All I Know² :: Information, transmission, modulation, and noise. - Second Edition

This afternoon I attended a tribute event for Max Mathews on the occasion of his 80th birthday. It was at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.

This was organized by CCRMA, the computer music research lab at Stanford. 

Max is one of the great pioneers in using computers to synthesize speech and music. He started working on it in 1957 when he was at Bell Labs. Speech and sound synthesis in general was a topic of great interest to the researchers at the phone company. And altho the computers that were around 50 years ago were many thousands of times less powerful than the cell phones and laptops of today, he did set the theoretical vision for everything we take for granted today, like the iPod and mp3 music players, iTunes, and GarageBand. 

But Max's first real contribution was a program called MUSIC IV, written in FORTRAN, that allowed the programmer to set parameters that would define synthetic musical "instruments", and have the computer generate the sound samples characteristic of those parameter settings. What the computer was doing was solving the equations of sound that simulate the vibrations in air that we associate with music and musical instruments.

Back in 1966, when I was working as a systems programmer at the Courant Institute computer center at NYU,  I had heard about work that was being done to synthesize sound on a computer. And thru some contacts I had with the NYU music department, I eventually got involved with porting Max Mathews MUSIC IV program to the CDC 6600 at NYU. One day I received the source code from Bell Labs via Princeton, with some sketchy documentation on how it was supposed to work. 

I did get it to work, somewhat, but I never went beyond that for a couple of reasons. The biggest problem was the the computer center was funded by the Atomic Energy Commission (eventually the Department of Energy), and the Music department was not quite able to justify this use of their supercomputer. Then also, the output of the program was a digital tape that had to be sent to Bell Labs in New Jersey to be converted to analog sound. If I recall, a full digital tape, which held about 600 MB of data and took a few hours to generate, represented only about ten minutes of sound.  So this was pretty impractical. So eventually the project was dropped. But in the process of researching all this, I did get to meet Vladimir Ussachevsky and Milton Babbitt, and then Morton Subotnick, who was using a large Buchla analog synthesizer at the time. Once I was introduced to Don Buchla's analog voltage-controlled synthesizers I gave up on computer synthesis. (As it turned out, we needed to wait another 20 years before it became practical.)

But at some point I did get to meet the famous Max Mathews. I believe it was at a talk he gave at NYU. I cannot remember. But I did have some correspondence with his assistants at Bell Labs or Princeton regarding some problems I was having porting Music IV. 

Skip ahead to the 1970's and now I'm doing radio programs on KPFA in Berkeley and involved with electronic music activities at Mills College and other things. During that time I meet Jean-Claude Risset and John Chowning, two composers who pushed Mathews technology even further. Risset came from France to teach a seminar in computer music one summer at Stanford, where John Chowning was teaching and setting up a computer music research lab that eventually became CCRMA. Unfortunately I couldn't attend the seminar, but friends of mine did and I got some of their notes, and featured some of the new computer music on the radio.

From that point, the technology of computer generated music advanced extremely rapidly as smaller and faster computers became available. And jump forward to today, where the computer plays an integral part of all music (and film) production, much of these advances are due to the seminal work done 50 years ago by Max Mathews and his team at Bell Labs.

So it was fitting for both CCRMA and the Computer History Museum to honor Max for those 50 years and on his 80th birthday.

Hahn Auditorium was filled to capacity today to hear CCRMA's director Chris Chafe, Evelyne Gayou from the French Groupe de Rechereches Musicales (GRM) in Paris, John Chowning  of Stanford, Gerald Bennett from Zurich, Jon Appleton from Dartmouth, and Jean-Claude Risset from Marseille, each give a brief talk about their work with Max over the years, and his importance to them as mentor and guide. These reminiscences were heartfelt and gave some insight into how visionary Max's work really was. And then Max gave an all-too-brief summing up of the early years working with the IBM 7094 and DEC PDP 10 (versions of which were downstairs on the museum exhibit floor.)

The talks were followed by an hour-and-a-half concert that I only wish was better. Of the six works presented, most were dreadful, or worse. It left me pondering about how music depends on so much more than just enabling technologies.

But there were two that stood out because they demonstrated a true musical consciousness that was above the rest.

One was Gerald Bennett's Un Madrigal gentile,  for tape alone. (We say "for tape alone" to indicate that the sound was mixed and generated probably on a computer and written probably to an audio CD or AIFF format data file. I doubt if any "tape" was really involved, but the language from the pre-digital days remains... we don't say "for CD alone").  This was a wonderful, minimalist piece that mixed brief choral sounds with voices, natural sounds, and lots of silence. Unlike so many pieces of this genre that throw everything at you all at once, Bennett's "tape" piece allowed itself to take all the time it needed. I found the subtleties of the sound and the pacing very engaging, and I wanted to hear more.

The other stand-out piece on the program was Jean-Claude Risset's Strange Attractors (parts 2-4) from 1988 for clarinet and prerecorded sounds. Combining live traditional instruments with computer accompaniment is difficult to do well. But here Risset concentrates on the most interesting sounds that the B flat and bass clarinets produce, those low sensuous tones. The musical style was firmly placed in the late '80's, with the prerecorded sounds of the clarinets playing against the live solist. The intertwining of the live and recorded sounds provided an interesting backdrop. But I was expecting more. So it was a bit disappointing. I've heard a number of Risset's works that are far better than this one. But still, it was miles ahead of the other works on the program.  The live clarinet parts sounded quite difficult to master, and they were performed dilligently by Gareth Davis, dressed in old jeans and a faded t-shirt. Maybe I'm turning into an old fart about this, but it might have been better had he dressed a bit snappier for the occasion, rather than like he just came from the gym. (I found out later that, in fact, Gareth, who is from the UK, had no time to change clothes between rehearsal and performance. In an email he said that otherwise he would have been "black on black", which is more like his performing attire.)

Anyway, I was glad to see such a turnout in tribute to Max, who remains, even at 80, a vital part of this community. Happy birthday, Max!