1992 found me studying Music Information Technology at City University under Jim Grant and Simon Emmerson. As part of my dissertation I wrote a long piece on the history of electronic music. It sat around on the old paulhazel.com for a while, but I recently revised it and updated it for my own students, and, for those who are interested in such things, I’m including it here.
I think it remains useful. It is only a brief history but it covers a lot of ground, technological, artistic and political. It finishes around the time synthesizers entered the mass-market and just before MIDI, but it goes right back to the medium’s real beginning. Contrary to what most people think, “music technology” didn’t begin in the late 1960s with Bob Moog: as far back as 1906 Thaddeus Cahill had a working polyphonic additive synthesizer that transmitted pure electronic music over a telephone network. Talk about being ahead of your time…
Bloom is a recent application for the iPhone developed by Brian Eno and Pete Chilvers. The press release describes it as “part instrument, part composition and part artwork”; in practice it’s an ambient music generator that allows the user to input notes via the touch screen. These notes are then a) displayed like ripples on a pond and b) taken up by the programme and variations are generated over time.
I’ve been playing with the thing all week. Despite being very simple to use, it’s very good at what it sets out to do. It’s hypnotic and relaxing, and does actually create convincing ambient music. There is only one sound available, a sort of cross between a piano and a harp, but there are subtly shifting drones that hover in the background as the melodies drift in and out… There are also a set of ‘moods’ that seem to change the scales used by the ‘pieces’:
There’s obviously a lot of very clever stuff going on behind the scenes. Presumably all the sounds are generated in real-time (i.e. no samples) which gives the music a very rich and warm sound. Knowing Eno, I’m guessing it uses an FM synth, probably built in Max/MSP or PD. And although the sequence generator seems to be little more than a delay line at first listening, if left alone the programme will generate endless variations on even the most simple of inputs.
I left it running today for about four hours, and it was still happily evolving when I turned it off. Running the programme this long did highlight one thing: it drained the battery in a couple of hours. Here it is in action:
I love it. It’s not a toy. It’s not a gimmick. Bloom actually turns the iPhone into a viable and meaningful instrument that allows you to produce some very listenable and sonically high-quality ambient music. I found it extremely satisfying to be able to tap out a quick sequence, let that evolve for a while while I went about my business, and then ‘add a new part’ just as I was passing by. Or shake it and start again. Whatever…
As with RjDj, it suggests a completely new type of relationship with both the music and with the technological device, and you find yourself operating somewhere between the seemingly incompatible realms of recorded and improvised musics.
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One final point: there has been a lot of comment about Bloom being a rip-off of Electroplankton (which has been available on the Nintendo DS for ages). This is just silly: I don’t particularly want to diss either Electroplankton or the DS, but, as this short video demonstrates, we’re talking completely different kettles of fish:
Released on October 10th, RjDj is one of the most interesting pieces of software that I’ve come across for some time. It’s difficult to describe what it is exactly, so you’d better watch the video (over 9 minutes but worth it, believe me):
I downloaded RjDj this afternoon and begrudgingly dragged my unloved and unused Apple headphone set out of the box—the software only works with this headset at the moment. It all worked perfectly first time, and within five minutes I was tapping, banging, clacking, and, yes, even singing along to “the soundtrack to my life.” Live and interactive: John Cage would have loved it.
Cooking the Sunday dinner became an experimental sound workshop: peeling potatoes, kicking open the flip-top bin, using a knife to create glissandi on the grill rack, whistling, thumping the worktop, running the tap, the clanking of saucepans, all became melded into some futuristic ambient-techno soundscape. Great fun!
At the moment, the number of scenes available is limited (5 only) but the website promises another 18 coming shortly. It could do with a way of exporting your recordings, and of course people posting comments on the RjDj site already want programmable delay times, use of better headsets, access to the individual audio channels, etc., etc.. Like a lot of iPhone applications, it borders on being a gimmick: something interesting and exciting for sure, but we’re not quite sure what to do with it…
BUT: what we’ve got here is an application that is sampling in real time, performing DSP on the input, playing that back and recording it at the same time. On a mobile phone. (In fact, RjDj makes the phrase ‘mobile phone’ suddenly seem redundant, out-of-date.)
Something important is happening here. It seems like one of those tipping-point moments, a paradigm shift. The gestural interface of the iPhone is exploited by RjDj in such a way that it allows not only a new way of making music, but a completely new way of experiencing music where our behaviour generates the events that become both the raw material and the gestures that shape our listening.
In fact, one could envisage a future where we no longer primarily bought music performed by other people. Instead we would buy new ’scenes’ and build up a library of software that would transform the music we listen to and the sounds we experience according to mood, behaviour, whim, or conscious control. All ‘recorded music’ would become permanently fluid, open to improvisation and gestural control.
Here’s something: a venerable analogue monosynth re-imagined for the 21st Century and the Nintendo DS, no less.
2 twin-ocillator synths and a 4-part drum machine pre-loaded with samples create by the DS-10 itself. A 6-track sequencer. Built-in FX and real-time sound control via the touch screen. Wireless communication allowing you to sync multiple units together and swap data. From this:
To this:
Fun. Amazing. Mind-blowing. And yet so musically limited (to put it mildly). A Toy.
This is quite an interesting device (providing you are seriously into arpeggiators):
As usual the video brings up as many questions as it answers:
Can you save patches?
Can you sequence patches?
Is it portable/reliable?
I think without 1 & 2 the device would be very limiting if used on a regular basis. Whatever, it’s mostly interesting because of the way it asks the user to rethink the way they visualize and spatialize music: it’s a new notational form as much as anything else. See also Reactable.
Back in October I posted on the so-called ‘loudness wars’ (Just Loud). Since then a couple of other useful sources have come to my attention:
Firstly, there’s an excellent in-depth article here on Wikipedia, with a particularly useful set of References and some well-conceived visual examples. For example, there’s an illuminating image sequence showing the time-domain representations of four successive releases of Something by The Beatles which highlights the incredible extent to which modern CD releases are being (over) compressed. And in a similar vein, there are these two images of Abba’s One Of Us, the first from a 1981 CD release, the second from a 2005 reissue:
I’m sorry, but this is nothing short of butchery…
The second article is in a similar vein and is here at Record-Producer.com. What’s interesting about this article is that the included audio examples have been processed to show what it is your adding when you over-compress/limit. Incidentally, a very odd piece of music!
Finally, there’s this article from Wired’s Listening Post, which is really about the sound of vinyl compared to that on CD. It only mentions the ‘loudness wars’ in passing, but it seems to me to be part of the overall debate.
There have been four posts so far on this blog about multi-touch interfaces: Jefferson Han’s work (along with the iPhone) here and here, Microsoft’s Surface, and Reactable. Why? Firstly, I love ‘em. Secondly, I think they will soon become the norm as far as human-computer interfacing goes.
However, the first commercially available multi-touch interface must surely be the JazzMutant Lemur, released around October 2005. This is an audio-media specific control surface that is “able to track an unlimited number of fingers at once” according to their website. It’ll work with all the major DAWS, and will even interface with Flash. Its controller software includes a whole range of presets objects such as faders, rotary controllers, sliders, pads, scopes, switches, and various readout/LED options, and it will allow you to build almost anything:
There’s loads more info on the JazzMutant site: technical description, image galleries, and some strangely silent videos.
What a great piece of kit, and it’s a shame it’s marooned in the boondocks of the music technology industry. In fact, if I was a venture capitalist I would buy JazzMutant and get this thing out into the mainstream of the computing world now! First off, I’d invest in top-notch and heavy-duty presets for Photoshop, Illustrator, and Flash…. Then Google Maps, iPhoto, etc., etc..
I cannot let the death of Stockhausen pass by without saying something. But what?
Firstly, I’ll have to admit that much of his music remains completely unknown to me. Despite this, those pieces that I do know exist somewhere inside me in a place that is very close to the centre of my musical world: Gesang Der Jünglinge, Kontakte, Microphonie, Telemusik, and his masterpiece Hymnen. In other words, all his early pure electronic stuff from the period 1956-1967.
I believe that no matter what else Stockhausen has done since, these works alone would assure his place as one of the most important composers of the 20th century. Simply put, he stripped Western music down to its absolutely minimal state—the sine wave—and built it up from there, harmonic by harmonic. Complex sounds were laboriously created by overdubbing simple tones, initially using only the most basic equipment: tape machines; oscillators; a white noise generator; filters; and later, reverberation. Stockhausen describes one such process during the production of Gesang Der Jünglinge, quoted in Kurtz (1992):
I invented completely different processes in which the three of us - myself and two musical and technical collaborators - each used a different piece of equipment. One of us had a pulse generator, the second a feedback filter whose width could be continuously changed and the third a volume control (potentiometer). I drew graphic representations of the processual forms. In one such form, lasting twenty seconds, for example, the first of us would alter the pulse speed, say from three to fourteen pulses per second, following a zigzag curve; the second would change the pitch curve of the feedback filter, in accordance with another graphic pattern; and the third - using yet another graphic - would change the dynamic curve. [...] So we sat down to realise one of these processual forms, one of us would count 3, 2, 1, 0, then off we went. The stopwatch was running, and at the end of twenty seconds each of us had to be finished.
Each composition took him months of laborious and painstaking work. And yet despite the mathematical precision and scientific rigour with which these works were created, incredibly, miraculously, they sound vital, thrilling, and organic. They sound like they’re alive, and 50 years down the line still have the power to shock, excite, and stimulate. This is Stockhausen’s genius.
Contemporary musicians, with their computers, their synths, samplers, and plug-ins; their MIDI, their virtual instruments and their digital mixers; their automation, quantization, and their Auto-Tune; their loops, their cutting and pasting; they still have almost everything to learn from Stockhausen because—despite the archaic nature of the technology he used—conceptually he remains light years ahead of them.
I love Stockhausen because:
He was brave. He went where the music took him.
He was independent. No record company puppet.
He was doing ’surround sound’ from the beginning. To him, a sound always exists in three-dimensional space. (This is a drawback listening to his CDs: they’re only in stereo.)
He was committed to his vision. If you were lucky enough to attend one of his electronic music concerts, you just sat in the dark and listened!
His music is just awesome.
Finally, here’s a short 2006 TV piece—apparently from the BBC’s Culture Show—that shows the honesty, intelligence, integrity, and downright impish charm of the man. Delightful:
Thankyou so much. The End.
Reference Kurtz, M. (1992) Stockhausen: A Biography. Faber.
The second day of the surround recording sessions at Swansea Metropolitan University with the final year students of the BSc Music Technology course produced this fine version of The Devil’s Dream/Mason’s Apron, as performed by Roots & Galoots:
