Introduction

History teaches us that musical technologies are fundamental unstable, and have no inherently correct or obvious function. Inventors may suggest applications for their innovations, but cannot guarantee that anyone will take them seriously; consider again the case of Edison. The masses and the market may establish a conventional use for a music technology, but a convention is not a fact; it is, rather, an illusion of certainty. As composers, we should be critical of these conventions because personal creativity, by definition, is not mass-produced. Hitting a ball with a tennis racquet or a nail with a hammer are not acts of personal expressivity, because tennis racquets are designed to hit balls and hammers to hit nails. When we use these tools as they are meant to be used, we are at the mercy of convention. Our challenge is to invent new tools for ourselves, and to come up with new uses for old tools. Whereas a conventional approach to music technology tries to conceal the tools being used, these critical approaches put the tools in the foreground, for creative reassessment.

We have given you some pieces to analyze that exemplify these types of critique. In Guero, Lachenmann devises a vocabulary of percussive piano sounds to empty the piano of its traditional character. Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry juxtapose the noise of tape splicing and manipulation with the sound of an unprocessed, acoustic piano, creating a tension between old and new recording techniques. In Bye Bye Butterfly, Pauline Oliveros pushes that tension to the breaking point, by juxtaposing a recording of Puccini's opera Madame Butterfly with sine-wave loops. The composer intends her piece as a critique of the nineteenth-century concert music, "the polite morality of that age and its attendant institutionalized oppression of the female sex" [1]. And while Stockhausen's Studie II is less explicitly polemical, it shows how far one may go in pursuit of a cosmic language that is uniquely one's own. We have seen, then, some examples of compositional intervention, involving both traditional musical instruments (in particular, the piano) and recording technology itself.

Our model of compositional intervention emphasizes historical knowledge. By studying the history of a technology, we dig up forgotten alternatives to its conventional use. These alternatives can break the spell of functionality and give us the courage to use the technology incorrectly—that is, personally.

The Computer as Emulator

As we have seen, the computer, as a musical instrument, is a chameleon of analog techniques. An audio-editing program such as Audacity emulates the splicing and editing techniques of the tape recorder; a synthesis program such as Max/MSP emulates the filters, oscillators, and signal flow of sound circuitry. The power of the computer as a musical instrument is its capacity to make a hundred years of music technology available to us at the touch of a button. The computer shatters the barriers between formerly distinct sound media, allowing us to mix techniques at will, without concern for their history or regard for their material basis in magnetic tape or potentiometers.

This is both a blessing and a curse. The blessing, of course, is that the computer makes the old, hard work with tape and circuits physically and mentally easy—literally immaterial. We don't have to fiddle with wires and risk electrocution to use an oscillator in Max/MSP; we can copy and paste audio in Audacity without cutting our fingers on a razor. We can listen to a hundred different dynamic envelopes in the time it took Stockhausen to produce one by hand. Freed from the physical constraints of analog media, we can produce sonic material faster than we ever could in the past.

But this blessing of ease and flexibility of production comes with the curse of conventionality. The sounds of Schaeffer's splices and Stockhausen's reverb were radical in part because they were difficult to produce; more than specialized equipment, they required the composers' labor. Most people don't bother working for three months to produce a three-minute tape piece. But now this labor is no longer an issue, and therefore the electronic sounds that were once rare and strange have become ubiquitous. Anyone can produce them, so everyone does. In principle, the computer can produce any sound. In practice, however, it simply echoes the history of analog sound media.

Digital Intervention

So, despite living in the so-called digital age, we're stuck with the conventions of analog sound media. But we can work around the computer's analog models, just as Lachenmann works around the conventions of a piano, or Pauline Oliveros the conventions of nice nineteenth-century operas.

Ikeda: Dataphonics

The first intervention comes from Ryoji Ikeda, who is one of the composers on the table for this week's analysis. It comes in the form of data:

Dataphonics is a music project by Ryoji Ikeda, which focuses on the relationship between the sound of data and the data of sound. [2]

[2]	Dataphonics, "Introduction"

Like Lachenmann, Ikeda is interested in a fundamental musical ambivalence. For Lachenmann, every sound is also the consequence of a physical gesture; the uneasy relationship between sounds and their gestures is the driving force of the composer's music. A different ambivalence drives Ikeda's computer-based music. For Ikeda, every digital sound is both an approximation of an analog waveform and an array of binary data. The score for Dataphonics makes this evident:

Example 6 from "Binary conversion of sound waveform" in Dataphonics

On the left, we see waveforms that are familiar to us from sound-editing programs like Audacity. This technique of sound-writing represents time on the x-axis and sound pressure on the y-axis; it dates back to the nineteenth century, and became a composition tool in the age of optical soundtracks. On the right, we see black and white pattern of bits that represent each sample as a 16-bit binary number, i.e. a number between 0 and 255 (or perhaps -128 and 127: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two's_complement).

Example 11, with magnified visualization of bit-patterns.