Erkki Kurenniemi: Computer Music (c. 1966)

February 04, 2012, 9:01pm

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Music, technology, utopia: The legacy of Pietro Grossi

Pietro Grossi: Excerpt from Create C (1972)

From the album Bit Art (2010)

On the basis of both his musical creations and his visionary perspectives on the fate of art in the digital age, the Italian composer Pietro Grossi (1917-2002) is one of the most important figures in late 20th-century music. Grossi’s career was dedicated to a radical new conception of creativity and artistic production, as both aesthetic and a social phenomena.

Like most electronic and computer music composers of his generation, Grossi began as a classically trained musician. He studied cello and composition, played in the orchestra for many years, and his early compositions from the late 1950s are for conventional ensembles such as the string quartet, albeit in a probing, post-Webernian idiom, as was the style of the time. Some of these pieces employed a pre-compositional approach known as combinatory analysis, which was inspired by Grossi’s reading of Joseph Schillinger’s influential text The Mathematical Basis of the Arts.

His first contact with electronic music came in 1961, when he visited the Studio di Fonologia Musicale (Studio of Musical Phonology) in Milan, which was led by Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna. Here he realized Progretto 2-3, one of his earliest tape pieces, based on slowly changing sonorities formed by superimposed sine waves. Grossi would revisit this concept in an even more fundamental way in his later compositions Battimenti (1965). Another piece from this period, entited PG 4, was an ambient drone work created for a sound installation for an architectural exhibition in Florence.

Grossi founded the Studio di Fonologia Musicale di Firenze in Florence in 1963. It began in his home with a white noise generator and a few oscillators, filters, and tape machines. In 1965 the studio was absorbed by the Florence conservatory, where Grossi began teaching a course in electronic music, the first of its kind in Italy. In 1967, Grossi was given the opportunity to develop a music program for a GE-115 computer, provided by the Italian computer company Olivetti. Grossi programmed a number of pieces, including a fugue from Bach’s Musical Offering and Paganini’s Fifth Caprice. He also created his first original computer compositions, which demonstrated the experimental potential of the computer. All this music was included on a 45-RPM record that was sent as a Christmas present to 20,000 Olivetti customers.

In 1969, Grossi began working with computers on a regular basis at the National University Computation Center (CNUCE) in Pisa. At first the computer was able to output only a monophonic square wave of constant amplitude. Later systems allowed for variation in volume and timbre. The computer stored music as manipulable data which could be affected through a set of commands at the console, such as INVERT (in invert melodic intervals), SCALE (to change tuning), and MODIFY (to make global parametric alterations).

While many composers were drawn to the computer for its ability to perform complex musical instructions with absolute fidelity, Grossi had a fundamentally different conception of the potential of “computer music.” He saw the computer not as a means of precisely realizing the pre-formed music in his mind, but rather of liberating composition from the constraints imposed by human intelligence. Provided by humans with certain basic parameters, the computer can create music of a complexity and richness literally beyond imagination.

Grossi’s music from the early 1970s is to my ears the most exhilarating and original of his work. Pieces such as Monodia (1970) are stunning etudes in synthetic sound, using a single, monophonic sound chip to create skittering blasts of notes, twisted digital distortion, and trompe-l’oreille illusions of polyphony. Create C (1972), presented here, could be humorously described as “Ferneyhough in Super Mario World”: the primal timbres of early computer sound chips are pushed to their limits, creating a music of bewildering complexity and abrasive beauty. For all its intensity, this is still music of breathtaking, childlike directness, far from all pretense or ironic posturing. Grossi’s music not only anticipates but surpasses much of the computer music that would follow it in the 40 years between then and now.

Grossi’s later projects carried his radical aesthetic principles from music into graphic arts. In 1986 he developed “Homeart,” a computer program written in QBasic which created random visual patterns according to basic instructions— a kind of digital interior decoration. He later published a number of unicum books based on the Homeart program. Finally, in 1997, he and Sergio Maltagliata designed an interactive audio-visual composition called NetOper@. (This was a late manifestation of Grossi’s interest in long-distance music-making: in 1970 he had established a telephone link between computers in Rimini and Pisa in 1970, and in 1974 organized a “telematic concert” between himself in Pisa and Iannis Xenakis in Paris.  This idea would later be taken up by the American computer music group The Hub in 1985.)

The composer at the console

The emergence of the computer as an instrument of what could be called “computer-aided composition” spelled the end of the division of labor separating the functions of performer, composer, and listener. Accordingly, Grossi envisioned a fundamental shift in the meaning of composition. His class at the Florence Conservatory was open to non-musicians: the computer was to de-specialize musical production, eliminating the long, lonely hours of study required under the old regime. The liberation from the drudgery of instrumental training would free students to become more well-rounded and enlightened members of society.

Grossi encouraged his students to do away with the concept of intellectual property, instead thinking of music as a constantly changing work-in-progress of which individuals are merely the temporary custodians. Existing music was not a sacred and inviolable cultural heritage, but rather a reservoir of material for future productions. This was a kind of “remix” aesthetic avant la lettre, but with an important difference: Grossi’s notion of musical re-invention was based not on recordings, but rather on the greater malleability afforded by musical storage in terms of digital instructions. This allows for more abstract transformations. For example, a given composition, when stored as data in the computer, could be analyzed with regard to pitch content, producing a statistical table of pitch-class frequency that forms the basis for a new composition with a similar tonal “color” to the original. Analogous process could be undertaken with regard to rhythm, dynamics, and theoretically even timbre.  Grossi writes:

“Already twenty-five years ago, I was in close contact with all the researchers involved in electronic music, and we exchanged taped recordings each with a title and an author. And each time I got something, I was very happy to listen to what the other person had done. But I could also get hundreds of other pieces out of that tape by making use of the technology available at the time: variable speed tape recorders, filters, even scissors. Already we saw the prospect of freeing ourselves from the message, which earlier had been rigorously fixed on music paper and performed according to precise rules. Each tape-recorded phonic message became the point of departure for creating many others… From a set of information making up a classical, contemporary, or even extemporary piece created by the computer itself, it is possible to make an infinite series of transformations.”

Grossi’s vision of the dissolution of the barriers between listeners, performers and composers was an outgrowth of the utopian thinking of the 1960s, which foresaw technological progress leading to the minimization of labor, freeing individuals for lives devoted to creative pursuits. As he put it, “[The present gives us] the image of a society characterized both by permanent education and research and by a frequent transfer from one activity to another. And in the fullness of time the leisure deriving from increased automation will give man the possibility of cultural enrichment and refinement. Today, practically speaking we have the possibility of solving our problems; the means are there—only the appropriate structures are still missing.”

Such a vision accorded with the idea of “composing” outlined in Jacques Attali’s 1977 book Noise. Attali announced the arrival of a new paradigm in the history of music, characterized by the decentralized production of music outside the orbit of economic exchange. For Attali, as for Grossi, the emancipatory and democratic potential of music, aided by the development of technology, presaged a social order of equality and plenitude: Grossi invoked the words of sociologist Renato Famea, who foresaw a utopian anti-economy of “everything for everybody, effortless and valueless.” 

As Grossi foresaw, the development of technology has decentralized and democratized musical creativity. But the old ways die hard. Collaborative and interdisciplinary approaches to composition are still the exception, rather than the rule. Popular conceptions—and following them, money and power—are still in the thrall of a conservative mentality that favors marketable products above experimental processes, individual geniuses above creative collectives, and technology as a means of repeating what we know, rather than discovering what we don’t. At a historical moment in which the idea of progress threatens to wither into the private accumulation of consumer gadgets amidst the general destruction of the commons, Grossi’s vision of musical politics is as distant as it is pressingly relevant.

 Still image from Grossi’s Homeart program

October 23, 2011, 3:49pm

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

The Hub: “Waxlips I” (1991)

From the album Boundary Layer 

This Thursday at Vox Populi in Philly, computer music pioneers Mark Trayle and John Bischoff will be playing in a concert organized by my comrades at Philadelphia Sound Forum. Trayle and Bischoff are both alums of the network music collective The Hub, which in turn spun off from the seminal “micro-computer network band” the League of Automatic Music Composers.

The name “The Hub” was first used in connection with a performance by Bischoff and Perkis in San Francisco in 1985. The group appeared in its six-person form for the first time in a pair of concerts curated by Nicolas Collins in New York in the fall of that year. Breaking up into two sets of three, The Hub performed simultaneously at two separate Manhattan venues, connected via modem. (Kyle Gann dubbed this phenomenon, perhaps the first of its kind, “musica telephonica.”) Ultimately, however, the group opted for “in the flesh” performances, which allowed them to better respond to the unfolding algorithmic structure of the music.

This sephirot-like diagram shows one of the group’s MIDI configurations

In The Hub’s first incarnation, the members’ computers were wired together via a central memory unit they called “the Blob.” Around 1990, they adopted a MIDI interface, which allowed each player to communicate to any other directly, rather than through a common data pool. Later in the decade The Hub would abandon MIDI-connected homemade synthesizers for computer audio languages such as Max, and in the mid-90s they revisited the possibility of simultaneous music-making over the internet.

Waxlips, conceived by Tim Perkis in 1991, provides a great example of the group’s approach to computer-augmented improvisation:

The rule is simple: each player sends and receives requests to play one note. Upon receiving the request, each should play the note requested, and then transform the note message in some fixed way to a different message, and send it out to someone else. The transformation can follow any rule the player wants, with the one limitation that within anyone section of the piece, the same rule must be followed (so that any particular message in will always cause the same new message out). One lead player sends signals indicating new sections in the piece (where players change their transformation rules) and jump-starts the process by spraying the network with a burst of requests. The network action had an unexpected living and liquid behavior: the number of possible interactions is astronomical in scale, and the evolution of the network is always different, sometimes terminating in complex (chaotic) states including near repetitions, sometimes ending in simple loops, repeated notes, or just dying out altogether.

September 19, 2011, 10:38am

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Yasunao Tone: Excerpt from “Solar Eclipse in October”

From the album Musica Iconologos (1993)

Japanese polyartist Yasunao Tone is an alumnus of many major experimental art movements of the 1960s and 70s, including the seminal free improvisation outfit Group Ongaku, the international neo-Dada collective Fluxus, and the Japanese computer art pioneers known as Team Random.

Tone’s most characteristic music involves experimentation with the generative musical potential of digital recording technologies and the process of transduction between different forms of information. In the mid-1980s he began exploring the unexpected sound potential of compact discs, taking advantage of the error correction mechanism triggered by misreadings of the ones and zeros in which sound is digitally encoded. By applying scotch tape with tiny pinholes to the bottom of the CD, Tone scrambled the player’s storage retrieval logic and coaxed a sputtering, crystalline music from the disc’s binary data.

A similar concept underlies Musica Iconologos, a 1993 work commissioned by Thomas Buckner of Lovely Music. Taking as his source material two poems from the Shih Ching, the oldest extant collection of Chinese poetry, Tone digitized the images of the poem’s characters and generated histograms from the resulting visual data. These histograms, in turn, were converted into sound via computer software controlled by Tone’s technical assistants at the Electronic Music Studio of McGill University in Montreal. Each of the 187 characters in the poems was turned into a tiny burst of sound merely 20 milliseconds long. These bursts were then elongated and woven together according the verbal logic of the poems to create the music that you hear.

Tone’s experiment resonates with a deep techno-naturalist fascination with the dream of using musical devices to unlock the latent sonic forces inhabiting the world around us. The result is a harsh but beautiful music, an alien musical language opaque in meaning yet governed by some uncanny syntax. Refracted through the transfiguring lens of computer technology, there glimmers the faint but unmistakable trace of movement, intelligence, life.

July 12, 2011, 7:04pm

The League of Automatic Music Composers: Live

Check out this fantastic video of the “world’s first computer network band,” the previously featured League of Automatic Music Composers. (This is the post-1980 lineup of Perkis/Bischoff/Horton.)

May 09, 2011, 9:38am

A young Raymond Kurzweil shares his musical computer on I’ve Got a Secret in 1965. 

April 29, 2011, 9:03pm

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

The League of Automatic Music Composers: “Martian Folk Music” (1980)

From the album The League of Automatic Music Composers 1978-1983

Take the anarchic, self-organizing ethos of free improvisation, add the raw, low-bit waveforms of early computer sound chips, and tie it all together with cybernetic concepts of interactivity and information exchange, and you get the League of Automatic Music Composers.  A product of the uniquely Northern Californian fusion of counterculture and high technology (brilliantly chronicled in Erik Davis’ book Techgnosis), the League pioneered the use of computers in live performance and created music of rare and distinctive beauty.

The League at work: Tim Perkis, Jim Horton, and John Bischoff

The KIM-1, released in 1976 and packing 1152 bytes of RAM, was one of the first mass-market microcomputers (so-called to distinguish them from the massive mainframes that were the most common form of computer at the time).  Jim Horton, an electronic musician who had been active for years in the Bay Area scene, quickly bought a KIM-1 and started exploring the unit’s potential as a musical instrument.  Horton had earlier specialized in building massive, self-generating analog synthesizer patches which he would let run for hours on end— a remarkable parallel with the simultaneous efforts undertaken in Europe by Roland Kayn.  (A late solo work by Horton was previously featured on this blog.)  

It was Horton who conceived the notion of a “silicon orchestra” of human-controlled interconnected computers which reacted to each other’s output in deliberately complicated configurations.  He was soon joined by John Bischoff, Rich Gold, and David Behrman, and this quartet performed for the first time as the League of Automatic Music Composers in November 1978.  

In 1980 Gold and Behrman left the group and Tim Perkis became a member. “Martian Folk Music” is performed by this later lineup of Perkis, Bischoff, and Horton. This track is typical of the League’s trademark sound: pure digital waves spasmodically careening across the sound-field, interacting according to the laws some occult dynamics that lies just beyond the listener’s comprehension.  

A flyer made by Rich Gold showing one of the League’s configurations

August 02, 2010, 1:00pm

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Newman Guttman: “Pitch Variations” (1957)

From the album Music from Mathematics

It seems appropriate that some of the first pieces of computer music were composed by a man with the fantastically dorky name of “Newman Guttman.” Realized on the state-of-the-art IBM 7090 computer at the legendary Bell Labs in New Jersey, the work of Guttman, Max Mathews, and others helped inaugurate a new age of synthetic sound.

The theoretical foundation of computer music was nothing less than a recapitulation of the 2500-year-old wisdom of Pythagoras:  ”Any sound can he described mathematically by a sequence of numbers.”  From this basic principle, the pioneers of computer music laid out an ambitious program of unhindered musical creativity:

“Man’s music has always been acoustically limited by the instruments on which he plays. These are mechanisms which have physical restrictions. We have made sound and music directly from numbers, surmounting conventional limitations of instruments. Thus, the musical universe is now circumscribed only by man’s perceptions and creativity.” (From the liner notes to Music from Mathematics)

But, as Pierre Schaeffer and others were discovering, there was a chasm between the neat equations of pure mathematics and the pyscho-acoustic realities of human hearing.  ”Pitch Variations” explores the nonlinear relationship between frequency and perceived pitch that arises in periodic vibrations too quick to be perceived as rhythm, yet too slow to be heard as tone— the realm of what would later be called pulsar synthesis.  This noisy little piece of electronic music history thus anticipates many later developments, from granular synthesis to glitch.

This wonderful album, first released in 1962 and long out of print, has been graciously immortalized and is available for download from Orpheus Music.

June 23, 2010, 3:40pm

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Jim Horton: “Rebirth” (1990)

From the album Numbers Racket

Beginning in the late 1960s, Jim Horton (1944-1998) was an active member of the San Francisco Bay Area experimental music scene. In the early 70s he studied at the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College under the leadership of Robert Ashley. With Tim Perkis and John Bischoff, Horton founded the “world’s first computer network band,” the League of Automatic Music Composers, in 1978. The League pioneered the collaborative use of microcomputers in live improvisation. Many of their “compositions” were driven by game-like interactions between the players.  Around this time, Horton also began using computers to implement alternate systems of tuning, and in particular various forms of just intonation.

These influences are at work in this piece composed by Jim Horton in 1990 and released on a 1992 cassette by the Just Intonation Network entitled Numbers Racket. The sounds in this piece are vintage 80s digitalia. Although I’m generally fond of these bright, metallic sounds, the timbre of the piece wears a bit thin by the end of it.  The real interest here is on the level of tuning and form.  

The composer provided the following cryptic notes to “Rebirth”:

The computer, empty of suffering, simulates high-speed attainment of nirvana by playing the medieval Tibetan Buddhist game “Determination of the Ascension of Stages,” invented by Sakya pandita Kunga Gyaltsen (“Whose Banner is Total Joy”). The board shows 104 places of a fantastic cosmic geography.

The game mentioned by Horton is a variation on an ancient Indian board game in which “the player progresses according to the throw of dice from hell states and other inauspicious conditions by way of the Tantric path to Buddhahood and nirvana.” (Amazingly, it belongs to the same lineage as the modern children’s game Snakes and Ladders.) This strange “program” behind the piece resonates with the cyclical quality of the music, which climbs ever upward only to tumble back down again and start anew. Each iteration is slightly different, and the various levels seem always to be slightly out of phase, thus creating the overall sense of motion and vitality suggested by the title.

June 10, 2010, 2:32pm