paul@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Paul Lansky) (12/13/90)
I received many requests for information, and even sound(!)
from people who couldn't make it to our NeXT concert at
Princeton on Dec. 7th. Unfortunately the technology is not
quite ready to distribute the several gigabytes of sound which
were heard, but I can pass out the program notes. The main
thing I am especially pleased with concerning this event is that
in contrast to most techno-shows in which the potential of some
technological medium is displayed, this was an event at which
actual accomplishments were the only focus. It was not what you
"can" do, but rather what we already "have done" that was on display
I suspect most material played on the 7th will make its way
to commercially distributable media (CD) in the next year or two.
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Princeton University, Taplin Auditorium
December 7, 1990, 8PM
A Little NeXT Music
Notes
Paul Lansky: The Sound of Two Hands
The Sound of Two Hands combines the lowest
sound-technology--those flabby appendages with which we ex-
press approbation, as well as eat: our hands--with the
highest in modern musical technology, digital synthesis.
The piece was synthesized on a NeXT computer using the
software facilities of the NeXT Soundkit and Cmix.
Paul Lansky is Professor of Music and Chairman of the Music
Department at Princeton University. For the past twenty
years he has been banging his head against a wall of intran-
sigence presented by unmusical computers , trying to get
them to behave musically (which is why his hair is grey and
he acts silly sometimes) . Fortunately for him he has had
some success. His works have been recorded on
Columbia-Odyssey, Wergo, Nonesuch, CRI, Centaur, Neuma and
New Albion Records. His recent CD, Smalltalk, on New Albion
Records was partially created and entirely mastered on a
NeXT computer(NA030CD).
Peter Velikonja: Spomin
Spomin is the first piece composed using the sound synthesis
language Fugue, developed at Carnegie Mellon University by
Roger Dannenberg and Chris Fraley. The material is derived
from thousands of transformations of a single human vocal
utterance. Fugue sound processing primitives were used to
manipulate the sound to varying degrees, so that some events
are clearly vocal while others sound quite unrelated to
their vocal source. In Slovenian, the word spomin means
memory, or a memorial, and the piece deals with the transi-
ence of our human memory: one event leads logically enough
to the next, but after several such steps the present state
seems quite unrelated to its origin. It is amazing, over
long periods of time, how far we are able to drift from an
original premise.
Peter Velikonja is Assistant Professor of Oboe and Theory at
West Virginia University, and is active as a performer and
composer. He received his training at Northwestern Universi-
ty, the Folkwang Musikhochschule in Essen, F.R.G., on a Ful-
bright grant, and the Mannes College in New York City. He
has performed with several major orchestras, including the
Chicago Symphony and the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra.
Currently he performs with the Wheeling (WV) Symphony
Orchestra, the Pittsburgh Opera Orchestra and the Morphic
Resonance Ensemble, an experimental music group. At the
School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University he
writes music using digital synthesis and develops other
music software.
Brad Garton: Ruff Raga Riffs
Ruff Raga Riffs, a piece-in-progress , is the sonic output
of my attempt to grow a wailin' heavy-metal guitarist in my
NeXT computer. For this piece, however, the heavy metal
seems to have been mined somewhere in South India -- hence
the 'raga' in the title. The synthesized guitar sounds come
from a remarkable variation of the Karplus-Strong (or
"plucked-string") digital synthesis algorithm written by
Charles Sullivan. The 'virtual guitarist' you hear perform-
ing is actually a LISP program designed to improvise suit-
ably "wailin'" guitar riffs when given a simple scale. I'm
able to coerce different sorts of melodies and playing tech-
niques by holding long conversations in LISP with my
home-grown guitar player, but the actual note-by-note musi-
cal choices (pitch, rhythm, articulation, etc.) are being
made by something other than me. And I swear I can hear it
practicing late at night...
Brad Garton recently received his PhD. in music composition
from Princeton University. He currently serves on the
faculty of Columbia University, where he directs the Comput-
er Music facility. His computer piece, Approximate Rhythms
was recently released on Centaur Records.
Frances White: Resonant Landscape
The physical landscape is baffling in its ability to
transcend whatever we would make
of it. It is as subtle in its expression as turns
of the mind, and larger than our grasp;
and yet it is still knowable. The mind, full of cu-
riosity and analysis, disassembles a
landscape and then reassembles the pieces-the nod of
a flower, the color of the night
sky, the murmur of an animal-trying to fathom its
geography. At the same time the
mind is trying to find its place within the land, to
discover a way to dispel its own sense
of estrangement.
- Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams
Resonant Landscape began with my desire to make a piece us-
ing animal voices and other sounds of nature. While feeling
a strong connection to these sounds, I felt it important
that whatever I did would still allow them to retain their
"ability to transcend whatever I would make of them." I
have tried to do this by making a piece that is not a tradi-
tional work for magnetic tape, but which is an interactive,
living experience.
The piece exists as a landscape in which the various sounds
can be encountered. The different sounds-recorded natural
sounds (streams, wind, birds), computer-processed natural
sounds,
and purely synthetic sounds-inhabit particular places within
this space. The landscape is represented by a map
displayed on the computer, and the listener explores the
space of the piece by tracing paths on the map. As one
moves around, the computer responds by playing the sounds
characteristic of one's current location. Although I was
inspired by my walks in the woods around Princeton, the in-
tent of the piece is not to imitate any real experience or
particular place, but rather to communicate to the listener
my sense of the natural landscape: my memory and imagina-
tion of it.
All computer processing and synthesis of sounds was done on
a NeXT workstation using Cmix and Csound software. The
map-making and performance software was made especially for
this piece by James Pritchett.
Frances White studied at the University of Maryland, Brook-
lyn College, and is currently in the doctoral program at
Princeton University. She has been active in computer music
for a number of years and her works have been widely heard.
They have been recorded on Centaur, Wergo and Le Chant Du
Monde. Records. Two of her compositions won prizes in the
18th International Electroacoustic Music Competition at
Bourges, France. Her museum installation of Resonant
Landscape at the Glasgow Art Museum last November was
featured on BBC television.
Tom Hajdu, Andy Milburn:Sound and Vision
Andy Milburn and Tom Hajdu, former graduate students at
Princeton, now form tomandandyinc. a Manhattan based com-
pany that produces music for various media. They do things
such as generate sound and music for MTV's Buzz show, ABC
News,, a collaboration with N.Y. painter, Marilyn Minter,
and a new pilot for Fox Television. . For the past two
years they have been using a pair of NeXT machines (ap-
propriately named tom and andy), running Paul Lansky's Cmix
along with their own dark and convoluted software. The work
on this program is a compilation of recent work.
Maurice Wright: Music from Dr. Franklin
Dr. Franklin is an electronic opera in two acts in which
Benjamin Franklin, on the last day of his life, reveals his
plan to preserve his body in a cask ofmadeira in order to
return to Philadelphia 100 years later. He returns in the
present time, gets a look around, and is killed by a light-
ening bolt while still in the hospital he founded. Scored
for five singers in multiple roles and taped music, the
piece incorporates video tape and a set designed by David P.
Gordon based on Robert Venturi's "Ghost House" monument to
Franklin which stands in Philadelphia. The electronic sound
was synthesized using the NeXT computer with the addition of
MIDI
synthesizers and acoustic recordings. The NeXT Music Kit,
Paul Lansky's Cmix software, and various programs written by
the composer were used to compute the digital sound.
Maurice Wright is Laura H. Carnell Professor of Music Compo-
sition at the Esther Boyer College of Music of Temple
University in Philadelphia.
Michael McNabb: The Lark Full Cloud
The Lark Full Cloud was commissioned by the Community
Redevelopment Agency of Los Angeles in 1989, and was real-
ized the same year in the composer's private digital music
studio. The eight short pieces, interleaved with 16 other
short works by two other composers, will be played one piece
on the hour, 24 hours a day, from a permanently-installed
sound system in the new Grand Hope Park in downtown Los
Angeles. A real-time performance application called Ensem-
ble, running on the NeXT Computer, was used to simultaneous-
ly synthesize many of the sounds, control a Yamaha TX81Z and
Lexicon PCM70 through MIDI, and generate algorithmic materi-
al. In addition, Lisp software written by the composer, the
Scorefile package, was used to transform composed material
into NeXT Music Kit Scorefiles. The wind and river sounds
were recorded in the Teton and Yellowstone National Parks,
Wyoming, U.S.A.
Composer Michael McNabb holds a Doctor of Musical Arts in
Music Composition from Stanford University, where he studied
with Leland Smith and John Chowning. He realized his compo-
sitions at the Center for Computer Research in Music and
Acoustics for over 10 years, and now works at his private
digital music studio in San Francisco. He has received
awards from the Prix Ars Electronica, the U.S. National En-
dowment for the Arts, the Bourges Festival, and the League
of Composers / ISCM. Two CD releases are available, Comput-
er Music (Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs MFCD-818), and Invisi-
ble Cities (Wergo 2015-50). Michael McNabb is currently
manager of the Sound and Music Group at NeXT Computer.
We would like to thank the Friends of Music at Princeton,
and the hard work of Janet Cahill, Susan Kelly, and Mike
Matlack, of NeXT Inc.