important space in the history of compositional methods, for the subsequent adoption and expansion of his theories, that through structuralism arrived into computer music. Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez are the two composers to look out for understanding how to apply serialism to any musical parameter. At the same time, the ideas of indeterminacy, launched by Americans, for example, John Cage and Morton Feldman, brought forward a further expansion of methods for composition.

As well explained in the book by Peter Manning Electronic and Computer Music, Musique Concrète, The Elektronische Muzik Studios in Köln, and the RAI Phonology studio in Milan were place and groups of composers that marked the first steps in electronic music composition. This led successively to the adoption of computers, with the efforts of many, but in particular of Max Mathews and Miller Puckette.

All these composers and pioneers worked to expand the compositional methods from the past, at times trying to reproduce well-known music of the past with computers, noting the major differences between the two outcomes, and at other times to truly experiment with new logics and methods. Computer music started becoming a hugely influential way to approach sound that sensibly affected the timbre creation and the compositional methods.

I would point out, without any particular order, some concepts to work as suggestions for reflection. They are based on the comparison between human and computer:

– computer’s automatism

– human touch, flexibility and imperfection

– computer can do some things fast

– computer can multitask

– computer can make comparative decisions

– computer can follow rules

– expression

– invention

– improvisation

– interpretation

…

This chapter is dedicated to the study of playback systems and techniques in Max that arrived to us through this outlined historical process of research and discovery, thanks to many pioneers and brilliant minds. You will have access now not only to the technical methods but also to put yourself in the middle of this musical debate, to add your ideas and findings to the improvement of the practice.