Computer Music to the Max

Related link: http://www.computerhistory.org/music_12142004

Surprisingly, computers have now been making music for almost half a century. I just returned from a fascinating lecture by Max Mathews, who developed the first software synthesizers back in the 1950s. (The graphic music programming software Max was named after him.)

Sitting on the stage at the Computer History Museum with his Linux laptop, Mathews (78) played us the world’s first digitally synthesized music, “In the Silver Scale,” by Newman Guttman. The 17-second melody, realized on Mathews’s Music I program in May 1957, sounded like a bad wristwatch alarm. “After hearing ‘Sliver,’ you’re probably asking, ‘Why didn’t we quit?’” grinned Mathews. The answer came in a groundbreaking article that he wrote for Science in 1963. Called “The Digital Computer as a Musical Instrument,” it included the assertion,

There are no theoretical limitations to the performance of the computer as a source of musical sounds, in contrast to the performance of ordinary instruments. At present, the range of computer music is limited principally by cost and by our knowledge of psychoacoustics.

Indeed, just four years after unleashing the wretched silver scale, Mathews had his Bell Labs computers singing “Bicycle Built for Two.” Science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, visiting the labs, was so impressed that he later immortalized the event in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Remember when the dying HAL computer reverts to singing, “Daisy, Daisy....”?

The breakthroughs continued. Mathews described how his associate, Jean-Claude Risset, discovered that it’s the shifting frequency spectrum that makes acoustic sounds so rich. Risset also found that the first 20 milliseconds of a sound have a huge impact on how we perceive it. Twenty years later, that discovery led to the Roland D-50 synthesizer, which grafted complex sampled transients onto easily synthesized sustaining tones.

John Chowning, the other half of the panel, then described his research in frequency modulation (FM) synthesis, which spawned the hugely successful Yamaha DX7, followed by millions of soundcards and cell phone synthesizers. Again, the core factor in generating rich sound was varying the pitch and timbre. Chowning played some examples in which simply adding a bit of vibrato to a synthetic tone made it sound startlingly vocal. He also showed how changing the bandwidth and amplitude of a sound in parallel produced the complex bell and brass tones FM does so well.

The event ended with a performance of Risset’s “Duet for One Pianist,” in which a live pianist and a computer (running Max) simultaneously played a Yamaha Disklavier player piano. The Disklavier transmitted the human’s performance into the computer via MIDI. The computer then improvised complementary parts on the piano by triggering solenoids under the keys. When an audience member later asked the panel where it thought computer music was going, Chowning predicted there’d be more of that type of human-machine interaction. Mathews envisioned having a helmet that would scan the composer’s brainwaves and convert them to music.

I wonder what future musicians will think of today’s computer-music tools and techniques in 2051.

What do you think were the most important computer-music breakthroughs—and what’s next?