Computer music

Computer composition

Composition and sound synthesis are complementary processes because the first may lead to the second. Composers may elect to use a set of compositional programs to produce a composition. They may then stop using a computer and print their results for transcription to instrumental performance. Alternatively, they may transfer their results directly into electronic sounds by means of a second set of programs for sound synthesis. Finally, they may desire only to convert an already composed score into sound. When composers do this, they translate their score into a form that can be entered into a computer and use the computer essentially as a data translator.

The first point to understand about computer composition is that, like electronic music, it is not a style but a technique. In principle, any kind of music, from traditional to completely novel, can be written by these machines. For composers, however, the main appeal consists not in duplicating known styles of music but rather in seeking new modes of musical expression that are uniquely the result of interaction between the composers and this new type of instrument.

At present, composers above all need a compiling language comprised of musical or quasi-musical statements and a comprehensive library of basic compositional operations written as closed subroutines—in effect, a user’s system analogous to computer languages (such as Fortran) used by mathematicians. Two major obstacles stand in the way of building up an effective musical computer language. The first is the obvious one of allocation of sufficient time, money, and other resources. The second is defining what goes into the subroutine library—i.e., stating with precision the smallest units of activity or decision making that enter into the process of musical composition. Unlike mathematics, in which traditional modes of thinking prepared the way for such a definition of subroutines, in music the defining of “modules” of composition leaves even sophisticated thinkers much more at sea.

The earliest example of computer-composed music is the Illiac Suite for String Quartet (1957) by two Americans, the composer Lejaren Hiller and the mathematician Leonard Isaacson. It was a set of four experiments in which the computer was programmed to generate random integers representing various musical elements, such as pitches, rhythms, and dynamics, which were subsequently screened through programmed rules of composition.

Two very different compositions, ST/10-1,080262 (1962), by Yannis Xenakis, and HPSCHD (1968), by John Cage and Hiller, are illustrative of two later approaches to computer composition. ST/10-1,080262 is one of a number of works realized by Xenakis from a Fortran program he wrote in 1961 for an IBM 7090 computer. Several years earlier, Xenakis had composed a work called Achorripsis by employing statistical calculations and a Poisson distribution to assign pitches, durations, and playing instructions to the various instruments in his score. He redid the work with the computer, retitled it, and at the same time produced a number of other, similar compositions. HPSCHD, by contrast, is a multimedia work of indeterminate length scored for one to seven harpsichords and one to 51 tape recorders. For HPSCHD the composers wrote three sets of computer programs. The first, for the harpsichord solos, solved Mozart’s Musical Dice Game (K. 294d), an early chance composition in which successive bars of the music are selected by rolling dice, and modified it with other compositions chosen with a program based on the Chinese oracle I Ching (Book of Changes). The second set of programs generated the 51 sound tracks on tape. These contained monophonic lines in microtone tunings based upon speculations by the composers regarding Mozart’s melodic writing. The third program generated sheets of instructions to the purchasers of a record of the composition.

Hiller has continued to develop compositional programming techniques in order to complete a two-hour cycle of works entitled Algorithms I, Algorithms II, and Algorithms III. Otherwise, interest in computer composition gradually has continued to grow. For example, Gottfried Michael Koenig, director of the Instituut voor Sonologie of the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, has after a lapse of several years written new computer music such as Segmente 99-105 (1982) for violin and piano. Related to Koenig’s work is an extensive literature on theoretical models for music composition developed by the American composer Otto Laske. Charles Ames, another American, has written several works for piano or small ensemble that are less statistical and more deterministic in approach than most of the above. Clarence Barlow has written a prize-winning composition, Çoğluatobüsíşletmesí (1978), that exists in two versions—for piano or for solo tape. A different, but nevertheless important, example of computer music composition is Larry Austin’s Phantasmagoria: Fantasies on Ives’ Universe Symphony (1977). This is a realization, heavily dependent on computer processing, of Charles Ives’s last and most ambitious major composition, which he left in a diverse assortment of some 45 sketch pages and fragments.

The borderline between composition and sound synthesis is becoming increasingly blurred as sound synthesis becomes more sophisticated and as composers begin to experiment with compositional structures that are less related to traditional musical syntax. An example of this is Androgeny, written for tape in 1978 by the Canadian composer Barry Truax.