Joseph Paradiso's Massive Modular Synthesizer

Joseph Paradiso is professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Lab, where he is co-director of the “Things That Think” workgroup. Paradiso is trained as a physicist and electrical engineer, but in his spare time he has built one of the world’s largest modular synthesizer configurations, a creation known simply as “Massive Modular Synth.” 

In the age of computer music triumphant, the towering banks of modular synthesizer units often seen in histories of electronic music are typically portrayed as relics of a technologically obsolete era. But these physically clunky devices continue to exercise a powerful allure on experimentally minded musicians, as shown by the recent resurgence of interest in custom-built analog components.

Paradiso, who has been building his own synthesizers since 1974, approaches his instrument not as a means of creating static “sounds” to be played by means of a keyboard or other kind of interface, but rather as a sophisticated form of “hands-on” composition:

I don’t play this rig any more as a keyboard instrument. My main use for it now is to make gigantic sound installations with huge patches that I continue building over several hours, until I run out of patch cords. The process is perhaps closer to sculpture than music, where one starts with a small “seed” patch that expresses a simple musical process that is progressively augmented and refined as the patch builds. It is a large, complex feedback system, with signals that control the modules fed back to their inputs through a massive network of digital and analog processing . The resulting sounds are mainly autonomous, babbling and droning on for hours and days, as each patch achieves a distinctive groove or atmosphere without really repeating.

This approach strongly resembles the so-called “cybernetic music” of the German composer (and Acousmata favorite) Roland Kayn (1933-2011). The act of wiring the components together becomes itself a form of composition, expressed not in musical acts or notation, but rather in the distinctly technological language of oscillators, filters, sequencers and logic gates. Although some of the components of Paradiso’s synthesizer are digital, there is no computer involved, and Paradiso sees his instrument as a testament to the aesthetic values of tangibility, ephemerality, and unpredictability possessed by analog electronics.

November 26, 2011, 1:51pm

Undated drawing by Paul Hindemith (from the book Der Komponist als Zeichner)

November 07, 2011, 10:57am

Steve Porcaro of Toto tweaks the band’s massive Polyfusion syntheszier “Damius” (1982). From Mark Vail’s Vintage Synthesizers, p. 155.

September 09, 2011, 10:58am

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Roger Winfield: “Windsong 2”

From the album Windsongs: The Sound of Aeolian Harps (1991)

Although the underlying acoustic principle is an ancient one, the first detailed description of a human-built Aeolian harp (also known as the wind harp) comes from the 1650 compendium Musurgia Universalis of the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher. The instrument, which appears under the heading “Machinamentum X,” is featured in a series of fantastic devices for making music without human intervention.

Kircher often gets credit for introducing the wind harp into European letters, but the instrument was mentioned briefly in the Magia Naturalis of the Italian scholar Giambattista della Porta, published in 1588. As R. Murray Schafer points out, the instrument turns up in various forms in many different world cultures, including a miniature version built into a kite, well-known in China and Java.

The Aeolian harp gained new life in the late 18th and early 19th century, when it was hailed by Romantic poets as the transcendent spirit of nature made audible. Coleridge, Keats, and Wordsworth, Goethe and Schiller, and later Emerson and Thoreau all devoted lines to the instrument, which provided for sensitive souls of the time a kind of meandering, ambient music avant la lettre.

A sketch of the instrument from Kircher’s book Phonurgia Nova of 1673

Attentive listeners noticed that the sounds elicited by the wind harp were often strangely dissonant and bore no apparent relationship to the fundamental pitches of the instrument’s strings. These unexpected frequencies confounded acousticians, who concocted a number of theories to explain how such sounds arose from the interaction between the wind and the string.

Only in the late 19th century was a satisfactory explanation attained: the wind passing over the string creates tiny eddies or vortices around the string.  At a sufficient velocity these eddies break off and produce a tone, which may elicit a sympathetic tone in the strings if it corresponds to one of the string’s harmonic frequencies. These “friction tones” were a new acoustic discovery and accounted for the unique sound quality of the Aeolian harp.

This modern example of the sound of an Aeolian Harp is from the 1991 album Windsongs by British musician Roger Winfield, who recorded a variety of harps using magnetic pickups (similar to those found on electric guitars) to amplify the otherwise delicate tones of the harp into something rather more powerful. The recordings were edited after the fact to create musical contrasts, but underwent no substantial processing or effects.

(For more information: The Alsatian composer Georges Kastner wrote a massive study of the instrument in 1856 entitled La Harpe d’Éole: Sur les Rapports des Phénomènes Sonores de la Nature avec la Science et l’Art. The book has unfortunately not been translated. An excellent recent history of the Aeolian harp can be found in the book Instruments and the Imagination by Thomas Hankins and Robert Silverman.)

September 02, 2011, 7:41pm

“Musician’s Costume,” from Nicholas de Larmessin, Les Costumes grotesques et les métiers (late 17th century).

August 01, 2011, 1:45pm

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Paul Hindemith: Des kleinen Elektromusikers Lieblinge for three Trautoniums, No. 6: “Lebhaft, mit Kadenzen” (1930)

From the album Elektronische Impressionen (1998)

In 1930, a new electric instrument was unveiled: named after its inventor, the engineer Friedrich Trautwein, the Trautonium was a monophonic instrument in which the touch of the player’s finger pressed a wire against an underlying metal strip, closing the circuit and generating a tone. Following musical convention, the frequency of the generated tone increased as the player’s finger moved from left to right. Like many other first-wave electric instruments, the Trautonium allowed a continuous glissando between tones, but to enable more precise staccato playing, Trautwein affixed a number of leather “tongues” above the metal strip, which could be positioned to mark the pitches of a scale. Thus the instrument could be played either directly on the metal band, or through the configurable keys.

To show off the new instrument, the German composer Paul Hindemith, at that time among the most famous figures in European music, wrote a set of seven short pieces for three Trautoniums. Hindemith’s composition was called Des kleinen Elektromusikers Lieblinge (The Little Electro-musician’s Favorites), and was premiered at the New Music Berlin festival in 1930. The character of the pieces is typical of Hindemith’s 1920s compositional style: sprightly, contrapuntal, and tonal, yet suffused with pungent dissonances. The structure of this piece, the sixth in the set, is a simple ternary form (ABA) followed by a brief cadenza for each of the instruments and a coda. The resulting mix of futuristic, otherworldly sounds and neoclassical formal molds is uniquely characteristic of the early 20th-century phenomenon known as “electric music.”

In 1933, the radio company Telefunken began mass-producing a simplified model of the instrument called the Volkstrautonium, but like virtually all the electric instruments of the period, this device was doomed to failure by a combination of socio-economic turmoil and a resilient culture of musical technophobia. In spite of its flop as a consumer instrument, the Trautonium enjoyed a substantial afterlife, primarily through the single-handed advocacy of the instrument’s sole virtuoso, Oskar Sala. Around 1950, Sala began developing a new, expanded form of the instrument he called a Mixturtrautonium, which featured a number of improvements, including the ability to generate subharmonic frequencies below the primary tone. Sala’s instrument was used in a number of film soundtracks of the time, most famously in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963). 

(This photograph shows a later, three-voice version of the Trautonium, developed in the mid-1930s. Notice the three terraced manuals, consisting of flat strips of metal overlaid with “tongues” corresponding roughly to the keys of a piano. The extensions on either side of the manuals contain the tone-generating circuitry and feature dials to adjust the timbre. The pedals are for volume and additional timbre control.)

May 31, 2011, 2:57pm

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Anonymous: “Tribularer”

From the album Ein Konzert an der ältesten spielbaren Orgel der Welt (2004)

“A concert on the oldest playable organ in the world,” proclaims the title of this remarkable recording, released in Germany in 2004. The instrument in question is the “Gothic organ” of the Church of St. Andreas in the town of Ostönnen in the German region of Westphalia.  Previously located in the nearby town of Soest, the organ was moved to its current home in 1721.

The keyboard of the St. Andreas organ

The dating of the organ, carried out in conjunction with its restoration from 2000-2003, was an extremely complicated process, involving the study of inscriptions on the instrument’s metal pipes and dendrochronological tests on the wood used in the organ’s console and windchest. (This process was complicated further by the fact that many of the instrument’s numerous parts had been replaced over the course of centuries.) Ultimately the date was determined as circa 1430, making this organ among the oldest preserved specimens of its type, and the single oldest that is still playable. 

This anonymous “Tribularer” is thought to be an intabulation of a four-part motet, though the voices are remarkably independent. The score comes from the library of the Monastery of the Holy Ghost in Krakow. It was written in 1548 in German letter notation. Little else is known about this piece.

I was surprised (and perhaps a little disappointed) at how good the instrument sounds. No doubt the quality of its tone has everything to do with the extensive restoration work that has been lavished on the organ over the years. Any remaining strangeness can be attributed to the organ’s tuning, which is a compromise between Pythagorean and mean-tone temperament derived from Arnolt Schlick’s Spiegel der Orgelmacher (1511).

The frontispiece to Schlick’s treatise

May 25, 2011, 11:20am

The “Orphika,” a keyboard instrument designed to be worn on a strap over the shoulder, invented in Vienna in 1795 by Carl Leopold Röllig.

Image from Alte Musikinstrumente: ein Leitfaden für Sammler by Hermann Ruth-Sommer (Berlin, 1916)

January 11, 2011, 9:51am

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Robert Rutman: “Dresden”

From the album Zuuhh!!  Muttie Mum!! (1998)

A self-described “sculptor, instrument builder, sound inventor, painter, musician, and graphic artist,” Robert Rutman was born in Berlin in 1931.  In 1938, he fled Nazi Germany with his mother, who was Jewish.  Rutman arrived in the United States in 1950 after spending the intervening years in England.  From 1955 to 1962, he studied art in New York and Mexico City.  He started developing the first prototypes of his original musical instruments around 1966, and in 1975 he founded the U.S. Steel Cello Ensemble, based on the technique of using a bow to play large sheets of hanging metal.  Rutman’s group toured extensively in the United States and Europe during the 1970s.

In 1990 Rutman moved back to Berlin, where he has lived ever since.  Like many of the pioneering musicians of the 60s and 70s, Rutman had to wait several decades for his work to become known and available.  In 1989, Pogus Records released an album of his music called 1939, and two other albums came out in the following decade: Music to Sleep by (Tresor, 1997) and the enigmatically titled Zuuhh!! Muttie Mum!! (Die Stadt, 1998).  (1939 has since been re-released on CD and is still available from Pogus.)  As an token of his newfound cachet, Rutman joined the seminal German experimental band Einstürzende Neubauten for their U.S. tour in 1998.

The sound of Rutman’s steel cello is surprisingly versatile, capable of everything from deep, otherworldly drones reminiscent of an aeolian harp to the jagged, resonant clangor of a postindustrial primal scream.  Both extremes are on display in this track, “Dresden,” whose title seemingly invokes the horrors of civilian bombing in World War II.

November 21, 2010, 4:30pm

Wooden Voices: Hans Reichel's Daxophone

November 05, 2010, 9:50am