Reflections on the 20th Anniversary of CMJ

Abstract

At Symbolic Sound, we have a copy of every issue of Computer Music Journal from the very first (thanks to Kurt Hebel who started subscribing when he was still in high school), and, as far as I can tell, Computer Music Journal's first issue came out in 1977. I suppose this is the 20th anniversary year for the same reason that we call this the 20th century (for the next five years anyway ... ). I didn't discover Computer Music Journal until 1978, but it had an immediate and profound impact. Through it, I discovered, for the first time, that I wasn't alone, that there were others who had similarly hybridized interests, and that they took this kind of hybrid work seriously enough to give it a name and publish a journal about it. Computer Music Journal gave a name to what I had been trying to do all along, and the name was It didn't matter to me that much of that first issue was beyond my technical grasp at the time; in fact, I took it as a challenge that I would do whatever it took to be able to read and understand everything in there. Thus, it was because of Computer Music Journal that I took my first programming class, my first logic design course, and found my way to the University of Illinois. I remember working on my first FORTRAN program and having a friend of mine glance at what I was doing and tell me I was wasting my time learning to program; her father had told her not to bother, because in one, maybe two, years, all computers would be programmed using spoken, natural language. Alice, wherever you are, I hope you are not still waiting. In 1979 at the University of Illinois, studying computer music meant punched cards, Music 4BF on Control Data Corp. Cyber mainframes, 9-track tapes that held 3 min of sound at 20 kHz, and once-a-week conversions at the astronomy building in the evening with a computer operator who wore orange ear protectors as an aesthetic statement about our music. Despite the primitive conditions, those were exciting times. Computer music was still something unusual, and only people with special characteristics (primarily blind stubbornness and mulelike perseverance) could stand to do it. In those days, there were still some computer scientists and engineers interested in working with composers on computer music research which, at that time, was still synonymous with experimental music. MIDI changed all that. The engineers and computer scientists (with a few, highly cherished, exceptions) lost their tolerance for the composers. Why should they put up with experimental music any more when they could afford their own computers and their own synthesizers and program them to play all the Bach they desired? Some of the professors who had previously been heavily involved in developing innovative software and hardware allowed themselves to be lulled into thinking that they no longer had to get their hands dirty (with solder or line-printer ink), because the commercial music industry would take care of all that low-level stuff for them-kind of like Alice waiting for the naturalspeech interface to computers. The impact on computer music research was to push it outside the university and into private industry. There are still a few institutions where first-class computer music research has been continuously supported, but it can no longer be said that academia is the only environment where one can do innovative and original work in computer music. One has simply to look at the number of early International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) delegates and see how many of them now attend only the Audio Engineering Society conferences. That first taste of computer music left me feeling as though it were, in many ways, a step backward from the analog electronic studio. I couldn't understand why the software synthesis languages were based on a paradigm of instruments playing muComputer Music Journal, 20:3, pp. 31-35, Fall 1996 ? 1996 Massachusetts Institute of Technology