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Computer music

Application of computing technology in music

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  • 5 chapters

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History

Much of the work on computer music has drawn on the relationship between music and mathematics, a relationship that has been noted since the Ancient Greeks described the "harmony of the spheres".

Musical melodies were first generated by the computer originally named the CSIR Mark 1 (later renamed CSIRAC) in Australia in 1950. There were newspaper reports from America and England (early and recently) that computers may have played music earlier, but thorough research has debunked these stories as there is no evidence to support the newspaper reports (some of which were speculative). Research has shown that people speculated about computers playing music, possibly because computers would make noises, but there is no evidence that they did it.

The world's first computer to play music was the CSIR Mark 1 (later named CSIRAC), which was designed and built by Trevor Pearcey and Maston Beard in the late 1940s. Mathematician Geoff Hill programmed the CSIR Mark 1 to play popular musical melodies from the very early 1950s. In 1950 the CSIR Mark 1 was used to play music, the first known use of a digital computer for that purpose. The music was never recorded, but it has been accurately reconstructed. In 1951 it publicly played the "Colonel Bogey March" of which only the reconstruction exists. However, the CSIR Mark 1 played standard repertoire and was not used to extend musical thinking or composition practice, as Max Mathews did, which is current computer-music practice.

The first music to be performed in England was a performance of the British National Anthem that was programmed by Christopher Strachey on the Ferranti Mark 1, late in 1951. Later that year, short extracts of three pieces were recorded there by a BBC outside broadcasting unit: the National Anthem, "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep", and "In the Mood"; this is recognized as the earliest recording of a computer to play music as the CSIRAC music was never recorded. This recording can be heard at the Manchester University site. Researchers at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch declicked and restored this recording in 2016 and the results may be heard on SoundCloud.

Two further major 1950s developments were the origins of digital sound synthesis by computer, and of algorithmic composition programs beyond rote playback. Amongst other pioneers, the musical chemists Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson worked on a series of algorithmic composition experiments from 1956 to 1959, manifested in the 1957 premiere of the Illiac Suite for string quartet. Max Mathews at Bell Laboratories developed the influential MUSIC I program and its descendants, further popularising computer music through a 1963 article in Science. The first professional composer to work with digital synthesis was James Tenney, who created a series of digitally synthesized and/or algorithmically composed pieces at Bell Labs using Mathews' MUSIC III system, beginning with Analog #1 (Noise Study) (1961). After Tenney left Bell Labs in 1964, he was replaced by composer Jean-Claude Risset, who conducted research on the synthesis of instrumental timbres and composed Computer Suite from Little Boy (1968).

Early computer-music programs typically did not run in real time, although the first experiments on CSIRAC and the Ferranti Mark 1 did operate in real time. From the late 1950s, with increasingly sophisticated programming, programs would run for hours or days, on multi million-dollar computers, to generate a few minutes of music. One way around this was to use a 'hybrid system' of digital control of an analog synthesiser and early examples of this were Max Mathews' GROOVE system (1969) and also MUSYS by Peter Zinovieff (1969).

Until now partial use has been exploited for musical research into the substance and form of sound (convincing examples are those of Hiller and Isaacson in Urbana, Illinois, US; Iannis Xenakis in Paris and Pietro Grossi in Florence, Italy).

In May 1967 the first experiments in computer music in Italy were carried out by the S 2F M studio in Florence in collaboration with General Electric Information Systems Italy. Olivetti-General Electric GE 115 (Olivetti S.p.A.) is used by Grossi as a performer: three programmes were prepared for these experiments. The programmes were written by Ferruccio Zulian and used by Pietro Grossi for playing Bach, Paganini, and Webern works and for studying new sound structures.

John Chowning's work on FM synthesis from the 1960s to the 1970s allowed much more efficient digital synthesis, eventually leading to the development of the affordable FM synthesis-based Yamaha DX7 digital synthesizer, released in 1983.

Interesting sounds must have a fluidity and changeability that allows them to remain fresh to the ear. In computer music this subtle ingredient is bought at a high computational cost, both in terms of the number of items requiring detail in a score and in the amount of interpretive work the instruments must produce to realize this detail in sound.

In Japan

In Japan, experiments in computer music date back to 1962, when Keio University professor Sekine and Toshiba engineer Hayashi experimented with the TOSBAC computer. This resulted in a piece entitled TOSBAC Suite, influenced by the Illiac Suite. Later Japanese computer music compositions include a piece by Kenjiro Ezaki presented during Osaka Expo '70 and "Panoramic Sonore" (1974) by music critic Akimichi Takeda. Ezaki also published an article called "Contemporary Music and Computers" in 1970. Since then, Japanese research in computer music has largely been carried out for commercial purposes in popular music, though some of the more serious Japanese musicians used large computer systems such as the Fairlight in the 1970s.

In the late 1970s these systems became commercialized, including systems like the Roland MC-8 Microcomposer, where a microprocessor-based system controls an analog synthesizer, released in 1978. In addition to the Yamaha DX7, the advent of inexpensive digital chips and microcomputers allowed real-time generation of computer music. In the 1980s, Japanese personal computers such as the NEC PC-88 came installed with FM synthesis sound chips and featured audio programming languages such as Music Macro Language (MML) and MIDI interfaces, which were most often used to produce video game music, or chiptunes. By the early 1990s, the performance of microprocessor-based computers reached the point that real-time generation of computer music using more general programs and algorithms became possible.

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