A special purpose digital system for musical instruction, composition, and performance

Abstract

IT has become clear in recent years that the future of musical performance, composition, distribution, and instruction is increasingly dependent on technology. These developments have expressed themselves at Dartmouth College where there has been a decade of activity in the composition and performance of electronic music, as well as a tradition of computer-assisted instruction in many areas, recently including music. The last few years have also witnessed startling and rapid advances in digital electronics technology enabling computer methods to be applied inexpensively to many phenomena of the "continuous world" which were formerly the province of analog technology. Research in this area has been carried on for some time in the Computer Hardware Laboratory of the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College. The history of the relationship between music and technology has been well documented, most recently in an article entitled "Computers and Future Music" by Mathews, Moore and Risset (Science, Vol. 183, No. 4122, 1974). The purpose of this article is to describe the development of a digital synthesizer that was built and is being used at Dartmouth in the instruction, composition, and performance of music. The actual design and construction, as well as the use of the system, is the result of the convergence of curricular needs and was accomplished through collaboration of the music department and the engineering school. Analog synthesizers have been used to date almost exclusively in the composition and performance of electronic music and the situation at Dartmouth was no different. However, because there has been significant activity in this musical genre at Dartmouth, it was natural that interest in digital synthesis should manifest itself because of the greater control it affords the composer. At the same time, it was recognized that the traditional approach to digital synthesis (Music V, Music 360, etc.) did not satisfy the compositional expectations concerning ease of use and low cost. The procedures used in conventional digital synthesis programs are at best cumbersome for most composers, and impose certain "stylistic" limitations. The greatest obstacle, however, has been the "turn around time" required before the composer can hear what he has specified; this has made live performance impossible. Within the more traditional offerings of the music department there have been theory courses where part of the objective is to train the "ears" of students in such skills as interval, scale and chord recognition. Because this ear training is best accomplished on an individual basis, we had been using one of a number of methods which have musical