The Computer As A Musical Medium

Abstract

This paper examines the concept of computers as a musical medium. The word medium has many definitions. Among them is "a person thought to have the power to communicate with...agents of another world or dimension."[1] Sceptics argue that such people are deluded or out of touch with reality. However, if disbelief is suspended and the computer considered as something that can channel fantasy into reality, then a case could be argued that a computer can actually act as this kind of medium.

Introduction

Christopher Longuet-Higgins in Musical Structure and Cognition (ed. Howell, Cross and West: xi)[2] describes music as "perhaps the most mysterious of all the arts, being at the same time so remote from reality and so faithful to experience." To talk about reality at all is to talk about our perception of it. Perception is shaped by experiences, both real and imagined and these combine to create memories. Memories enable us to compare and contrast experiences, our perceptions of them, and thus define our reality. One of the prime characteristics of the computer as a medium is its ability to blur this reality and by extension, alter our state of consciousness.

Virtual Realities

Lewis Carroll's stories of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass both provide good illustrations of blurred realities created in the literary medium. They conjure worlds in which big is small, up is down, and so on. For a child, these stories challenge their perception of the world they know. It is the same challenge faced by the character of Neo in the Matrix films and the Virtual Reality world in which the films are set. It is a computer world where none of the usual laws of physics apply, just as Wonderland was for Alice. At a deeper, more philosophical level, both explore concepts of morality, choice, and a search for meaning.

Carroll's Jabberwocky poem could also be a metaphor for today's news media - a medium that presents to us a reality but which is filled with Orwellian double-speak and jibberish. Alice's statement after reading Jabberwocky sums it up very eloquently:

"...it's rather hard to understand!" (You see she didn't like to confess, ever to herself, that she couldn't make it out at all.) "Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas - only I don't know exactly what they are! However, somebody killed something: that's clear, at any rate..."[3]

A Playground For Musical Fantasy

The references to Carroll have been used to highlight an important facet of the computer as a musical medium and in particular, the methods by which it can represent things that otherwise could only be imagined. When Alice first begins to read the Jabberwocky poem, it makes absolutely no sense to her at all because the typeface is all reversed. It dawns on her that the poem can only have meaning if its words are reflected in a mirror. If one was to make an audio recording of a reading of Jabberwocky using computer software, the medium is such that it can easily be played in reverse thus allowing the listener to hear the poem actually spoken as Carroll might have imagined. In a sense, it could be said that Carroll's creative spirit is being channelled directly through the medium.

Similarly, the computer can act as a musical medium to channel any sound a person might be able to imagine from their thoughts and into a world where everybody can hear them. If there is any limitation to this, it's unlikely the computer medium is at fault. Rather, the only possible limitation will be that of the human operator's imagination and their ability to use the sonic manipulation capabilities of various music software programs.

Taboos, Invention and Creativity

In music, just as in life, there are many taboos. By definition, these are strong social prohibitions relating to human activity or social custom declared as sacred and forbidden; breaking of the taboo is usually considered objectionable or abhorrent by society.[4] What is particularly interesting, however, is that taboos are social conventions that exist in reality but not necessarily in the human mind. There seems to be a consensus among those who have studied creativity (Csikszentmihalyi et. al.) that creative individuals are aware of traditions but aren't afraid to challenge and break from them.[5]

Throughout music history, various musical taboos have been broken. Perhaps the most significant break was when western music was liberated from its role as purely religious and devotional to become a secular entertainment. The tritone interval, once called diabolus in musica or the Devil's interval in the early music era through to the Baroque, is now in common use across a range of musical styles.

In the past 100 years, many things once considered purely as noise and thus a taboo in music are now regarded as new and exciting timbres in the creation of new sounds. Technological advances have made this possible in music though there are many parallels in other fields of artistic expression as well. The invention of electricity not only paved the way for the capturing, storing, manipulation and dissemination of sounds. It made possible dozens of new forms of visual arts, from motion pictures to laser light sculptures and for the integration of these with sound and music. More than this, these combinations themselves - borne in the imaginations of creative people - can be channelled through the computer medium to form virtual worlds that are greater than the sum of their parts.

Conclusion

Sceptics might argue, just as they do about psychics, that the disembodiment of one sound from its traditional context to create another and the channelling of it into something labelled as "music" is the work of charlatans. It is certainly the case that the computer as a musical medium challenges traditional analysis and meaning of music but then, the very nature of music has eluded scholars for well over three thousand years.[6] As a phenomenon, music is ubiquitous and universal and yet its existence remains unexplained by any apparent practical purpose. Perhaps the best explanation might be simply that our entire perception of reality is flawed by the nihilism so prevalent in today's culture. If the computer medium really is the conduit between some other world or dimension and this one, just as the rabbit hole was Alice's portal into Wonderland, then the future as I see it looks as bright and meaningful as any I can imagine.

"Reality: a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there." (Anonymous)



References

1 Dictionary.com (2006), Medium, http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=medium, Accessed 20 May, 2006.
2 Howell, P., Cross, I., and West, R. (Eds.), (1985) Musical Structure and Cognition, London: Academic Press.
3 Literature.org, (2005), Lewis Carroll: Through The Looking Glass, http://www.literature.org/authors/carroll-lewis/through-the-looking-glass/chapter-01.html, Accessed 20 May, 2006.
4 Wikipedia, (2006), Taboo, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taboo, Accessed 20 May, 2006.
5 Csikszentmihalyi, M., (1996) Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, New York: Harper Collins.
6 Serafine, M. L., (1988) Music As Cognition: The Development of Thought in Sound, New York: Columbia University Press.

Playing Piano With Balls

A Human Seal

Male Optical Illusion

Pervert's Music Archive

The music links take you to the page of a file server where the mp3s are located. They can be downloaded and saved or streamed directly from there. Apologies for the inconvenience.

LIVE

Fugue.mp3
Let's Dance.mp3
Tarkus-Take 5 Medley.mp3

Fugue is a piano/bass duo and Tarkus is jazz piano trio. These two pieces originally were performed together (the mp3 split into two smaller files). The recording is from 1992, transferred from video tape so, the quality is a bit dodgy. But, the performances are kick-ass, even if I do say so myself. The bass player is a guy I haven't seen (almost) since these recordings were made. Oddly enough, I bumped into him at my local shops about a week ago. He's no longer playing much -- decided there was more money in being a lawyer than music.

Let's Dance was recorded (to video, as above) in 1995 when I used to have a Santana 'tribute' band. Tribute bands were all the rage in the 20th Century (in case you didn't know) and various artists continue to be aped by 'tribute' acts. That said, this band (an 8 piece group) included some great players and was about the most fun band I've ever had.

ORCHESTRAL

Abaddon's Bolero.mp3
Creole Dance (Orchestral).mp3
Happenstance.mp3
Op.1 No.1 The Rat Patrol.mp3
Op.1 No.2 Dance of the Farmer's Crazy Wife.mp3
Op.1 No.3 Mice in Wolves' Clothing.mp3

Abaddon's Bolero is a transcription I did of an Emerson Lake & Palmer piece, originally released on their Trilogy album. It's a personal fave, not the least because I used to have a dog named Abaddon.

Creole Dance is also a transcription of a Keith Emerson solo piano piece. I've orchestrated it in the style of Lalo Schifrin -- film composer of notable themes like Mission Impossible and Mannix. You'll hear discreet references to these and other tunes that have some connection to Latin America.

Happenstance isn't strictly speaking an orchestral piece, but I thought it belonged in this folder. It's a piece I composed last year as an exercise for the post-grad music course I was doing. If you're interested in the details of how it was composed, email me. Otherwise, just enjoy it for its '20th Century Art Music' sound.

Opus 1 - Variations on Three Blind Mice

I've always felt a bit wanky about titling my work with opus numbers, but I decided last year that I might start doing that. The problem I have in not labeling things that way is I often change my mind about titles and ultimately end up losing things or having duplicates under a dozen different titles.

The first variation - The Rat Patrol - was composed in the style of contemporary American composer, John Adams. I really like a piece of his titled Short Ride on a Fast Machine and I had it in mind when I composed this. There's also a few discrete references to an ELP piece called Pirates -- kinda a personal joke that would take too long to explain here.

The second variation - Dance of the Farmer's Crazy Wife is as its title suggests. It's a fairly wild variation that extends ideas introduced in the first variation. Incidentally, whenever people ask if I dance I usually say no. It's not that I don't dance - I do. It's just I dance to music like this and, frankly, I'm yet to visit any nightclub that plays music remotely resembling this. So yeah, if you want to dance with me, you'll need to get your dancing shoes around music like this. Oh, and I like to spank to these types of rhythms as well. Just so you know.

The third and final variation - Mice in Wolves' Clothing is a solo piano piece in a minimalist style. There are some subtle metric modulations throughout to alleviate the monotony of the minimalism. The title is something of a musical in-joke that won't be evident in this recording. Originally, the piece was conceived using the Pythagorean tuning system. This system was such that all intervals of a third are 'consonant' while the octave, fourths and fifths (usually the most consonant) are dissonant. The 'thirds' relates semantically to the Three Blind Mice and by making consonant (most harmonious) here ends the cycle of dissonance established in the preceding two movements -- but not entirely, as the Pythagorean tuning sounds 'out of tune' to modern ears. Even in equal temperment, the repetition of certain notes and intervals is such that it alludes to the Pythagorean tuning.

SOLO PIANO

A Blade Of Grass.mp3
Ballade.mp3
Barrelhouse Shakedown.mp3
Hornpipe.mp3
Piano Improvisations-WBMF.mp3
Solitudinous.mp3
The Dreamer.mp3

All the files in this folder are transcriptions I've done of Keith Emerson pieces. I have dozens more that I'll be uploading over the coming weeks.

A Blade Of Grass is a tranquil minature piece.

Ballade is a neo-romantic piece in the style of Chopin - the godfather of cocktail bar piano music. Don't let that description turn you off.

Barrelhouse Shakedown is typical of Emerson's piano style and general aesthetic. This particular transcription is of his solo performance of this tune released on his album Emerson Plays Emerson (it originally was recorded with the London Jazz Ensemble and released on ELP's Works Volume 2 album). It's a straight-ahead boogie piece, but it is interesting in the way Emerson plays it over more sophisticated bebop chord changes and blends in trad jazz form, such as the stomp chorus and Tatum-esque stride. It's a party piece I've played since I was a kid.

The Dreamer is a minature piece with some interesting melodic leaps and modal shifts in the chord progression. All of this takes place in just over two minutes.

Hornpipe is a fun little variation on Sailor's Hornpipe arranged in the Baroque style of J.S. Bach. It was originally recorded on Harpsichord by its composer, George Malcolm but this arrangement is a transcription of Emerson's version, played on piano. It's something that wouldn't sound out of place at a pirate party! (I have a pirate fetish, umkay?)

Piano Improvisations is the piece of music I heard that made me want to be a musician. I'd played piano for about ten or eleven years before I heard it, and never had any difficulty playing anything I heard by ear. This piece, however, stopped me dead in my tracks. The transcription of this has been an on-again, off-again project all my life and was only recently completed properly. It is, in short, my pièce de résistance.

Solitudinous in another minature piece that explores some interesting harmonic terrain.

SOUNDSCAPES

Infanticide.mp3
Q042-Jonestown.mp3

A small change of pace here...

Infanticide is an attempt to paint a sonic picture of mental illness. The vocal samples come from a recording I made of a local poet, but I've taken her completely out of the original context she wrote in.

Q042 - The Jonestown Massacre is a macabre piece I composed using fragments of a tape recording of Jim Jones' final hour in Guyana, right before his suicide and the infamous massacre of his followers. I've juxtaposed samples of the craziness against a happy little 'dance' piece as a metaphor for les moutons des Panurge as Rabelais might have called people who actually think they like dance music. The other samples used are The Russian Counting Man -- symbolic of the conspiracy theories that continue to abound about Jonestown (a CIA Mind control experiment gone awry, for example). The original public domain tapes of Jonestown and The Conet Project (for the Russian) can be found at Archive.org.

OTHER

Sweet Dreams of Funking.mp3
Light My Fire.mp3

Sweet Dreams of Funking is my arrangement of the Eurythmics song, Sweet Dreams are Made of This. There's a long story about how this was arranged and recorded but basically, I recorded the singer as she sang the words to a MIDI backing of the original version. Then, I composed a new backing and cut and pasted her vocal track into it. This technique is quite common these days, but it was relatively new at the time I did it.

Light My Fire is another of my arrangements. It's an instrumental that drastically alters the tune to give it more of a blues/jazz feel. One of these days I will record the vocal part to this arrangement.

Revenge on a Telemarketer

Prank Call Backfire

SNL - I Gotta Have More Cowbell!

Ode To Dobes

The following is an excerpt from a book about Dobes. It speaks for itself.

We had neighbours once who watched our Dobermans and then one day announced, "we have decided that a Doberman is the Cadillac of dogs." Most persons who have owned Dobermans will agree. There are other fine dogs; then there are Dobermans - the dog of dogs.

Talking about Doberman ownership is a little like trying to explain a family relationship, for a Doberman demands and takes a full place in your life. A Doberman either trains you, or is trained by you, and for most of us, it is a little of both. You can't put a Doberman away, forget about him and take him out when you want to show him off. A Doberman isn't built that way; he wants to be with you, to help you, torment you, love you, and guard you. And he will work out ways to get what he wants.

A Doberman is an affectionate animal; but his affection is noble. You can't bribe a Doberman with a pat on the head. He doesn't enjoy "just being petted" the way other breeds do. He wants to be close to you, to have your hand on his head, to rest his head on your knee, or to sit on your shoe with his back to you. He won't leave you for a stranger who offers to scratch his ear. Scratching an ear may be nice, but it isn't as nice as resting his rump on your shoe.

Seldom do you find a "licking" Doberman. A single kiss - a touch of the tongue, a touch of his nose to your ear - that is his way of special greeting. To lick (unless you have a wound that needs healing) would be too undignified for most Dobermans. Yet with his black eyes, short tail, and graceful body he can tell you more plainly how special you are than could all the licking and rubbing or petting in the world.

A Doberman is an energetic dog with lots of strength, speed and agility. He can run with a horse, manoeuvre quick enough to catch a rabbit, track faster than a bloodhound, tree mountain lions, and beat you to the davenport every time if you let him. A Doberman is a gentle dog with the firmness of the strong. He will let a baby teethe on his ears and nod with pleasure. He will take his six year old mistress walking to show her off and guide her with the mature judgement that knows it is well to let a six year old have her own way - unless it is dangerous.

A Doberman is a sensitive dog, keenly alert to your feelings and wishes. If someone visits you whom you don't like, watch the dog, for he will be watching your visitor. After he has been with you a few years, you will find often you don't need to speak a wish. He will know and respond. You become a part of him, and he becomes a part of you; and the only tragic part of owning a Doberman is that a part of you is buried with him when he dies."

My Dawg, Aamon

In demonology, Aamon is a Marquis of Hell. He appears as a wolf with a serpent's tail and breathes fire. According to Wikipedia, he tells of things past and future, and reconciles feuds and controversies between friends.

The name seems apt for a Dobe with a tail. Many people perceive the breed as being demons of the dog world - a perception that any owner of a Dobe will tell you is flat out wrong. Whatever the case, like the cheeky nature of Dobes themselves, I'm not going to dispell the myth and so I've named him Aamon.

I considered naming him Qi (pronounced chi). Aside from being my favorite Scrabble word, it means life force in various Eastern cultures. Interestingly, Aamon appears in ancient Egyptian mythology as Amun - the deification of the concept of air. As such, he came to be associated with the breath of life.