Electronic Music Studio Research Articles

From the Editor

Cuban-American Aurelio de la Vega has been one of the most daring and innovative Latin American composers of his generation. He first studied music at the Instituto Musical Ada Iglesias in Havana under Harold Gramatges. While in Los Angeles as cultural attaché to the Cuban consulate he took private composition lessons with Ernst Toch. From 1953 to 1959 he directed the music department at the Universidad de Oriente in [End Page 1] Santiago de Cuba. He then settled in California where he taught composition and founded the electronic music studio at the California State University, Northridge (formerly the San Fernando Valley State College). He retired from that institution in 1994 as Distinguished Emeritus Professor after over thirty years of instructional activities.

Gayle Young. The Sackbut Blues: Hugh Le Caine, Pioneer in Electronic Music. Ottawa: National Museum of Science and Technology, 1989. xiv, 274 pp. ISBN 0-660- 12006-2

GAYLE YOUNG. The Sackbut Blues: Hugh Le Caine. Pioneer in Electronic Music. Ottawa: National Museum of Science and Technology, 1989. xiv. 274 pp. ISBN 0-66012006-2 Canada has a history of original creative thinkers, and Hugh Le Caine (1914-1977) must be one of tne most remarkable among them. LeCaine was both an experimenter and an inventor. In 1920's, he experimented with aspects of sound recording and processing: John Cage did much same things in late 1940's and early 1950's and almost immediately became a celebrity. In 1940's. Le Caine designed and built a musical (described in The New Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments as the earliest instrument that resembles a synthesizer [Davies 1984: 680], whose power and flexibility of control still has not been surpassed by modern digital instruments: Robert Moog built a similar instrument twenty years later and gained no small reputation thereby. While still a child. Le Caine built such futuristic, if rather impractical, devices as an electronic ukulele, a paper-roll-driven autoharp, and a guitar with foot pedals for tuning like those of a harp. He experimented with processing sounds by means of microphones and speakers and by means of modified playback of homemade phonograph recordings. His absolute pitch, remarkable musical memory, and formal and autodidactic study of musical instruments made him particularly suited to musical instrument invention. After first synthesizer, he went on to create first polyphonic synthesizer, an audio playback device that allowed for highly controlled mixing and editing, and ingenious controllers to allow composers to interact with synthesizers and tape recorders. Given his unusual accomplishments, perhaps most remarkable aspect of man was his shyness. Although he was composer of first (and for many years, most famous) tape composition produced in Canada and for more than a decade Canadian composer of electroacoustic music best represented on disc, he never considered himself a real composer. He maintained he was only trying out his instruments in see them from composer's point of view. He tried in various ways to draw attention of composers to what his instruments had to offer, but attempts were so humble that few composers or performers came to know of Le Caine's accomplishments during his lifetime. There were illustrious moments, of course. Arnold Walter seized upon Le Caine's work and, in cooperation with National Research Council (Le Caine's lifelong employer), set up University of Toronto Electronic Music Studios (UTEMS). In 1959, this was but second electronic music studio in North America (the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center having been established preceding year) and for next ten years one of of world's most important centres for art. Le Caine filled UTEMS with his marvellous devices and, a few years later, did same for Istvan Anhalt's facility at McGill University. He also placed equipment in studios of Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Queen's University (Le Caine's alma mater, where School of Music building was named, in part, in his honour in 1974). Le Caine published much of his work in technical journals and occasionally in musical ones, but world was not quite ready at that time to make much use of such information. Moreover, since Le Caine worked for Canadian National Research Council, marketing of his inventions was subject to certain restrictions. Perhaps more importantly, even where commercial production of Le Caine's devices seemed to be on horizon, his modesty and perfectionism made him reluctant to agree that a project was finally ready for manufacture. Robert Moog's name became synonymous with musical synthesizers for more than a decade not because he made a better but because he managed actually to market one (something perhaps easier to accomplish in United States). …

Interview with Morton Subotnick

Morton Subotnick, a pioneer of electronic music, is one of the most active composers on the new music scene today. Born in Los Angeles in 1933, he studied with Leon Kirchner and Darius Milhaud. During his early years in San Francisco, he cofounded the San Francisco Tape Music Center. For many years he was on the faculty at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California, where he directed the electronic music studios.

Beyond Notation

What exactly is the relationship between notation and the music we hear? How has this relationship been affected by the development of first analogue and then digital recording of sound during the present century? This article looks at these issues from the point of view of a composer working with both traditional and unconventional notation and with recorded sound in the electronic music studio. The arguments present a very much condensed and simplified version of a discussion presented in the author's recently published book On Sonic Art.

Interactive Composing: An Overview

Interactive composing is the name I have given to a method for using performable, real-time computer music systems in composing and performing music. The concept of interactive composing has grown in my work since 1967, at which time I proposed the design for a sequencer-programmable analog synthesis system, subsequently built by the R. A. Moog Co. and installed in the Electronic Music Studio at State University of New York at Albany in December 1969. That system's special capability in automating controls made possible the techniques that led to several compositions, in particular Ideas of Movement at Bolton Landing (1971) (Chadabe 1972), which involved the control of timbre and rhythm interactively with automated controls generated by sequencers, and Echoes (1972) (Chadabe 1975; 1977), in which the sounds performed by an instrumentalist are delayed for a few seconds, then transformed by a sound-processing system, then distributed to various loudspeakers. The transformed sounds appear as distant echoes to which the performer reacts in deciding how to play the next notes.

McGill University: Its electronic music studio complex

Abstract The article lists (and describes some of) the equipment of 3 composing, 1 recording and 1 editing studio and offers general information on the electronic music courses given at the studio complex.

Notes from Grainger museum, University Of Melbourne

Abstract Burnett Cross, now a senior science editor with Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, N.Y., from 1945 to 1961 assisted Percy Grainger in the development of machines to play Free Music. In March 1976 he visited Australia by courtesy of the Australian-American Educational Foundation to work on restoration of the Free Music machines in the Grainger Museum. On 23 March he delivered the 1976 Percy Grainger Lecture. A feature of the lecture was the presentation of Grainger's Free Music No. 1 as realised, on the Synthi 100 in the electronic music studio of the Faculty of Music, University of Melbourne, by the Faculty's electronics technician, Les Craythorn. The Australian Broadcasting Commission filmed a television segment at the Museum during Burnett Cross's visit. The segment, Free Music, was screened on the Weekend Magazine programme on Sunday, 13 June.1

An Introduction to the Play Program

PLAY was first written during the spring and summer of 1977 at the Electronic Music Studio at State University of New York at Albany.* It grew out of our knowledge of several other programs and systems, particularly Groove and The Conductor Program from Bell Telephone Laboratories, Donald Buchla's Series 500 Electric Music Box and Salvatore Martirano's SalMar Construction. Our intention in PLAY was to maximize a composer's flexibility in conceptualizing temporal processes, and, consequently, although traditional musical problems may easily be solved with PLAY, the formats in PLAY are not rooted in traditional concepts or notation. Further, because we feel that small interactive systems offer important advantages to composers, we designed the program to be used with a small, portable computer controlling an external synthesizer, analog or digital, video or audio, in realtime and with extensive interaction capability.** As a specific example to convey the general principles of organization and the operating procedures of the program, we will, in this article, describe PLAYl, a version of the PLAY program optimized for the PDP11 in the Albany studio.

Digital control in electronic music studios

Abstract A new concept for a studio for electronic sound production will be dealt with, in which three methods of control are available to the user: manual control, voltage control and digital control. A digital bus system and a microprocessor form the heart of the studio. The possible ways of using such a studio will grow as more software is developed for the micro‐computer.

Electronic Music Studios in Britain - 7: West Square, London

Electronic Music Studios in Britain - 7: West Square, London

Electronic Music Studios in Britain - 4: Goldsmiths’ College, University of London

Electronic Music Studios in Britain - 4: Goldsmiths’ College, University of London

Electronic Music Studios in Britain - 2: University College, Cardiff

Electronic Music Studios in Britain - 2: University College, Cardiff

Practice rooms of the Harvard University Music Building: a case history

In 1969, Harvard University began planning a large addition to its Music and Music Library Buildings. The addition contains some 30 teaching studios, 20 practice rooms, an electronic music studio, a large rehersal room, a small ensemble room, and a huge area of library storage space. Upon completion and occupancy of the building, all of its facilities were found to be in excellent acoustical condition, with one exception: the sound isolation characteristics of the practice rooms, which were, by any standards, a dismal failure. What went wrong? This question is answered by tracing the history of the project from its conceptual stages through its actual completion and occupancy, including objective comparisons between the design criteria and the as-built measurements. Some thoughts and comments concerning possible remedial measures are presented.

MUSYS: Software for an electronic music studio

AbstractMUSYS is a system of programs used to create electronic music at the computer studio of Electronic Music Studios, London. This paper describes the programming language employed by composers, and the implementation of its compiler and of other programs in the system. It is shown that by the use of a macrogenerator, an efficient and useful system can be built from simple software on a small computer.

The electronic music studio at Stockholm, its development and construction

The electronic music studio at Stockholm, its development and construction

What Goes into an Electronic Music Studio

What Goes into an Electronic Music Studio

A Tape Recorder for Use in Electronic Music Studios and Related Equipment

In 1954 the National Research Council of Canada started a small program of research on electronic music instruments. Two instruments will be described briefly: our special-purpose tape recorder, designed for music creation in an electronic music studio, and our sine-wave oscillator bank with photocell and other control devices. Occasional reference will also be made to the unit system which we are evolving in co-operation with the Electronic Music Studio of the University of Toronto, the aim of which is to design units which can be used in many configurations in order to enlarge the scope of an individual studio.

The Electronic Music Studio of the University of Toronto

Electronic Music, although conceived purely as a function of radio and television entertainment, has now become an accepted academic discipline. Not only does it open new areas of musical experience and extend the modern musicians' traditional range of taste, but it creates as well an awareness of the perimeters of musical performance and composition to an extent that was impossible until the techniques and equipment of Electronic Music were developed to their present level of perfection. In order to make available the results and benefits of research and instruction in this area, Dr. Arnold Walter, in his capacity as Director, established in May of 1959 the Electronic Music Studios as an integral and permanent division within the Music Faculty of the University of Toronto. Dr. Hugh Le Caine, of the National Research Council of Canada in Ottawa, was the technical advisor and continues to play a dom-

Electronic Music at the University of Illinois

Electronic music is, of necessity, institutional music because adequate equipment for its preparation is not cheap. Therefore the history of electronic music has been one of subsidized effort. In Europe, most electronic music studios are supported by government broadcasting agencies or private industry. In this country, universities and foundations will have to fulfill a similar role. Therefore, our experience at the University of Illinois in building up facilities for experimental music composition is perhaps typical of what will occur elsewhere in this country. Our studio is the second such to be organized in the United States, following the one at Columbia University now subsidized by the Rockefeller Foundation*l.

Tape-Recorder for Creative Use in an Electronic Music Studio

The existence of sound storage processes, especially tape-recording, has been responsible for a new point of view in realizing music. The authors believe that the philosophy of “Musique Concrete” is not necessarily involved in this approach and that any method of music production would-benefit by it. Conventional tape-recorders are not well suited to creative use, and in this paper a tape-recorder designed for the purpose is discussed. There will be a demonstration.