The Early History of Music Programming and Digital Synthesis

Chapter 20. Meeting 20, Languages: The Early History of Music Programming and Digital Synthesis 20.1. Announcements • Music Technology Case Study Final Draft due Tuesday, 24 November 20.2. Quiz • 10 Minutes 20.3. The Early Computer: History • 1942 to 1946: Atanasoff-Berry Computer, the Colossus, the Harvard Mark I, and the Electrical Numerical Integrator And Calculator (ENIAC) • 1942: Atanasoff-Berry Computer Courtesy of University Archives, Library, Iowa State University of Science and Technology. Used with permission. • 1946: ENIAC unveiled at University of Pennsylvania Source: US Army • Diverse and incomplete computers © Wikimedia Foundation. License CC BY-SA. 20.4. The Early Computer: Interface • Punchcards • 1960s: card printed for Bell Labs, for the GE 600 Courtesy of Douglas W. Jones. Used with permission. • Fortran cards Courtesy of Douglas W. Jones. Used with permission. 20.5. The Jacquard Loom • 1801: Joseph Jacquard invents a way of storing and recalling loom operations Photo courtesy of Douglas W. Jones at the University of Iowa. Photo by George H. Williams, from Wikipedia (public domain). • Multiple cards could be strung together • Based on technologies of numerous inventors from the 1700s, including the automata of Jacques Vaucanson (Riskin 2003) 20.6. Computer Languages: Then and Now • Low-level languages are closer to machine representation; high-level languages are closer to human abstractions • Low Level • • Machine code: direct binary instruction • Assembly: mnemonics to machine codes High-Level: FORTRAN • 1954: John Backus at IBM design FORmula TRANslator System • 1958: Fortran II • • • 1977: ANSI Fortran High-Level: C • 1972: Dennis Ritchie at Bell Laboratories • Based on B Very High-Level: Lisp, Perl, Python, Ruby • 1958: Lisp by John McCarthy • 1987: Perl by Larry Wall • 1990: Python by Guido van Rossum • 1995: Ruby by Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto 20.7. The Earliest Computer Sounds: CSIRAC • late 1940s: The Australian Council for Scientific Industrial Research develop the (CSIR) Mk 1 computer, later CSIRAC (Council for Scientific and Industrial Research Automatic Computer) © Wikipedia User:Dysprosia . License BSD. • 1951: CSIR programmed by Geoff Hill to play simple melodies with a pulse-wave through its integrated loudspeaker • CSIRAC Performance: .001 Mhz speed, less than 768 bytes of RAM, consumed 30,000 watts of power, and weighed 7,000 Kg • Listen: Reconstruction of CSIRAC music, Colonel Bogey • Listen: Reconstruction of CSIRAC music, In Cellar Cool, with simulated machine noise 20.8. The Earliest Computer Sounds: The Ferranti Mark 1 and MIRACLE • Recently original recordings of early computers have been released • 1951: Christopher Strachey, under guidance from Alan Turing, writes a program for Ferranti Mark 1 at the University of Manchester (Fildes 2008) Listen: Christopher Strachey. "God Save the King" and more (BBC News website) • 1955: David Caplin and Dietrich Prinz write a program to generate and synthesize the Mozart Dice Game on a Ferranti Mark 1* (MIRACLE) at Shell laboratories in Amsterdam (Ariza 2009b) (c) source unknown. All rights reserved. Listening: Mozart "Dice Game" on the Ferranti Mark 1. 20.9. 1950s: The First Synthesis Language • Max Mathews, working at the acoustics research department Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, conducted experiments in analog to digital conversion (ADC) and digital to analog conversion (DAC) • 1957: Music I is used on an IBM 704 to render compositions by Newman Guttman Listening: The Silver Scale (1957): frequently cited as the first piece of computer music • IBM 704, released in 1954, was the first mass-produced computer with core memory and floatingpoint arithmetic Photo: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory © IBM. • Music 1: one voice, one waveform (triangle), square envelope, and control only of pitch, loudness, and decay • The IBM 704 was in NYC; output has to be taken to a 12 bit DAC at Bell Labs in New Jersey (1980, p. 15) • Mathews: “... as far as I know there were no attempts to perform music with a computer” (1980, p. 16) “Music I sounded terrible and was very limited” (1980, p. 16) • 1958: Music II: adds four voices and 16 stored waveforms • Moves to IBM 7094 20.10. 1950s: Early Concepts of Music N • 1960: Music III: solidified fundamental concepts • Unit generator: modular building blocks of sound processing similar to the components of a modular synthesizer Mathews: “I wanted to give the musician a great deal of power and generality in making the musical sounds, but at the same time I wanted as simple a program as possible” (1980, p. 16) Mathews: “I wouldn't say that I copied the analog synthesizer building blocks; I think we actually developed them fairly simultaneously” (1980, p. 16) • Wavetables: stored tables of frequently used data (often waveforms) retained and reused for efficiency • Two code files (then punch cards) required to produce sounds • Orchestra: synthesis definitions of instruments with specified parametric inputs • Score: a collection of event instructions providing all parameters to instruments defined in the Orchestra 20.11. Listening: Tenney • James Tenney: student of Lejaren Hiller at the University of Illinois • Mathews: “to my mind, the most interesting music he did at the Laboratories involved the use of random noises of various sorts.” (1980, p. 17) • Employed randomness as a sound source and as a compositional strategy (Mathews and Pierce 1987, p. 534) • Listen: James Tenney, Analog #1: Noise Study, 1961 20.12. 1960s: Distribution • Lack of portable, hardware independent languages led to new versions of Music-N for each machine • 1962: Music IV: Mathews and Joan Miller complete on IBM 7094 computer © IBM. • Early 1960s Max Mathews distributes Music IV to universities with computers • Leads to MUSIC 4B (Hubert Howe and Godfrey Winham), MUSIC 4BF, in Fortran, and MUSIC 360, developed for the IBM 360, written by Barry Vercoe • 1967-1968: Mathews completes Music V, written in FORTRAN with inner loops of unit generators coded in machine language (1980, p. 17) • Music V: source code distributed as boxes of 3500 punch cards (Chadabe 1997, p. 114) 20.13. 1960s: Working Methods • Music V was a multi-pass batch program • IBM 7094 was used to generate digital audio samples that were stored on magnetic tape • IBM 1620 was used to convert samples into analog audio signals • Rendering audio and DA conversion would take up to two weeks 20.14. Music from Mathematics • Album released on Decca Records in 1962 with early computer music by Mathews, J.R. Pierece, David Lewin, James Tenney, and others. © Decca Label Group. . 20.15. Listening: Jean-Claude Risset • Risset visits Bell Labs in 1964, works with Mathews • Had researched timbre analysis methods and held a Ph.D. in physics • 1969: Works with sounds entirely synthesized with a computer at Bell Labs using Music V • Used of additive and FM synthesis techniques • Listen: Jean-Claude Risset: “Mutations,” 1969 20.16. 1970s: Music 11 and Control Rate Signals • 1973: Vercoe, at MIT, releases Music 11 for the Digital Equipment PDP-11 • Optimized performance by introducing control rate signals (k-rate) separate from audio rate signals (a-rate) 20.17. Listening: Barry Vercoe • Composition for Viola and Computer • All digital parts produced with Music 11 • Listen: Vercoe: “Synapse” 1976 20.18. Listening: James Dashow • Completed at MIT with Music 11 • Listen: Dashow: “In Winter Shine” 1983 20.19. 1980s: Portability • Machine specific low-level code quickly became obsolete • Machine independent languages, such as C, offered greatest portability • 1985: Vercoe translates Music 11 into C, called Csound • 1990: Vercoe demonstrates real-time Csound • Csound is ported to all platforms and is modern Music-N 20.20. Reading: Roads: Interview with Max Mathews • Roads, C. 1980. “Interview with Max Mathews.” Computer Music Journal 4(4): 15-22. • Mathews states that “the only answer I could see was not to make the instruments myself -- not to impose my taste and ideas about instruments or the musicians -- but rather to make a set of fairly universal building blocks and give the musician both the task and the freedom to put these together into his or her instruments” (1980, p. 16); is this goal possible? • Mathews states that “The reaction amongst all but a handful of people was a combination of skepticism, fear, and complete lack of comprehension” (1980); what motivated these responses, and how were these responses different based on established musical roles? • What does Mathews later work with GROOVE, the Sequential Drum, and electric violins suggest about his interests after Music V? 20.21. Listening: Spiegel • Laurie Spiegel: worked at Bell Labs from 1973 to 1979 • Worked with Mathews on the GROOVE system • Appalachian Grove composed with the GROOVE system • Listen: Laurie Spiegel, Appalachian Grove I, 1974 • Improvisation on a “Concerto Generator”, realized on the Alles synthesizer with interactive control software written in C for the DEC PDP-11 (c) source unknown. All rights reserved. YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWKDsfARXMc)