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Laurie Spiegel: “Old Wave”

From the album The Expanding Universe (1980)

I’d been thinking about featuring the music of Laurie Spiegel for some time now, and Geeta Dayal’s recent piece on the surprising appearance of Spiegel’s 1972 composition “Sediment” in the new movie The Hunger Games convinced me that the stars were right for an ultra-rare Acousmata/pop culture tie-in.

Born in Chicago in 1945, Spiegel came of age as a composer in the 1970s, amidst the transition from old-school tape-and-scissors techniques to the digital interface of the computer. As a musical late bloomer whose early influences included shape note singing and the guitar playing of John Fahey, Spiegel felt ill at ease in the insular and often sexist environment she found at Julliard and other academic institutions. Reacting to these unfavorable conditions, she came to view the computer as an ideal medium for independent compositional work.

Spiegel was among the first to envision the computer as a tool of musical democratization, a new kind of folk instrument that allowed for decentralized musical production free from the constraints of economic and institutional forces. (Around the same time, the Italian composer Pietro Grossi and the Bay Area collective The League of Automatic Music Composers were also highlighting the political dimensions the new creative technologies.)  Speaking at the dawn of the PC era in 1980, Spiegel stated:

Ultimately, these little computers will make it easier to compose, as well as to play music. There are far too few people creating their own music compared to the number of people who really love music. It’s a much worse ratio than amateur painters or writers to consumers of those media, I suspect, and it’s because until now, there has been only a very difficult technique for composing.

Many of Spiegel’s works from the 1970s—including all the pieces on The Expanding Universe—were created using GROOVE (Generating Real-Time Operations on Voltage-Controlled Equipment), a pioneering computer music environment developed by Max Mathews and Richard Moore at Bell Labs in 1968. GROOVE allowed the composer to use a variety of interface devices, such as keyboards, buttons and knobs, and drawing tablets, along with a computer terminal, to shape musical data in real time. Previously, making music with  a computer generally meant an asynchronous relationship between the composer’s actions and the resulting sounds. Spiegel used the real-time capacity of GROOVE to create music at once sophisticated and accessible, patterned yet highly differentiated—in her own terms, she sought an aesthetic middle ground between the two poles of serialism and minimalism.

April 02, 2012, 9:36pm

Acousmata will be on hiatus for a while as I focus my attention on my family and dissertation. Thanks for reading!

March 08, 2012, 10:08pm

John Dowland: “Flow My Tears” (1600)

Performed by Valeria Mignaco and Alfonso Marin

February 29, 2012, 1:13pm

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Morphogenesis: Excerpt from “Improvisation 11.11.88”

From the album Prochronisms (1989)

Formed in 1985 as a spinoff of a seminar on “New Music” taught by Roger Sutherland at City University in London, Morphogenesis was a collective of experimental musicians who developed a distinctive approach to collective improvisation. The group included among its ranks a number of veterans from the far fringes of the British musical avant-garde: Sutherland was an alumnus of Cornelius Cardew’s Scratch Orchestra, Clive Graham was an occasional contributor to Nurse with Wound, and Michael Prime had worked with David Jackman’s project Organum.  

Morphogenesis extended the “live electronics” tradition initiated in the 1960s by such figures as John Cage, David Tudor, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and the performer/composers of the Sonic Arts Union. More particularly, they worked in the lineage of pioneering ensembles such as AMM, MEV, and Gruppo d’Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza. Like those groups, Morphogensis practiced improvisation using experimental sound sources to create emergent, highly textured musical performances. However, the group’s aesthetic is far removed from the spontaneous sensibility of its forebears. Their sound is darker and more concentrated, closer to ambient and drone than to the free-jazz influences of the earlier groups.

“The group’s aim is to unify and integrate many diverse sound elements, (electronic, vocal, instrumental and environmental) within a context of continual evolution and group dialogue. We construct some of our own instruments in addition to using adapted or prepared conventional instruments - usually violin, piano and acoustic guitar. The range of sounds are further extended by means of filtering and other forms of signal processing. Contact microphones are used to amplify the sounds of bubbling water and other small sounds. All these acoustic sounds are enhanced by electronic filtering etc. One electronic instrument we use is a bioactivity translator which is used to measure the voltage potential of living organisms — including plants, fungi, and the human nervous system — and translate the biological rhythms into electronic sound. Other electronic instruments include a 4 speed portable reel-to-reel tape recorder and a multi-speed CD player, both of which are used to work with short sound samples. We do not use laptops or pre-recorded material for playback.” [source]

The group’s unique sound derives from their characteristic use of synthetic and processed instrumental sounds to generate undulating sonic processes evocative of the primordial phenomena of nature. This biological/telluric coloration is reinforced by the group’s titles for its albums and compositions, such as “Deep Virus,” “Solarisation,” and “Entelechy.” According to Prime, Morphogenesis sought to distance itself from the cerebral associations of avant-garde music, striving instead to address the auditor on a purely sensory plane: ”I don’t think any conceptualization is necessary to appreciate our music. The listener can easily relate to it on a basic level of feeling and emotion, an appreciation of interesting sonic textures and soundscapes.”

February 14, 2012, 9:45pm

Erkki Kurenniemi: Computer Music (c. 1966)

February 04, 2012, 9:01pm

Algorithmic Music for the Masses: WolframTones

A brainchild of British mathematician Stephen Wolfram, WolframTones is an online application that creates musical scores from the patterns generated by one-dimensional cellular automata. A few parameters determine the rules followed by the automata, and thus control in a very general way the structure of the resulting music, which can be further customized by adjusting certain musical settings, such as the behavior or voices and the scale.

WolframTones is based on the thesis laid out in Wolfram’s 2002 book A New Kind of Science, that simple sets of rules (algorithms) can generate highly complex results. According to Wolfram, by exploring all possible configurations through computational modeling it is possible to map out the underlying structure of the universe, which is in essence digital. In musical terms, the promise of this kind of program seems to lie in its ability to generate musical forms that transcend our compositional imagination. At the same time, Wolfram suggests, these artificial products might bear a profound resemblance to the deep structures of nature:

“In some ways WolframTones compositions are like objects in nature: their features emerge from specified underlying rules. So if the form of a sunset, a tree, or a mollusk shell is meaningful, then so can a WolframTones composition be.”

Upon hearing your first composition rendered via your computer’s internal MIDI soundset, you may ask yourself, “Is this it?” The rather limited musical customization options, particularly with regard to rhythm, and the weak MIDI timbres mean that you’re not going to be creating algorithmic masterpieces right out of the box, so to speak. However, WolframTones has great potential as a means of producing musical “raw material” which can be crafted into something more presentable via a software MIDI editor and some decent sound sources.

Two major complaints: Wolfram Research, Inc. maintains a rather draconian degree of control over the music created by WolframTones, preventing you (among other things) from “broadcasting, publishing, or publicly performing” your algorithmic tunes. Second,  to export your work as a MIDI file you have to send it to yourself as an email, which is an extremely cumbersome alternative to simply downloading it directly.

Much more information is available on the WolframTones website. 

February 01, 2012, 6:00am

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Area: “Mela di Odessa”

From the album Crac! (1975)

Active from 1972 to 1983, Area was a pioneering Italian group that creatively synthesized currents of American popular music such as jazz and funk with experimental tendencies in song form and sound production. Led by the Orphic incantations of vocalist Demetrio Stratos, Area featured a rotating cast of musicians anchored by the core group of Giulio Capiozzo (drums), Patrizio Fariselli (keyboards), Ares Tavolazzi (bass and trombone), and Paolo Tofano (guitar).

Crac! is Area’s third album, following Arbeit macht frei (1973) and Caution Radiation Area (1974). Although they disbanded within a few years of Stratos’ untimely death in 1979, the group’s early records earned them a spot on the legendary Nurse with Wound List, a hugely influential catechism of underground music circa 1980.

“Mela di Odessa” (The Apple of Odessa”) opens with a noisy burst of chirping electronic tones, atonal guitar noodling, and a raucous drum solo, leading into a driving jazz-rock texture topped by a piercing electric keyboard solo. Stratos’ trademark wordless vocalizations occasionally double the instrumental parts, leading through a frenzied labyrinth of improvised passagework. About halfway through, the mood changes quite suddenly, as the the drums and bass introduce a funky, off-kilter groove. Twittering electronic noise, Stratos’ spoken words, and brassy interjections—including a quotation of “Taps“—bring the track to a highly ambiguous close.

In his liner notes to the 1990 re-release on Cramps Records, Franco Bolelli writes: “To sink one’s teeth into the Area apple is to experience a taste which is neither the penitential taste of the avant-garde nor the tamed taste of the spectacle. Area has proven that the poetic and the experimental is not at all difficult and suffering. Indeed, it can be energetic and contagious.”

January 25, 2012, 9:39pm

I recently bought an iPad for the primary purpose of exploring the device’s potential as an experimental musical instrument. After about a week of research, I’ve discovered some very promising and creative software that suggests that the iPad can indeed function as a very powerful means of sound control and exploration. However, I was surprised how difficult it was, amidst the glut of cheesy emulations of acoustic instruments and instant techno beat machines, to find apps designed for experimental purposes. So, in the humble hope of aiding like-minded seekers, I offer this small guide to some of the best apps, according to the criteria of conceptual originality and musical open-endedness.

TC-11 ($29.99): Although there are some very impressive “playable” apps out there, such as Geo Synthesizer, SynthTronica, and Animoog, most of these virtual instruments model familiar interfaces such as the keyboard or some approximation thereof, proving Marshall McLuhan’s point that the content of new media is old media. This cannot be said of TC-11, however, which is the most brilliantly conceived music app in terms of the unique affordances offered by the iPad. The instrument is played on the touchscreen, simply enough, but the actual sounds created in response to the player’s touch are determined by the patch parameters. Virtually every aspect of the sound can be controlled by any imaginable spatial mapping on the touch pad (plus the gyroscope and accelerometer), generating a mind-boggling array of performance possibilities. The TC-11 lends itself especially well to distended noise, but it can be played more conventionally as well: the pitch can readily be quantized according to any scale you like.

Droneo ($2.99): Very neat little app for creating rich, slowly evolving drone textures. It allows you to fine tune the individual frequencies outside of equal temperament, and has some very nice built in samples. The parameters can be tweaked in a number of ways, allowing you to actually “compose” your drone with some sophistication.

SoundyThingie ($2.99): This unfortunately named app is actually quite cool, taking a widely used concept—converting graphical patterns into sound— and doing something more creative with it. You can make complex branching structures of lines, each of which corresponds to a tone whose pitch varies according to its vertical position. Individual waveform assignments and the possibility of altering the play speed and timing make for a subtly complex instrument.

DrawJong ($2.99): One of many apps that combine sound and visuals, DrawJong is “a two-oscillator FM/wave terrain synthesizer based on chaotic attractors. It is capable of producing wild glitches and weird waveforms, along with a steady stream of gorgeous visuals.” A sensory feast for eye and ear. 

Glitch Machine ($2.99): It was reading about this app that inspired me to take the leap into iPad land. Glitch Machine is a live-coding environment that uses reverse Polish notation to render a constant output of luscious low-bit noise. Actually coding with any intelligence is way beyond me at this point (and the relationship between code and output is highly obscure), but you can do a lot simply by trial and error, and the potential of this app is staggering. It also allows you to easily save and export your work.

WaveShaper ($5.99): Load up a sample and use two fingers on the X-Y pad to mangle the hell out of it in real time. A very clean design and lots of fun to play.

MendelSynth ($1.99): A simple but very clever concept: each circle represents a sound—noisy or harmonic, static or varied—and by “breeding” two sounds, you create a set of offspring that are genetic mutations of their parents’ sonic qualities. It’s a neat and intuitive way of exploring electronic sound. Not playable as an instrument, but you can email your favorite sounds to yourself for later use.

NotePlex ($1.99): Notes are created as nodes on a vast, scalable grid. Pitch is determined not by placement on the grid, but rather by color. Nodes are activated by pulsars, which emit pulses regularly according to the tempo setting. Each node also has a setting which determines how it conveys the pulses it receives—it can send more pulses in all directions, or just one, or none at all. Plus, each node can be given a life-span, that is, the number of times it can be activated before disappearing. NotePlex can be used to create highly complex generative compositions that evolve in unpredictable ways. The built-in sounds are unspectacular, but you can import your own samples.

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz ($1.99): This devilishly clever little program shows how much can be done with a simple concept. Set loose the 26 letters of the alphabet onto the playing surface and listen to them interact according to four different spatial and sonic behavior patterns. If the result is instant avant-garde vocal music circa 1970 (think Berio or Kagel), it’s nonetheless a lot of fun to play around with, and a gentle introduction to experimental sound for the unsuspecting.

Anything by Nicholas Collins: His apps are among the best, and many of them are free. (They are unfortunately developed for iPhone, so they’re not ideal for iPad, but they work.) Some focus on live coding in which the user manipulates symbolic objects whose relationship to sonic output is tantalizingly opaque (TOPLAPapp, RISCy, Cryptoclash); others use samples (BBCut, Concat) or photos (Photo Noise, Photo OSC) as the basis for sound experimentation. Collins’ iGENDYN is a lovely multitouch implementation of Iannis Xenakis’ dynamic stochastic synthesis.

Finally, an honorable mention should go out to the following apps: Nanoloop, Soundrop, A Noise Machine, Runxt Life, Monnix, VirtualSynth, and AirVox.

Have I overlooked anything? Please share your favorites in the comments.

January 19, 2012, 10:42pm

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Louis Andriessen: Excerpt from De Staat (1976)

From the album De Staat

While the musical style broadly known as American minimalism comes in many flavors, from the cinematic ear-candy of Philip Glass to the playful psychedelia of Terry Riley and the symphonic bombast of John Adams, these various manifestations have in common a modal-diatonic approach to pitch organization and a tendency to eschew abrupt transitions in favor of gradually unfolding tone-patterns. American minimalism was intended (and in large part received) as a corrective to the overly “difficult” music of the mid-century avant-garde.

When minimalism made its inevitable appearance on the European continent, it took on a very different tone, one conditioned by the generally darker tendencies of European music in the postwar period. The premiere of Dutch composer Louis Andriessen’s De Staat in 1976 signaled a radically new take on the possibilities of musical minimalism.  Jagged, angular, and suffused with lush dissonances that betray the composer’s debt to Igor Stravinsky, De Staat consists of the brusque juxtaposition of highly differentiated textural blocks (Stravinsky again) played at a consistently breakneck pace. 

De Staat is written for an unorthodox ensemble heavily weighted toward winds and brass, plus the distinctive addition of electric and bass guitars. (Beginning in the early 1970s, Andriessen refused to compose for the conventional orchestra, which he saw as a symbol of the conservative musical establishment.) Four female singers intone snippets from Plato’s Republic concerning (ironically) music’s potential to disrupt the social order.

January 15, 2012, 10:24pm

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Ernst Krenek: Excerpt from Spiritus intelligentiae sanctus (1955)

From the album Spiritus intelligentiae sanctus / Klangfiguren

In the third and final installment of a series of posts highlighting the early productions of the West German Radio Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne, we hear one of the first attempts to blend synthetic tones with the human voice. Ernst Krenek’s Spiritus intelligentiae sanctus makes an interesting parallel with Karlheinz Stockhausen’s groundbreaking composition Gesang der Jünglinge, created around the same time.

Both compositions combine electronic sounds and vocal timbres, although Krenek’s approach in this regard was relatively traditional in comparison to Stockhausen’s. Both works were also based on religious texts—Krenek and Stockhausen were devout Catholics, and understood their works in the grand tradition of sacred music. Krenek even labelled his composition an “Easter Oratorio.” (This religious sincerity was lost on some critics: the German musicologist Friedrich Blume castigated such works as musical blasphemy in a controversial 1958 lecture portentously entitled “Was ist Musik?”)

Unlike most of the composers working in the Cologne studio in the 1950s, Krenek was a well-established figure in European modern music. Still, his Spiritus intelligentiae sanctus shows a youthful eagerness to explore the new possibilities presented by the electronic medium. Krenek tweaked the sine wave generators to create a slightly “squished” scale with 13 tones to the octave, instead of the customary 12, casting a strangely distended coloration over the music. The combination of pure sine tones, dissonant “tone mixtures,” and angular, ring-modulated vocal lines likewise contributes to an eerie and unsettling musical mise-en-scène.