Archives - 1976
Music Journal
November 1976
Day of the Instrument Interface
By Robert Moog
In thinking about the future of electronic music, I keep returning to two cherished bits of memory. The first is a short conversation that I had in 1964 with the technical director of a prominent classical electronic music studio. He asked me what I was up to. I told him of my intention to build electronic instruments especially for musical composition and performance. His reply: "Hmmm! What else are you going to do for a living?"
My friend, the technical director, was an expert. He knew all about the electronic music studios that existed in the early '60s. He had designed and built equipment for many prominent composers. If anyone could have predicted the future of the electronic music medium, it was he. What he saw was the continuation of electronic music as an avant-garde specialty. Well, a young student at the director's studio went on to design and build his own electronic music studio and then to produce what has become the largest selling classical record album of all time. A few years later, a classically trained English pianist chucked his bank clerk's job to become a rock musician. Inspired by the above-mentioned album, he incorporated a large synthesizer into his instrument complement, and developed playing techniques for the rock idiom. Today, hundreds of thousands of young musicians are being introduced to the electronic music medium throught synthesizers, and I, as well as thousands of others, am indeed "making a living" building these instruments.
My second bit of memory is of and incident from Woody Allen's movie Sleeper. Allen plays the proprietor of a health food store who, for medical reasons, is cryogenically preserved for a team of doctors of the future to cure. As the scene opens, Woody is waking up. The doctors talk to him. One asks him what he did, back in the twentieth century. Woody twlls them about the health food store. The doctors are puzzled. Finally, one says something to this effect: "It is now known that candy, ice cream, and other fattening foods are healthful."
Musical idioms, like fashions in clothing, food and morality, are constantly changing. They are complex socio-cultural phenomena that are shaped by the interaction of social forces, technological trends and psychological factors. We really don't understand them. And we certainly can't predict them merely analyzing past trends. Was my friend the technical director wrong? Today, with 20-20 hindsight, we say that he was. But nobody would say it in 1964! Are keyboard-controlled synthesizers and electronic amplification the "candy and ice cream" that contain little musical nourishment according to current conventional wisdom, but that future generations of musicians will find healthful? I don't know.
What follows is a transcript of a speech given by Ms. Mahalia Levine, prominent specialist in the history of the music of the latter half of the twentieth century. I feel that I am as qualified as anyone I know to write her speech at this time. But I sure wish I had Woody Allen's sense of humor.
Respected Colleagues:
It is an honor to address the International Union of Musical Engineers on this, its fiftieth anniversary. Since its founding in 1982, your Union has participated in virtually every development leading to the preeminent importance of music in our current culture. In addition to develping an amazing array of tools for making music, the members of IUME have made major contributions to our understanding of the relationships between sound, psychoacoustics, and aesthetics. This evening I will trace the development of several important aspect of music as we know it today. Along the way, I'll make particular reference to your society's contritbutions.
It's impossible for me to imagine what life would be like without music. From the many successful programs for developing heightened aural perception in infants, through the music teaching systems that are a part of every child's school day, and to the incredible array of sound environments, media events, and modes of spontaneous musical expression that are so essential to enjoyment of adult life, music in the twenty-first century is certainly our most important means for aesthetic gratification. It is remarkable, too, that despite the diversity of our music experiences, we musicians and music educators are keenly aware of the aesthetic and technical bases for all music, and are therefore able to teach musicians and music listeners alike with a degree of efficacy that was unknown just a hundred years ago.
In the latter half of the twentieth century, a child typically heard most of his music through speakers of television sets of the time, definitely a negative factor in developing effective musical perception. Primary schools offered musical experience and training to young students, with emphasis on ensemble performance of breath-powered acoustic instruments. Ear training and music history were taught concurrently. This first hologram depicts a typical primary school performance ensemble circa 1976. Note the preponderance of breathpowered instruments and the complete absence of electronics of any sort. Unfortunately, the vernacular music, which at that time was called rock and roll, utilized very little of the playing techniques that students developed in the schools. You see, rock and roll was really the first performance idiom to successfully employ electronic technology. Electrified guitars at first were the primary instruments of rock and roll. The next hologram shows a group called the Beatles, a preeminent group of the 1960s. The electronic technology employed by rock and roll musicians was incredibly crude by today's standards. Most of the circuitry was analog, and vacuum tubes were often used. However, musical engineers of the time were able to develop satisfactory musical instruments by intuitive means, very much the same way as the violin and piano were developed many centuries ago.
My research shows that, despite the fact that techniques of the rock and roll idiom were rarely taught in public schools, millions of teen age students studied electric guitar, drums, and similar instruments of the time, and did in fact enjoy bona fide musical experiences.
In terms of actual participation, a third area of musical experience was also important during the latter half of the twentieth century: the performance of music in the home on multi-keyboard instruments, which were then known as electronic organs. These instruments were commercially successful during the latter half of the twentieth century, and in fact accounted for more than a third of the total value of all musical instruments sold at that time. They were technically sophisticated and often contained complex preprogrammed musical patterns, especially rhythmic and chord patterns. Musically however, these instruments were more conservative in orientation than the instruments of rock and roll, and in fact, were programmed to produce the standardized patterns of vernacular music of the first half of the twentieth century. Here we see a typical electronic home organ of the 1970s. The preprogrammed musical patterns were evoked simply by depressing one key on each of the keyboards. In terms of our current understanding of creative musical performance, home electronic organs of the second half of the twentieth century not only failed to take ad- vantage of the musical training of schools, but they also provided minimal creative gratification.
Of course, the highly developed art music tradition continued among aca- demic musicians, professional performers and a relatively few serious amateurs. However, the newly-composed music coming from this tradition was not widely performed, a circumstance which may be attributed to economic conditions that prevailed during the latter half of the twentieth century. Although traditional symphony orchestras existed in many large cities, they devoted their efforts more to performances of well-established art music than to promoting the works of new composers.
The developments which led to our present musical experience began with the invention of the tape recorder in 1945. Although much experimentation
with musical electronics took place during the first half of the twentieth century, the tape recorder was the first really satisfactory means for storing and physically manipulating sounds and music. It enabled composers to produce textures and patterns that were simply impossible with acoustic musical instruments. It was responsible for getting many talented composers in touch with the capabilities of electronics and provided the impetus for the development of the first electronic music synthesizers. Incidentally, the early synthesizers were entirely analog and had to be manually patched and programmed. But used in conjunction with tape recorders, they allowed musicians to literally define a whole new medium of musical expression.
Simple, keyboard-controlled, pre-patched instruments became popular among thousands of performing musicians, especially those in rock and roll. Music educators turned to synthesizers to provide students with alternate musical experiences which were more akin to the vernacular music than those provided by breath-powered acoustic musical instruments. Here is a hologram that shows an experimental ensemble performance group of the 70s, in a junior high school in Nagoya, Japan. Led by Professor Hiroshi Suzuki, this group performed vernacular music on small synthesizers which were commercially available at that time. The account from which this hologram was taken states that the children produced aesthetically acceptable music after only two weeks of practice. Around this time, we also began to see synthesizer-like sections on home organs. In fact, by the mid-'70s, nearly all home organs had facilities for shaping and controlling aspects of the musical tones by means thatwere first developed on synthesizers.
While the new electronic instruments of the '70s began to unite school, vernacular and home music, the proliferation of new circuitry spurred a furious activity in musical experimentation. The outrageous iconoclasm of John Cage gave way to more systematic exploration of new means of music production. This hologram shows a concert of brain-wave-controlled synthesizers led by David Rosenboom, and here we see one of the first game-like musical compositions being performed. The computer controlled circuitry that you see in the background stored and manipulated the musicians' sounds according to rules like that of the game of tag. Composer Joel Chadabe is operating the electronic equipment. The next hologram shows microtonal composer-performer John Eaton at the console of one of the earliest computer-controlled polyphonic performance synthesizers. This instrument was built to Eaton's specifications in the late 1970s. It allowed the musician to play microtonal polyphony in real time.
Incidentally, Eaton wrote at great length about the necessity for making musical instruments difficult to play, a philosophy which was diametrically opposed to that of the commercial instrument manufacturers of the 1970s. What Eaton intuitively knew and what is now a basic assumption of our musical culture, is that the quality of the musical experience increases in proportion to the amount of control that the musician is capable of exerting over the sounds. Eaton's instrument had keys which were touch sensitive in many dimensions, and therefore allowed many musical variables to be controlled by touch during performance. This was a major departure from the designs of most commercially produced synthesizers of the '70s which had few touch-sensitive performance controls. Today, of course, all of our electronic performance instruments have finely tuned control interfaces that are sensitive in many directions. They have a subtlety of touch that is comparable to a fine piano keyboard. Thanks to the work of the members of IUME, the control interfaces of our contemporary electronic musical instruments are nearly perfectly matched to the capabilities and requirements of skilled musicians. In the 1970s people often said that electronic sound was mechanical and dull in nature. Of course, today we know that the dull and mechanical quality was due primarily to lack of appropriate player control, and we no longer recognize the distinction between acoustic and electronic musical sounds.
In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, digital techniques slowly but surely replaced analog circuitry in electronic musical instruments. You can't imagine how much cultural resistance there was at the time to using computer technology to make music. To be sure, the first efforts in this direction were realized on large digital computers using punched cards to program each tone. The early digital computers were virtually inaccessible in comparison with the convenient portable computers that are now so much a part of our daily lives. Early computer composers had to wait for many hours, even days, before the products of their compositional efforts could be heard. And it was many years before complete pieces of computer music were presented to the public. As digital technology developed to the point where digital watches and hand held calculators became commonplace, it became feasible for direct digital synthesis of music to be composed in real time on a small piece of equipment not much bigger than the early analog synthesizers. Hologram #8 shows a digital synthesizer in operation at Dartmouth University in 1975. In the foreground, you see four students, each wearing earphones, seated at simple control terminals. The digital synthesizer itself is in an adjacent room, and is mounted in a single equipment rack. The synthesizer was capable of producing 16 tones simultaneously. The developers of this system programmed it for simultaneous use by four students where each student had access to four of the 16 tones. In typi- cal composition exercises, the students would be limited to certain classes of tones, and their work would be stored in the computer memory for the instructor to evaluate at his leisure. For experimental music composition, all 16 tones would be assigned to one composer and the entire memory bank would be made available to him.
Many of you will recognize this early digital synthesizer as the forerunner of the types of systems which all of our schools now use. Of course, our systems have greater capabilities than this early instrument, especially in the area of student-machine interaction. Many of you programmers in the audience have developed and refined the software that our children enthusiastically use to develop their musicianship. We today are fortunate to have these music teaching systems that prepare our students to participate in and appreciate every type of musical experience of our current culture. The "acoustic instrument simulator" control interfaces that you engineers recently developed deserve special mention.
Imagine! A control interface that is plugged into our music teaching systems in place of a terminal, and that can be programmed to respond like a violin or trumpet, or to have simpler modes of response that are useful to the students when they are first learning the instruments! How music educators of the latter half of the twentieth century would have welcomed this facility! And how this development has spurred the art of acoustic in- strument performance! For the past decade or so, more than half of our students have achieved the first standard level of musicianship on at least one acoustic instrument, in addition to their studies in the electronic music medium.
It was not possible to devise effective music teaching systems until in- strument interfaces were standardized late in the twentieth century. Before 1986, acoustic instruments were standardized through long evolution. But there were no design standards for electronic instruments. Every musician who used electronic devices had to cope with a bewildering array of in- compatible interconnections and differing modes of operation. Imagine trying to develop a coherent musical culture out of such chaos! For that matter, imagine developing playing technique on the violin when every in- strument builder had his own standards for size, shape, and response of the instruments!
1986 was the big year - the convening of E.M.I.S., the Electronic Musical Instruments Standards conference. Early members of your organiza- tion met with electronic music equipment builders to define equipment configurations that would allow the maximum amount of instrument interchangeability consistent with the flexibility necessary to encourage new developments. This type of standardization had already been successfully implemented by the telephone and computer industries, which served as a model for E.M.I.S. In fact, many of the telephone company standards for transmitting digital information were adopted for use in digital synthesizers.
Today, the fruits of E.M.I.S. are all around us. No longer does an elec tronic performer need a road crew and a truck to transport and set up his equipment. Virtually every public entertainment center has its own multichannel sound system worthy of our greatest performing artists. And, of course, the digital synthesizers built into these sound systems all have standard interface interconnections, so that electronic musicians need only bring their own custom control interfaces to the gig. Designing and builing control interfaces has evolved into were a sophisticated craft similar to violin- making of previous centuries. We are all finding that budding musicians are investing in their control interfaces even before they finish school. The same controllers that they learn to play in school can now be plugged in to the digital synthesizers that are built into current models of home quadraphonic sound systems. Most of these systems accept up to four control interfaces, and ensemble performance in homes so is more popular today than it has been since the invention of the phonograph.
This is not to say that the popularity of recorded music has suffered at the expense of live performance. Most electronic music studio composers today prefer to compose for digital synthesizers, and to disseminate their compositions in the form of programmed digital memories that the listener plugs in to his digital synthesizer in place of a live performance control interface. This insures that the playing of recorded electronic music is realized with the same fidelity as that of a live electronic performance. Actually, when we think of it, this sort of playback was realized with the acoustic piano over a hundred years ago. That is, the most sophisticated player pianos programmed not only notes but loudness inflections. The greatest pianists of the 1920s and 30s recorded on these instruments, and we hear their performances today recreated through restored player pianos exactly as the recording artists heard them.
At the beginning of the latter half of the twentieth century, musicians were preoccupied with the aesthetic problems of combining electronic and acoustic sounds, and instrument builders were preoccupied with making electronic instruments that accurately simulated the tone colors of acoustic instruments. Fortunately, musicians outgrew these concerns when they discovered that the electronic music medium, properly controlled, enabled musicians to impart as much subtlety and nuance to electronic sound as they could with acoustic sound. Today, of course, electronic musicians are deeply engrossed in the aesthetics and psychoacoustics of new synthesized sound, and under- stand that acoustic instruments have unique timbres and response modes which have evolved to a high state of perfection.
The many collaborations between musicians and engineers during the past half century have resulted in electronic instruments that are a joy to play on, compose for, and listen to. But equally important is the interchange of knowledge that has taken place. Music making is still an intuitive art. But now, musicians draw on an impressive body of knowledge of musical psychoacoustics to guide their intuitions with regard to both electronic and acoustic instrument performance. Today's musician is in tune with his physical environment. He un- derstands how musical sounds are produced, how his mind functions when composing or performing, and how his ear-brain perception mechanism converts music into aesthetic gratification. It is this understanding that underscores the importance of music in our contemporary culture. The contributions that you have made toward this understanding cannot be overstated.
Thank you.
The first instrument designer to offer the electronic music synthesizer on a commercial basis, Dr. Robert Moog has a Ph.D. in engineering physics from Cornell University and an Honorary Doctor of Music from Lycoming College in Pennsylvania.