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Musical Expression: How Computers Turn Amateurs into Mozart
Leroy Ekechukwu
RHET 243: E2
05/04/2010
I. Introduction
It is an ever-present belief that music is one of the few accurate expressions of the soul.
The composer, using simple note progressions or complex, overlapping synchronizations, can
express any of the emotions humans can feel on any given day; happiness, love, anger, sadness,
despair, all these emotions can flow richly from a piano, or slam gloriously from a drum, or
twang brilliantly from a guitar. The composer has written a piece of himself into a musical
piece, has encoded his emotions and thoughts within the notes that reach the listener.
This is where the entire experience gets interesting. Though the composer has written a
song with an emotion—specific or abstract, it doesn’t matter—in mind, the listener may have a
completely different take on it. What might have been written in anger can express
determination or ambition to a listener; what might have been sadness might come across as a
deeper, more profound and abstract meditation on love. This is what makes music so powerful
and so timeless: the coding from the composer stays the same, but the interpretation can be
different. Therefore, the music becomes universal. It reaches the hearts and souls of more
individuals than it may have originally been encoded for, and is appreciated on a much grander
scale.
But it is hard to create music. That is, it is hard to create truly captivating music using
traditional means. To create music in the traditional sense, one must have adequate knowledge
of music theory, which is the study of the way sounds of different frequencies interact with
each other to make a pleasant or unpleasant sound. One must be proficient in at least one
instrument: the piano, the violin, the drums, the guitar, etc. But being proficient in one
instrument doesn’t cut it: the composer also has to have knowledge of how all the instruments
he is considering for his piece work together. If he does not, then he often must work with
other composers that might have the knowledge he doesn’t. These are just some general
requirements for writing good music in the traditional sense, and while there are more, lacking
in any of the aforementioned areas will result in a very difficult and alienating time creating
music.
This was the problem that many faced in music for a long time. They heard symphonies
from great composers like Bach, Mozart, etc., and great improvisation from jazz musicians like
Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, and wanted to create music like them. But to create music
like them, they had to have been immersed in it their entire lives, which had not happened. On
top of that, recording good, clean, and permanent copies of these songs was very difficult to
do. Something had to be done to facilitate the process, and that is where computers came in.
In this essay, I want to examine briefly the history of how computers came to be such
important tools in music production. With this history in mind, I want to look—again briefly, as
this field of research is ever-expanding and will not fit in such a short essay—at exactly how
computers facilitate the music production process. After analyzing that, I’ll discuss how
computers have made people who otherwise would not have been musicians renowned locally
and even internationally. I’ll answer how computers have aided people as young as 10 years old
in expressing themselves musically, and how it has facilitated the entire production process. I’ll
discuss briefly where computer music production is today and where it is headed in the future,
and as a bonus, I will share my experiences as a musician who uses the computer to make his
songs. Music is one of the most important aspects of human existence; computers have helped
this aspect grow at far faster rates than it did before the advent of technology.
II. A Brief History of Computers in Music
When the word “computer” is used, many often think of the most advanced technology
packed into the smallest of containers; that is, people think of computers as we know them
today. But the word “computer” was being used well before it became associated with the
technology available in gadgets like cell phones and handheld video games. The earliest use of
the word “computer” as it has come to be known was at about the end of the 19 th century. It
did not take long for composer to become interested in using computers for musical purposes.
According to Aurelio de la Vega in “Regarding Electronic Music,” “the interest of
composers in producing music [by electronic means] is as old as the invention of the vacuum
tube” (3). The vacuum tube was invented in the 19th century, which is the same time the word
“computer” was being used similarly to its contemporary sense. Electronic music, which is the
same as music created with computers, “generally refers to music which is composed directly
on magnetic tape by electronic means” (de la Vega, 3). The interest was there as early as the
late 1800s, when inventors like Thomas Edison were already beginning to try to understand
how to use electricity to implement human functions.
It wasn’t until about 1945 that the first technique of composing electronically appeared.
Chronologically speaking, composing music with computers happened as Aurelio de la Vega
describes it in his essay:
pure musique concrete (appearing in France from 1945 to i952 in full force, and in
later years incorporated as partial elements of full scale works where other sound producing
means are used), which derives its sound materials from purely acoustical sources, such
as pounded surfaces or railway station sounds…pure electronic music originating in the
NWDR broadcasting studios in Cologne, Germany, around 1950…and rapidly
dispersing, with all sorts of modifications, throughout Italy…(de la Vega, 4).
As early as the mid 1940s, the process of synthesizing was already being developed. Synthesis
essentially is the process of taking a signal, often a sine wave or something similar, and
manipulating its frequency, amplitude, phase, etc. to produce a new sound. It is fascinating
that composers were going above and beyond this with every day sounds, which contain more
complex components than sine waves. This was a step closer, but a device that more closely
resembled the modern computer needed to be created in order for the major advancements
to occur.
CSRIAC was the answer to that call. Dubbed the “Electronic Computer Project,”
“Trevor Pearcey and Maston Beard officially began [the project] in 1947” (Doornbusch, 11).
CSRIAC was one of the first computers to be created in the world, and its specific purpose was
to process data and channel it into different sources. Some of the sources were “a memory
location, a register, the paper tape punch, or the loudspeaker” (Doornbusch, 12). The
loudspeaker is important in that mathematical sequences and programs would output their
results in the form of sound, which counts as an early form of synthesizer!
More computers like CSRIAC were built, with processing speeds that something as
small as an iPod dwarfs. It was hard to “accomplish a stable, pitched sound” (Doornbusch, 13)
because of how slow the computers were and how much power they needed to run. But, over
time as many know, computers became more advanced and more required less power to run
at higher speeds. Composers continued throughout the years to produce sounds using these
large computers, their work becoming slightly easier as the computers got slightly more
advanced. It was not until the late 1980s that computers were advanced enough to be used
reliably in making music. The first form music computers took was that of the modern
synthesizer in 1988.
III. Hardware and Software Synthesizers: Their Inner Workings
The evolution of computers and their use in musical composition gets more interesting
around 1988 because such computers now have a definitive name: synthesizer. These machines
enabled musicians to process signals and manipulate them into varying sounds. This kind of
process became the foundation for such genres of music as techno, pop, and, to a certain
extent, hip hop. Even percussive instruments like drums and xylophones could be effectively
simulated with synthesizers, thus making music composition accessible to anyone who could
afford it.
While synthesizers, or computer instruments, make it easier for the layman to create
music, the way they actually work is another story. The challenges associated with computers
being able to effectively simulate real music is articulated in the following:
Computer cognition of music actually involves four unique problems. First, how
will music be measured to provide input information to the computer system?
Second, how will that information be presented to the computer? Third, how will
it be represented in the computer program in such a way that the program can,
in some way, come to some understanding of its meaning? And finally, what will
the computer do with this knowledge (Dobrian, 2)?
The answer in its entirety is well beyond the scope of this essay; in fact, it is an ever
expanding answer, one that continues to innovate the way musicians use computers to
express themselves. As technology continues to evolve, the methods of musical creation
continue to become easier and also more flexible.
To put it briefly, computer scientists in conjunction with musicians create
complex programs that simulate the traditional means of musical production. The way
to understand it best is like this: “By complex calculations performable only by
computers, one can give the illusion of recorded sound flying about through space”
(Dobrian, 6). This is implemented by programmers with the use of very complex
algorithms that manipulate the sinusoidal components of notes to create familiar or
even unfamiliar sounds. Once this function is fully implemented, it is only a question of
creating an interface that will look familiar to a musician. So, instead of looking at the
complex calculations the computer is making, the musician can instead see things like a
virtual piano, guitar, or whatever the mind is capable of dreaming up. Such enormous
advances in technology have made it so that, today, even an inexperienced layman can
create something musical.
IV. Computer Musicians Today
Because of the ease of creating music using computers today, even average people can
sound like a modern day Chopin. There is a common misconception, however, that computers
have addressed all of the barriers that prevent anyone from creating music. As Chris Dobrian
puts it, “While it is unlikely that computers will help people become virtuosi without practicing
(although the possibility may one day warrant consideration), many admirable attempts have
been made to reduce the tedium…” (6). The fact of the matter is music is quite hard to create
without at least having some basic knowledge of how to do it. But, as noted above, there have been
attempts to lower the requirements of being successful in music production. Today, musicians that are
exceptionally skilled can create what are called loops. Loops, in essence, are premade musical
progressions that a layperson can then manipulate to his use, thereby creating something that is
original. Things like loops address the need to know a little something about music because now one
doesn’t have to know what buttons to push or what notes to string together to make a great-sounding
song. They only need to string enough loops together in a way that sounds logical, and a song has been
created almost from scratch.
But the tradition is for many young producers is to actually learn a thing or two about musical
production within the program that they wish to use.