Even in the strange and eccentric world of the ham radio operator, Fred Judd G2BCX (1914–1992) was something of an outlier and maverick.  Fred designed two well-known antennas, the Slim Jim and the ZL Special. Both of these are now antenna standards. Fred was also an advocate of early British electronic music, inventing or modifying the tools he needed to make this adventurous music along the way. G2BCX was the quintessential tinkerer;  a man who loved audio, radio, and the new possibilities for music being opened up by the careful application of capacitors.

As a radar technician in the armed forces during WWII Fred had the opportunity to develop his electrical aptitude and became a full blown engineer. After the war he found a spot working for the Kelvin Hughes company where he researched and developed marine radar devices.  To this day Kelvin Hughes continues to create navigation and surveillance systems.
Fred was a man of strong ambition, and the day job in electronics wasn’t enough to keep him satisfied. As part of his side hustle he wrote articles for hobbyist magazines on radio and the new remote control models coming to market. The first of his 11 published books hit the shelves in 1954. When Amateur Tape Recording (ATR) magazine was launched in 1959 he joined the staff as technical editor and wrote on all kinds of topics connected to tape, electronics and hi-fi.

The slim jim antenna for which G2BCX remains famous among hams is itself a variation on the J-Pole. The J-pole is at the time of this writing a 110 year old design, first invented by Hans Beggerow in 1909 for use on Zeppelin airships. In that regard, the J-Pole, commonly made of copper, can also be considered a steampunk antenna.  Trailed behind the airship, the J-Pole was made of a single element, one half wavelength long radiator with a quarter wave parallel tuning stub for the feedline. By 1936 this design had been refined into the J configuration and given the J Antenna name in 1943, now just called a J Pole.

Fred introduced his J-pole variant in 1978. He derived the name from its slim profile and the J type matching stub (J Integrated Matching). It has similar performance and characteristics to a simple or folded Half-wave antenna and identical to the traditional J-pole construction. Judd found the Slim Jim produces a lower takeoff angle and better electrical performance than a 5/8 wavelength ground plane antenna.  Slim Jim antennas made from ladder transmission line use the existing parallel conductor for the folded dipole element.
The ZL special antenna came from another variant Judd made, this time on the 2-element horizontal phased array created by George Prichard ZL3MH –hence the name ZL Special in tribute to Prichard’s work. L.B. Cebik, W4RNL has written up a detailed analysis of this design at: http://www.antentop.org/w4rnl.001/mu5a.html.

It can be presumed that when Fred wasn’t at work, or on the air as a ham, he was engaged in another aspect of his electronics hobby: making circuits sing. He also wrote one of the first how-to books in the world for making electronic music in 1961, titled Electronic Music and Musique Concrete. It included circuit diagrams alongside practical do-it-yourself tips. (A copy of this tome is available from the Public Library of Cincinnati along with his Radio and Electronic Hobbies book.)

Around this time he also promoted the creation of electronic music via lectures and demonstrations at amateur tape recording clubs all around Britain. As an editor and writer for the Amateur Tape Recording magazine he had access to these clubs and lots of street cred within them. Fred started putting out 7” records of electronic music which were made available through the magazine. Judd was also the editor of Practical Electronics magazine. Chris Carter was an avid reader of both of these magazines and spent time building a lot of the circuits Judd published. Chris Carter went on to be a founding member of Throbbing Gristle, the first industrial music band. Chris continued to innovate in electronic music with his wife Cosey Fan Tutti as Chris & Cosey and latter Carter Tutti.  

As any sci-fi movie or old-time radio show buff will know, one of the things electronic music is perfect for is making sound effects, and Fred became adept at making his own. Have you ever flipped around on the tube and come across the strange sci-fi puppet show Space Patrol? Broadcast in 1963 on the ITV network it was the first on British television show to have a composed electronic music soundtrack running throughout the whole series. Fred made those sounds himself using the techniques of tape manipulation, loops and tone generators in his home studio in London.

The Castle record label and its sister label Contrast issued a range of sound effects discs that he made in his studio, including 3 discs of electronic music. These tracks were later issued by library label Studio G, who specialized in providing stock music and sounds, on the Electronic Age album.

Fred also prototyped and built his own synthesizer. This simple voltage controlled, keyboard-operated unit was used to generate, shape and switch electronic sounds. The feat was small but impressive as it predated the Synket, Moog and Buchla synths.

Fred was also interested in the visualization of electronic sounds. One can imagine he knew his way around an oscilloscope and other test equipment. His tinkering in this area led to his Chromasonics system. By running a pulse generator and amplifier into a modified black and white tv that had a high speed color scanning wheel placed in front of the screen Judd was able to make trippy abstract patterns that moved in accordance with the sound input from oscillators or tape recordings. At the 1963 Audio Fair in London he demonstrated Chromasonics with much acclaim, but interest from electronics firm Stuzzi never made it to commercial development.

From the late 1970s Judd continued to operate as a ham from his home in Cantley, Norfolk. Towards the end of his life, he built several detailed reconstructions of early electrical devices including a Wimshurst machine and Edison phonograph. He was honoured by the University of East Anglia for constructing a working replica of apparatus used by Heinrich Hertz, but it seems that none of this equipment, the Chromasonics apparatus or his experimental music-making machinery has survived. He became a silent key in 1992.

In 2010 all of his remaining original quarter inch tapes have been cataloged and deposited with the British Library Sound Archive. In 2011 Ian Helliwell made a documentary on Judd called Practical ElectronicaA retrospective album gathering together as much of his experimental music as can be located, titled Electronics Without Tears was released by the Public Information label. It also contained an official biography of Judd written by Helliwell. It is available from their bandcamp page at: https://publicinformation.bandcamp.com/album/electronics-without-tears.
​

Here is a short bibliography of books by Fred C. Judd:

Radio control for model ships, boats and aircraft. London: Data publications, 1954.
Electronic music and musique concrète. London : N. Spearman, 1961.
Tape recording for everyone. Blackie, 1962.
Radio and electronic hobbies. London: Museum Press, 1963.
Circuits for audio and tape recording. Haymarket Press, 1966.
Electronics in music. London: Spearman, 1972.
Amateur radio. Newnes Technical Books, 1980.
Two-metre antenna handbook. Newnes Technical, 1980.
CB radio. Newnes Technical, 1982.
Radio wave propagation : (HF bands). London : Heinemann, 1987.

​Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Judd
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J-pole_antenna
https://thequietus.com/articles/12386-f-c-judd-interpretations-interview-holly-herndon-perc-public-information
Electronics Without Tears, Public Information, Biography by Ian Helliwell

This article originally appeared in theJune 2019 issue of the Q-Fiver. (All the articles in the Radiophonic Laboratory series have appeared first in various issues of the Q-Fiver.)

Magnetic Lemniscate: A Brief History of the Tape Loop

Sometimes, if the day has been hectic, when I get home I just want to kick back, relax and put on a record. Or a cassette. I still have hundreds of hours of music stored on tape, one of the finest mediums of storage ever invented. This privilege of being able to listen to recorded audio is unique in human history, and my ability to soak in the musical glow from my hi-fi system with my feet propped up and my head in my hands was built on the sweat of many researchers. The phonograph, loudspeaker and microphones all proclaimed that the age of audio had arrived. The promises made by this tech only cracked the door ajar. There was still a bolt in place on the other side barring further entry. The invention of magnetic tape recording proved to be the golden skeleton key responsible for unlocking the door to the studio of the audio engineer, and from there many other rooms in the mansion of new media.

Inside the tape studio it is possible to cut. Splice. Rewind. Fast forward. Edit. Create a new sequence for creative playback. The practice of recording and editing audio using magnetic tape was an obvious improvement over the previous electro-mechanical methods. The leap in audio fidelity alone was a dramatic feat. Further, it allowed for new practices of editing. It allowed for repetition, a key aspect of music, and so the loop was born. Splice. Snip.  Audio on magnetic tape had established itself as simply superior. The analog tape recorder made it possible to erase. Audio mistakes could be fixed at less cost by recording over a previous recording, something not possible on the shellac and vinyl based medium of the phonograph. The edit turned into an art form as tape had the advantage of being cut. Spliced, it could be joined back together in an endless profusion of edits.  Music could be rearranged, deranged, or removed.

From 1950 onwards magnetic tape quickly became the standard medium for audio master recording in the music and broadcast radio industries. This led to the development of hi-fi stereo recordings for the domestic market. If the day has been hectic, just kick back with some Les Baxter or the exotica of Martin Denny and let it transport you away from the work of the daily grind. Now in hi-fidelity, and turning at 33 1/3 rpm, longer songs and longer sounds mean more time to chill in the lounge. Sonically edited the album now offered to audio engineers the same plasticity of arrangement known to film directors. The many new combinations available became mind boggling and cinematic.

When I think of tape, I think primarily of its role in audio and video storage.  I think of the way it revolutionized sound recording, reproduction and broadcasting. It allowed radio, which had always been broadcast live, to be recorded for later or repeated airing. I think of how I sat with a radio and it’s built in cassette player to tape those late night radio shows. To be listened to again and again. But there was also data storage on tape. Remember tape drives? They were a key technology in early computer development, allowing unparalleled amounts of data to be mechanically created, stored for long periods of time, and rapidly accessed.

When I think of tape I think of iron oxide. It’s on tape and it’s also in your blood. It’s the stuff responsible for giving it that bright red color. It’s the stuff that holds the memory of a recording on the tape making it magnetic. The memory is in the blood. Iron oxide stores the genetic memory of music. Editing a tape splices the DNA of sound. Perhaps it is this magnetic resonance of the iron oxide, a shared connection with a vital and elemental force that has given tape such a place of prominence in electronic music. Perhaps it was the way the tapes could be manipulated, slowed down, sped up, chopped up and put into new patterns, which made tape such a dream. This medium of preservation and creation is in the very blood of electronic music.

With the invention of the tape loop the dream of creating infinite music was realized. The use of the pause button had been put on hold. Tape loops are spools of magnetic tape used to create repetitive, rhythmic musical patterns or dense layers of sound when played on a tape recorder. Sound is recorded on a section of magnetic tape and this tape is cut and spliced end-to-end, creating a circle which can be played over and over again, continuously, over and over. This is usually done on a reel-to-reel machine, though industrious lo-fi recording artists have been known to rig their own cassette tapes into loops. The loop originated with the musique concrète work of Pierre Schaeffer in the 1940s. He used the simultaneous playing of tape loops to create phrase patterns and rhythms. Musical experimentalists continued to explore the possibilities of this method on through the 1950s and 60s. Devotees of the tape loop included Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Brian Eno.

The medium is perfect for creating phase patterns, rhythms, textures, and timbres. When the speed of a loop is accelerated to a sufficient degree a sequence of events originally perceived as a rhythm now is heard as a pitch. The variation of the rhythm in the original recording produces different timbres in the sped up sound. Tape can also be slowed down, causing the music to drop in pitch and for sounds to be stretched. Tape was also used to create echo systems. The first delay effects were made using tape loops improvised on reel-to-reels by shortening or lengthening the loop of tape and adjusting the read and write heads, to create an echo whose time parameters could be adjusted. This delayed signal may either be played back multiple times, or played back into the recording again, to create the sound of a repeating, decaying echo.

Being the pioneer he was Stockhausen made extensive use of loops in Gesang der Jünglinge (1955–56) and Kontakte (1958–60) and he used the technique for live performance in Solo (1965–66).  Steve Reich was the composer to use the technique the most, specifically in his "phasing" pieces Come Out (1966) and It's Gonna Rain (1965).

In the realm of popular music it was used to great effect in the 60’s and 70’s. Think of the psychedelic music of the Beatles on the White album and of its use in the progressive rock and ambient genres. A standard loop on a standard reel-to-reel is at most a few seconds long. This is not enough for some composers.  To create a longer loop a standard practice was to use two reel-to-reels or for even longer stretches of tape, to run them around mic stands, or even door knobs. Perhaps the best known album made with this technique was Brian Eno’s Music for Airports: Ambient 1. This recording ushered in the vast and sprawling genre of ambient. In creating his 1978 landmark Eno reported that for one song, "the tape loops was seventy-nine feet long and the other eighty-three feet". 

Enter William Basinski

Texas born Basinski is a classically trained clarinetist who studied jazz saxophone and composition at North Texas State University in the late 1970s. At the age of twenty in 1978 he became inspired by the techniques of Steve Reich and Brian Eno and started the process of developing his own musical vocabulary using old reel-to-reel tape decks. Basinski experimented with short looped melodies. When played against themselves the loops created a pleasant feedback. Working with this discovery he created his singular meditative, melancholy style within the drone and ambient genres.

Basinki’s first release was Shortwave Music. First created in 1983, it wasn’t released until 1998 when Carsten Nicolai's Raster-Noton label put it out in a small vinyl edition. It was followed by his shortwave magnum opus The River. Basinski writes, "As a young composer in the early 1980’s I was experimenting with tape loops: recording and mixing them with sounds coming from the airwaves. The idea was to capture music out of the ether. In NYC, there was a very powerful radio station, I can’t remember the call letters, but it was the station that played American popular standards….that is, the ‘1001 Strings’ smoothed out, de-syncopated versions of the American popular standards: what was commonly referred to then as Muzak, or ‘elevator music’. In those days, there was no Prozac, only Muzak to smooth out the seams and ease the tension of hectic neurotic life in the mid-late 20th century. At any rate, this station was so powerful, it could be picked up by simply running a wire across the floor, so frequently I was picking up background transmissions in my recordings. Since it was inevitable and I had no choice in the matter, I began experimenting with recording off the radio small loops of string intros, outros and interludes randomly in my primitive studio in Brooklyn. I would then slow them down a couple of speeds and as if peering into a microscope, to see what I could discover beneath the glossy surface. Frequently, these loops held great depth and melancholy. This appealed to me greatly and I created a vast archive of these loops to later experiment with. I am still using this archive to this day.”

Having this library of ‘found’ material became very important to his work, as it became the basis for many future albums and releases. Something else he found at a thrift store was also important, the machine that would provide his radio static. “I bought a wonderful old Hallicrafters shortwave radio at the Goodwill around the corner and began listening to that. The sounds coming from this magical device were awesome. The idea that one could hear transmissions from ‘behind the Iron Curtain’ or Japan or London was thrilling and mysterious. The waves of shifting static and interstellar particle showers were mind-boggling to a young man who grew up in the shadow of the space race.

I was having a problem with a 60 Hz ground loop hum in my recordings. I had no idea what was causing it at the time…probably our fluorescent lights…just that it bothered me and I couldn’t figure out how to get rid of it. So I decided to try to mask it with the shortwave radio static. I would set the Hallicrafters on a pleasing in-between-stations setting teeming with showers of sparkling static and record live while mixing my loops. The results were extraordinary. The Hallicrafters would sometimes shift focus as if responding to the music coming from the loops. Occasionally a distant station from the Middle East perhaps, would slide into range just for a moment like a lingering column of cigarette smoke swirling slowly in a spotlight. I was very encouraged and excited. I didn’t know if I was really a composer, or if this was music, but to me it was magic! I loved it and was in my laboratory every night after work, like Dr. Frankenstien, just waiting to see what fascinating and strange sounds would bubble up next. The results of this period of experimentation were the Shortwave Music pieces and ultimately, the 90 minute masterwork of the series, The River. It would be over 25 years before these pieces would be released to the public."

Even though it wasn’t until the late 90’s that his music saw release on a label Basinski remained very active in the NYC music scene. He was a member of many bands including the Gretchen Langheld Ensemble and House Afire. In 1989, he opened his own performance space, "Arcadia" at 118 N. 11th Street. In the 1990s he helped put together many intimate underground shows at his space for artists like Diamanda Galás, Rasputina, The Murmurs, and Antony as well as his own experimental electronic/improvisation band, Life on Mars. In 2000, he made a film titled Fountain with artists James Elaine and Roger Justice.

In August and September 2001 Basinski started work on what would become his most recognizable piece, the epic four-volume album The Disintegration Loops. The album is made up of old tape loops whose quality had degraded. In an attempt to salvage these loops by recording them onto a digital format, the magnetic iron oxide ferrite on the tapes slowly crumbled. With each pass of the tape over the head on the reel-to-reel deck more and more of the iron oxide fell off.  The loops were allowed to play for extended periods as they deteriorated further, with increasing gaps and cracks and spaces in the music. These sounds were treated further with a spatializing reverb effect to further enhance their haunting aura. Basinski was able to capture the sound of their disintegration and the results were beautiful and stunning. The disintegration of these tapes was made all the more poignant as he finished his work on them on the morning of 9/11. Basinksi sat on the roof of his apartment building in Brooklyn with friends listening to the finished project as the World Trade Center towers collapsed. The artwork that accompanies the album features stills of footage he shot of the NYC skyline in the aftermath of the attack. In September  2012, the record label Temporary Residence reissued the entire Disintegration Loops series as a 9xLP box set, marking the project's 10-year anniversary as well as its impending induction into the National September 11 Memorial & Museum.

The creation of the Disintegration Loops was something of an accident, timestamped by their own destruction and the terrible tragedy of 9/11.  The four albums are perfect as a reminder of the beauty to be found in imperfection, as a reminder of our own transience, of our own ultimate disintegration, of how the iron oxide in our blood will once again return to dust.

References:
Live wires :a history of electronic music by Daniel Warner, Reaktion Books Ltd,  London, England, 2017.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_sound_recording
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_tape
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_loop
William Basinki’s website: http://www.mmlxii.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Basinski
https://wavefarm.org/ta/works/azeqwc

Holger Czukay was another musician who was fascinated with the sounds of shortwave listening. He brought his love of radio and communications technology on board with him when he helped to found the influential krautrock band Can in 1968. Shortwave listening continued to inform Czukay’s musical practice in his solo and other collaborative works later in his career. It all got started when he worked at a radio shop as a teenager.

 Holger had been born in the Free City of Danzig in 1938, the year before the outbreak of World War II. In the aftermath of the war his family was expelled from the city when the Allies dissolved its status as free city-state and made it become a part of Poland. Growing up in those bleak times his formal primary education was limited, but he made up for it when he found work at a radio repair shop. He had already developed an interest in music and one his ideas was to become a conductor, but fate had other plans for him. Working with the radios day in and day out he developed a fondness for broadcast radio. In particular he found unique aural qualities in the static and grainy washes of the radio waves coming in across the shortwave bands. At the shop he also became familiar with basic electrical repair work and rudimentary engineering. All of this would serve him well when building the studio for Can. In his work with the band he not only played bass and other instruments but acted as the chief audio engineer.

He spoke about this time, and his fascination with the mystery of electricity, in an interview. “When I was fourteen or fifteen years old, I didn't know if I wanted to become a technician or a musician. And when you are so young you think the one has to exclude the other. So in the very beginning I thought I am sort of a musical wonder-child, and want to become a conductor and that was very very serious, but there was no chance to get educated as I was a refugee after the war. And then, suddenly, electricity. Electricity was such a fascinating thing - it was something. And then I became the boy in a shop who carries the radios to repair them and carries them back again. That was so-called three-dimensional radio, before stereo. There was one front speaker in the radio and at the side, there were two treble speakers which gave an image of spatial depth. I must say these radios sounded fantastic.”

In 1963 at the age of twenty-five he Czukay decided to pursue the musical side of his vocation and begin studying under Karlheinz Stockhausen at the Cologne Courses for New Music. This is where he met up with Irmin Schmidt, another founding member of Can, who was also a student of Stockhausen’s. As much as Can itself was one of the guiding forces of Krautrock, or Kosmiche music as it was also called, a broad style of experimental rock music developed in Germany in the late 60s. Krautrock was for the most part divorced from the traditional blues and rock and roll influences of British and American rock music scenes of the time. Krautrock featured more electronic elements and contributed to the further development electronic music and ambient music as well as the birth of post-punk, alternative rock and New Age music. Stockhausen himself could be thought of as one of its chief instigators, a kind of Godfather of the genre. This was due not only to his influence as a teacher of German musicians, but because of his pioneering work with the raw elements of electronic music itself at the WDR studios.

Eccentric British rock musician and author Julian Cope discusses the importance of Stockhausen’s composition Hymnen in his book Krautrock Sampler. He considered that piece in particular pivotal to the whole Krautrock movement. It’s release had “repercussions all over W. Germany, and not least in the heads of young artists. It was a huge 113 minute piece, subtitled ‘anthems for electronic and concrete sounds’. Hymnen was divided up into four LP sides, titled Region I, Region II, Region III and Region IV.” In a previous column I had discussed this piece of music as an early attempt at creating ‘world music’. With its sounds of shortwave receivers and electronics it plays anthems from various countries in an attempt to unify them. What he did with the German anthem, ‘Deutschland, Deutschland Uber Alles’ had a liberating effect on young Germany, who had grown up under the shadow of the worst kind of nationalism. Cope writes of the German publics reaction, “The left-wing didn’t see the funny side at all and accused him of appealing to the basest German feelings, whilst the right-wing hated him for vilifying their pride and joy, and letting the Europeans laugh at them. Stockhausen had just returned from six months at the University of California, where he had lectured on experimental music. Among those at his seminar’s were the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh, Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane and many other psychedelic musicians. Far from snubbing the new music Stockhausen was seen at a Jefferson Airplane show at the Filmore West and was quoted as saying that the music ‘…really blows my mind.’ So whilst the young German artists loved Stockhausen for embracing their own rock’n’roll culture, they doubly loved him for what they recognized as the beginning of a freeing of all German symbols. By reducing ‘Deutschland, Deutschland Uber Alles’ to its minimum possible length he had codified it…Stockhausen had unconsciously diffused a symbol of oppression, and so enabled the people to have it back.”
​
Czukay’s time studying with Stockhausen was as important to the development of Krautrock as was Hymnen itself. In fact while Stockhausen was working on Hymnen at the WDR studio during the day, Holger Czukay and the other members of a pre-Can group, the Technical Space Composers Crew, would go in and use the equipment at night to record their own album Canaxis. In the piece ‘Boat Woman’s Song’ some of Czukay’s early pioneering use of sampling can be heard. The proto-ambient pieces of music on this record were painstakingly assembled from tape loops and segments of a traditional Vietnamese folk song. In an interview Czukay spoke of the experience. “When Stockhausen left for home, we had a second key and went in and switched everything on. We went in and Canaxis was produced in one night. In one night the main song ‘Boat Woman Song’ was done. I prepared myself at night at home, so I knew exactly what I wanted to do, so in four hours the whole thing was done.” David Johnson helped Czukay and Rolf Dammers engineer the album. “He knew the studio a bit better than me. He was engineering a bit, switching on stuff, copying from one machine to another…and that was okay. In four hours the job was done.”  The music on Canaxis is eerie and beautiful and haunting. It is both a part of this world, but also not of it. It seems as if it has come to us from beyond, and some fifty years later it still sounds fresh, as all timeless music does. 

Stockhausen influenced Czukay in other ways. It hadn’t originally been Czukay’s intention to become a rock musician. He was more interested in classical music, which he thought was the best, with a definite leaning towards it’s avant-garde. “Therefore I went to Stockhausen as he was the most interesting person. Very radical in his thoughts. With the invention of electronic music he could replace all other musicians suddenly: that was not only an experiment; that was a revolution! I thought that is the right man, yeah? So I studied with him for about three years. Until I finally said, if a bird is ready to fly, he leaves his nest and that is what I have done.”

After leaving the nest Holger became a music teacher in his own right as a way to make a living. Later he was able to work full time as a musician, because as he often joked, he was married to a rich woman. Teachers always learn from their students though and his were teaching him about the rock and pop music of the time, playing him records of Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones. The Velvet Underground and Pink Floyd's stood out to him, as did the song I am the Walrus by the Beatles. Czukay fell in love with that masterpiece of psychedelic pop. In particular he loved the way bursts of AM static and the sound of tuning between stations had been used for a musical effect at the end of the cut.

All of these influences and elements would fused together in his work with Can, a project begun while he was still a teacher. Irmin Schmidt’s mark on the band was equally massive, and he was just steeped, if not more, in the 20th century avant-garde, but exploring his contribution is not in the scope of this article. For most of his time in the band, Czukay played bass, but toward the end he gave up that instrument altogether in favor of a shortwave radio. He speaks about Stockhausen’s influence in making this switch.

 “A shortwave radio is just basically an unpredictable synthesizer. You don’t know what it’s going to bring from one moment to the next. It surprises you all the time and you have to react spontaneously. The idea came from Stockhausen again. He made a piece called ‘Short Wave’ [‘Kurzwellen’]. And I could hear that the musicians were searching for music, for stations or whatever, and he was sitting in the middle of it all and the sounds came into his hands and he made music out of it. He was mixing it live – and composing it live. He had a kind of plan, but didn’t know what the plan would bring him. With Can, I would mix stuff in with what the rest of the band were playing. Also, we were searching for a singer and we didn’t find one – we tested many, but couldn’t find anyone – so I thought: ‘why not look to the radio for someone instead? The man inside the radio does not hear us, but we hear him.’” This he used without additional effects. “The radio has a VFO – an oscillator – where you can receive single side-bands, which means just half of the waves and you can decode it – it’s like a ring modulator. And that’s more than enough. The other members of Can were very open to these unpredictable uses of instruments, especially in the early days.”

​His work with radios in a musical setting was a way for him to bring in energies from outside the band into their work. In his own words, “I looked for the devices to bring a different world into the group again and they had to react on that. That was the idea, working with a radio or working with tapes or working with a telephone. I even had this idea that with a transmitter, we could transmit and receive things back again. Or to call up people like today's radio shows where people call up or you call people. This sort of interaction I wanted to establish. But the group was not interested in this. So I finished with Can and went my own way. And here, I really followed this. I was working on that for a few years (with Can) but then I found it that it wasn't fun anymore. I continued alone then worked with other people.” 

Can had a great run as a band from 1968 to 1979. Afterwards Czukay continued to flourish with his solo recordings, including albums like Radio Wave Surfer. The methods he developed for using radio as an instrument he termed radio painting. He continued to make solo albums and collaborate with other musicians on various project throughout the 80’s, 90’s and 2000’s. He died of unknown causes on September 5, 2017.

All of this tells you the who, what, where, when and why. But to get the full experience I invite you to blow your mind by listening to Stockhausen, Can, Holger Czukay, and other crispy Krautrock bands! There is no better place to start than with Hymnen, the Can discography. 

Sources:
Krautrock Sampler: one head’s guide to great Kosmische muisk 1968-onwards by Julian Cope, Head Heritage, 1996.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Can_(band)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holger_Czukay

Interviews:
http://www.factmag.com/2017/09/06/holger-czukay-interview/https://rwm.macba.cat/en/curatorial?id_capsula=584#
http://media.hyperreal.org/zines/est/intervs/czukay.html

Starting in the early 1960s Karlheinz Stockhausen composed several instrumental works which he called "process compositions". These did away with traditional stave notation and instead used symbols including plus, minus, and equal signs that indicated the successive transformations of sounds that were otherwise unspecified or unforeseeable by the composer. In this way he brings elements of improvisation into the fold of Western classical music where the strict adherence to a fixed score left little room for interpretation by musicians. The scores in his process pieces don’t dictate specific notes or ways of playing but rather specify the way a sound is to be changed or imitated. Taking a cue from his studies of information theory Stockhausen created a way of writing music that is similar to computer programming. The program “determines the way information is processed while leaving the choice of information to be processed to the individual user.” (Maconie 1990, 156-157)
​
Stockhausen’s process pieces include Plus-Minus (1963), Prozession (1967), Kurzwellen, and Spiral (both 1968). Eventually they led to the text based processes of his intuitive music compositions in the cycles Aus den sieben Tagen (1968) and Für kommende Zeiten (1968–70).
Kurzwellen (Short waves), the third of the process pieces also marks the beginning of Stockhausen’s magnificent voyage using shortwave receivers as a medium for musical transportation.  The formal procedures in Kurzwellen (and the others) are fixed. Stockhausen thinks of these not as fixed in the way Beethoven’s Fifth symphony is a fixed piece that will sound the same to a greater or larger degree from recording to recording or performance to performance.  Only the processes themselves are fixed. These are indicated primarily by plus, minus, and equal signs and constitute the composition.

Yet the sound materials themselves, like the knobs on the tuners, are variable. The process scores can be followed and bring about very different results each time they are played and yet somehow still sound similar. The sound material coming in from the shortwave radios is unpredictable. Yet the prescribed processes themselves can be heard from one performance to another as being "the same".  These developments in musical theory and practice make live performances and new recordings exciting events.

The sounds coming in from the radio are what they players use as source material for the process of transformation as indicated by the score. Each player has a radio at their station. Stockhausen writes, “An undreamed intensity of listening and of intuitive playing is reached – and shared by all co-players and listeners – through the concentration of all players on unforseeable events coming from the realm of short-waves, in which one only very rarely knows who composed or produced them, how they came into being or from where, and in which all possible acoustic phenomena can appear.”

In practice the performers search for desirable sounds on the radio. These are for the most part the more  abstract and noisy sounds found in the spectrum. Then they replicate those sounds on their instruments and transform them by using variations in register, volume, duration or rhythmic density. There are additional instructions in the score for players to form synchronous duo, trio and quartet events, where players play together in tandem, or alternatively trade short events with one another. 

Part of the reason Stockhausen proscribed shortwave receivers rather than just the AM and FM broadcast band receivers most often used by John Cage is that they pulled in sounds from around the world. This played into his idea of creating a kind of world music. Shortwave also has a rich variety of sounds that allows the musicians greater freedom in finding sound material transform.

He continued to use shortwave radios in the pieces Spiral, Pole for 2, and Expo for 3. Writing of Spiral the composer says, "Doesn't almost everyone own a short-wave receiver?  And doesn't everyone have a voice? Wouldn't it be an artful way of life for everyone, to transform the unexpected (which one can receive on a short-wave radio) into new music - i.e. into a consciously-formed sound process which awakens all intuitive, mental, sensitive and artistic faculties, and makes them become creative, so that this awareness and these faculties rise like a spiral?!"

Expo is kind of the penultimate of these pieces, though it shares close similarities with Spiral and Pole, differing mostly in the number of players. All can be heard as being part of the same family of process pieces using shortwave radio. Expo was written for Stockhausen's 1970 stay in Japan at the World Fair in Osaka ("EXPO '70").  For the Fair Stockhausen designed a large spherical auditorium that was then developed by his collaborator Fritz Bornemann. Outfitted with 50 loudspeakers the audience was literally surrounded on all sides by sound. Karlheinz was able to control the movement of the sound mix around these speakers, moving the audio vertically and horizontally. Sometimes he created rising and falling spiral motions using what was termed a "rotation mill". There were also various balcony stages and platforms as the podium that gave the works peformed there further spatial dimension. For 183 his crew of twenty performed daily from 3:30 to 9pm. With breaks for individual musicians I’m guessing. The German pavilion became one of the main attractions at Expo '70.
These pieces represent a kind of music where both musicians and listeners must surrender completely to the process without worrying about the outcome. As humans this “not worrying about the outcome” of an action or a path taken can be a brutal challenge. These works embody a philosophy that has the effect of helping me to worry less about outcomes in my life. Process music as applied to my life gives me a sense of freedom from the outcome of an action. This allows me to be more present with the action itself as it happens, whether it is writing, radio, or some other activity. Listening to process music reminds me that I need to surrender to what I am doing in the moment. Surrender is difficult. Part of the joy to be found in the arts is submitting to how they grasp hold of us. Listening itself becomes a transformation.
​
To the amateur radio or SWLing enthusiast the sounds of Kurzwellen will be familiar. The static crashes and buzzes, warbling of telemetry, announcers in multiple languages and mysterious numbers stations are sweet nectars of sound for the radio hobbyist. Listening to these recordings is like drinking a fine wine. I prefer it served in a darkened room with ears open to the world.

Sources:
http://stockhausenspace.blogspot.com/ (plus/minus series of articles)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_music
The works of Karlheinz Stockhausen, by Robin Maconie, 2nd edition.

Gesang der Jünglinge

There is a mystery in the sounds of the vowels. There is a mystery in the sound of the human voice as it is uttered from the mouth and born into the air. And there is a mystery in the way electrons, interacting inside an oscillating circuit, can be synthesized and made to sing. Karlheinz Stockhausen set out to investigate these mysteries of human speech and circuitry as a scientist of sound, using the newly available radiophonic equipment at the WDR’s Studio for Electronic Music. The end result of his research was bridged into the vessel of music, giving the ideas behind his inquiries an aesthetic and spiritual form. In doing so he unleashed his electroacoustic masterpiece Gesang der Jünglinge (Song of the Youths) into the world.

Part of his inspiration for Gesang der Jünglinge came from his studies of linguistics and phonetics at the Bonn between 1954 and 1956, with his mentor Werner Meyer-Eppler. The other part came from his spiritual inclinations. At the time of its composition Stockhausen was a devout Catholic. His original conception for the piece was for it to be a sacred electronic Mass born from his personal conviction. According to the official biography, he had asked his other mentor Herbert Heimert to write to the Diocesan office of the Archbishop for permission to have the proposed work performed in the Cologne Cathedral, the largest Gothic church in northern Europe. The request was refused on grounds that loudspeakers had no place inside a church. No records of this request have been uncovered, so this story is now considered apocryphal. There are doubts that Eimert, who was a Protestant, ever actually brought up the subject with Johannes Overath. Johannes was the man at the Archdiocese responsible for granting or denying such requests and by March 1955 had become a member of the Broadcasting Council. It is likely Heimert and Overath were associates. What we can substantiate is that Stockhausen did have ambitions to create an electronic Mass and that he experienced frustrations and setbacks in his search for a suitable sacred venue for its performance, one that would be sanctioned by the authorities at the church.

These frustrations did not stop him however from realizing his sound-vision. The lectures given by Meyer-Eppler had seeded inspiration in his mind, and those seeds were in the form of syllables, vowels, phonemes, and fricatives. Stockhausen set to work creating music where voices merged in a sublime continuum with synthetic tones that he built from scratch in the studio. To achieve the desired effect of mixing human voice with electronics he needed pure speech timbres. He decided to use the talents of Josef Protschka, a 12-year old boy chorister who sang fragments derived and permutated from the “Song of the Three Youths in the Fiery Furnace” in the 3rd book of Daniel. In the story three youths are tossed into the furnace by King Nebuchadnezzar. They are rescued from the devouring flames by an angel who hears them singing a song of their faith.This story resonated strongly with Stockhausen at the time. He considered himself to be a fiery youth. Still in his twenties he was full of energy, but was under verbal fire and critical attack from the classical music establishment who lambasted him for his earlier works. Gesang der Jünglinge showed his devotion to the divine through song despite this persecution.

The electronic bedrock of the piece was made from generated sine tones, pulses, and filtered white noise. The recordings of the boy soprano’s voice were made to mimic the electronic sounds: vowels are harmonic spectra which may be conceived as based on sine tones; fricatives and sibilants are like filtered white noise; and the plosives resemble the pulses. Each part of the score was composed along a scale that ran from discrete events to statistically structured massed "complexes" of sound. The composition is now over sixty years old, yet the synthetic and organic textures Stockhausen pioneered for it are still fresh. They speak of something new, and angelic.

Stockhausen eventually triumphed over his persecution when he won the prestigious Polar Music Prize (often considered the "Nobel Prize of music") in 2001. At the ceremony he controlled the sound projection of Gesang der Jünglinge through the four loudspeakers surrounding the audience.
​

These breakthroughs in 20th century composition practice wouldn’t have been possible without the foresight of the WDR in creating an Electronic Music Studio and promoting new music on their stations.

Telemusik

As the world caught wind of the work being done at the WDR’s Electronic Music Studio, other radio stations and broadcasting corporations followed suit. NHK (Nippon HosoKyokai) in Japan built their electronic music studio in 1955, directly modeling it on the one at WDR. In 1958 the BBC created their famous Radiophonic Workshop. (I blame starting to watch Doctor Who as a ten year old, with its strange soundtrack and incidental music, for what became my lifelong fascination with electronic music.) The studio at NHK was just over ten years old when they invited Stockhausen over to work there and create two pieces for their airwaves. 
When he arrived in Japan Karlheinz was severely jet lagged and disoriented. For several days he couldn’t sleep. That’s when the strange hallucinatory visions set in. Laying awake in bed one night his mind was flooded with ideas of  "technical processes, formal relationships, pictures of the notation, of human relationships, etc.—all at once and in a network too tangled up to be unraveled into one process.” These musings of the night took on a life of their own and from them he created Telemusik.

Of Stockhausen’s many ambitions, one of them was to make a unified music for the whole planet. He was able to do that in this piece though the results sounded nothing like the “world music” or “world beat” genre often found on CD racks in coffee houses and gift shops. In the 20 minutes of the piece he mixed in found sounds, folk songs and ritual music from all over the world including the countries Hungary, Spain, China, Japan, the Amazons, Sahara, Bali and Vietnam. He also used new electronic sounds and traditional Japanese instruments to create what he called "a higher unity…a universality of past, present, and future, of different places and spaces: TELE-MUSIK." This practice of taking and combining sound sources from all over is now widely practiced across all genres of music in the form of sampling. But for Karlheinz it wasn’t simply making audio collage or taking one sample to build a song around it. Even though he used samples from existing recordings to make something different, he also developed a new audio process that he termed intermodulation.
In his own words he speaks of the difference between collage and intermodulation. “I didn’t want a collage, I wanted to find out if I could influence the traits of an existing kind of music, a piece of characteristic music using the traits of other music. Then I found a new modulation technique, with which I could modulate the melody curve of a singing priest with electronic timbres, for example. In any case, the abstract sound material must dominate, otherwise the result is really mishmash, and the music becomes arbitrary. I don’t like that.” For example he used "the chant of monks in a Japanese temple with Shipibo music from the Amazon, and then further imposing a rhythm of Hungarian music on the melody of the monks. In this way, symbiotic things can be generated, which have never before been heard"

Stockhausen kept the pitch range of Telemusik piece deliberately high, between 6 and 12 kHz. This is so that the intermodulation can project sounds downwards occasionally. He wanted some of the sections to seem “far away because the ear cannot analyse it” and then abruptly it would enter “the normal audible range and suddenly became understandable". The title of the piece comes from Greek tele, "afar, far off", as in "telephone" or "television". The music works consistently to bring what was “distant” close up. Cultures which were once far away from each other can now be seen up close, brought together by the power of telecommunications systems, new media formats, new music. By using recordings of traditional folk and ritual music from around the world Stockhausen brought the past brought up close and into the future by mixing it with electronics.

To accomplish all this at the NHK studio he used a 6-track tape machine and a number of signal processors including high and low-pass filters, amplitude modulators and other existing equipment. Stockhausen also designed a few new circuits for use in the composition. One of these was the Gagaku Circuit named after the Japanese Gagaku orchestra music it was designed to modulate. It used 2 ring-modulators in series to create double ring-modulation mixes of the sampled sounds.12 kHz was used in both the 1st and 2nd ring-modulation, with a glissando in the 2nd ring modulation stage. Then music was frequency-filtered in different stages at 6 kHz and 5.5 kHz.

Writer Ed Chang explains the effect of the Gagaku Circuit: “For example, in one scenario the 1st ring modulation A used a very high 12 kHz sine-wave base frequency, resulting in a very high-pitched buzzing texture (for example, a piano note of A, or 0.440 kHz, would become a high 12.440 kHz and 11.560 kHz).The 2nd ring-mod B base frequency (in this case with a slight glissando variation on the same 12 kHz base frequency) has the effect of ‘demodulating’ the signal (bringing it back down to near A).  This demodulated signal is also frequency filtered to accentuate low frequencies (dark sound).These 2 elements (high buzzing from the 1st signal and low distorted sounds from the 2nd) are intermittently mixed together with faders. By varying the 2 ring-mod base frequencies and the 3 frequency filters, different effects could be achieved.  This process of modulation and demodulation is what Stockhausen means when he says he was able to ‘reflect a few parts downwards’.”

The score was dedicated to the Japanese people and the first public performance took place at the NHK studios in Tokyo on 25 April 1966.
​

Hymnen

Telemusik prepared Stockhausen for his next monumental undertaking, Hymnen (Anthem) made at the WDR studio. The piece had already been started before Telemusik but he had to set it aside while in Japan. Hymnen is a mesmerizing elaboration of the studio technique of intermodulation first mastered at NHK in Japan. It is also a continuation of his quest to make a form of world music at a time when the people around the planet were becoming increasingly connected. To achieve this goal he incorporated forty national anthems from around the globe into one composition. He had collected 137 anthems in the process of composing the piece, by writing to radio stations in those countries and asking them to send recordings to Germany. The piece has four sections though it was first slated for six. The last two never materialized. These anthems from around the world are intermodulated into an intricate web of sound lasting around two hours long. Thrown into the kaleidoscopic mix are all manner of other sounds produced from sine wave generators, shortwave radio, his voice speaking, and many others. Whenever I listen to Hymnen the sounds of the music from different nations reminds me of someone tuning across the shortwave bands. In the audio spectrum and in the radio spectrum borders and boundaries are porous, permeable. And that is one of the things I love about amateur radio: the sharing of good will between women and men from all across the globe, our signals reaching each other across space to make the formerly distant close. Hymnen ends with a new anthem for a utopian realm called "Hymunion". Perhaps it can be reached through the shared communion that comes from truly listening to each other. 

John Cage's composition Imaginary Landscape No. 4 wasn't the end of his engagement with the use of radio as a sound source. In fact his imagination, now glowing like a hot tube, was just getting warmed up. I will turn to his next experiments shortly, but I wanted to dwell for a moment on his earliest radio work, that I overlooked in last month’s  article. I had quite forgotten about Cage's involvement with the Boy Scouts in Los Angeles in the early 1920's . It was during this time period that his fascination with radio was sealed. His father had built a crystal set that could be plugged into an electric light system. For his effort it got his father listed in the city directory as a "radio engineer" though he had been more recently famous for his work on submarines. Cage sr. had invented parts and systems for subs that helped keep them level and also a system for running the engines on gasoline instead of batteries, which increased the speed of the subs. His father's flair for invention seemed to have been passed on to Cage jr. As a Tenderfoot in the Boy Scouts John got the idea of hosting a scouting program on the radio. First he obtained permission from his organization, and then he approached LA station KFWB who rejected his proposal. He next took his idea to KNX, and they gave the show the green light. It broadcast weekly on Friday afternoons. John at the time had considered himself destined to be in the ministry as his grandfather had been. As such he began each program with ten-minutes of oratory from a local religious person, be they minister, rabbi, or priest. The rest of the show was devoted to singing Scout songs over the air, sometimes with John accompanying his fellows on the piano. Other topics included such favorites as building fires and tying knots. KNX is still on the air on 1070 kHz in L.A. as one of the original clear channel stations, blasting a non-directional 50,000 watts. KNX had begun with a humble 5-watts when amateur Fred Christian put it on the air as 6ADZ. It was from these small beginnings, and his first taste of the airwaves, that he built on as a composer, presenter, experimenter, creating works for radio and incorporating radios themselves into a number of works.

After Imaginary Lanscape No. 4 Cage's next piece involving radio was written for a television program. His piece, Water Walk, lasts about three minutes and consists of many small actions relating to water. He timed each of his sound making actions to the precise second required by the score using a stop watch. Written for such fun sound making things as gong with water gun, and crushed ice in electric mixer, it also includes five radios and a piano. He stopped at the radios and adjusted frequency and volume, then released steam from a kettle, and plinked a few keys on the piano. Water Walk appeared live on television twice, first in 1959 in Milan, on the show Lascia o Raddoppia, an Italian version of the then popular Double or Nothing Game Show. Returning back home he got the chance to share it with American audiences on I've Got a Secret in 1960.  

Six years down the road came Variations VII that was presented on two of the nights of 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering that paired artists, musicians and performers with engineers from Bell Labs in presenting new works fusing technology to contemporary art practices. The 9 Evenings was the first in a series of projects that came to be known as E.A.T., or Experiments in Art and Technology. This was the first organized large scale collaboration between artists, engineers, and scientists.  Some of the engineers included Max Mathews (whose work was included previously in this column), Bela Julesz, Billy Klüve, John Pierce, Manfred Schroeder, and Fred Waldhauer, alongside many others, around 30 in total. There were 10 artists involved including  Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, David Tudor, and Robert Whitman. The collaboration between the artists and engineers produced a number of "firsts" for technology in the theater. Some were specially-designed systems and equipment.  Others repurposed existing gear in innovative ways. Closed-circuit television and television projection was used on stage for the first time; an infrared television camera captured action in total darkness; a Doppler sonar device translated movement into sound; a fiber-optics camera picked up objects in a performer's pocket; and portable wireless FM transmitters and amplifiers transmitted speech and body sounds to loudspeakers.  The performances took place between October 13-23, 1966 at New York's 69th Regiment Armory, at Lexington Avenue and Twenty-Fifth Street. Around 1000 people attended each evening.

The engineering side for Cage's piece was overseen by Cecil H. Coker whose primary area of focus was acoustic research, specializing in articulatory speech synthesis. Coker, with two colleagues, wrote the first software text-to-speech program in 1973. Coker had worked with Cage before on the piece Variations V helping to develop a system of for using photoelectric cells to provide lighting and randomly triggered sounds. Variations VII was considerably more involved though it still used photoelectric cells as a key component for triggering sounds.

In composing Variations VII, Cage used no previously prepared sources of music. It consisted only of "those sounds which are in that air at the moment of performance." Part of the elaborate set up included ten telephone lines installed to the Armory and kept open at various locations in New York City. Some of the places they were connected to included Luchow's restaurant, the Aviary, the 14th Street Con Edison electric power station, the ASPCA lost dog kennel, The New York Times press room, Merce Cunningham’s dance studio, and one next to fellow composer Terry Riley's turtle tank. Magnetic pickups on the telephone receivers fed these sound sources into Cage's sound manipulation system, and from there to a dozen loudspeakers, one ceiling speaker. He also used 20 radios, one tuned to the police department dispatch),  2 television bands, and 2 Geiger counters. Oscillators and a pulse generator were other sound sources. Rounding it all off were a dozen household appliances such as blenders, fans, a juicer, and washing machine, wired with contact microphones. If that wasn't enough sounds from four wired body parts, heart, brain, lungs and stomach were included in the unpredictable mix. The entire set up stood on a platform with equipment stretched across two long tables. Cage, David Tudor and three other musicians moved around between the rows twisting knobs, plugging and unplugging cords and circuits, and flipping switches. Adding further randomness to the mix were the 30 photocells and lights mounted at ankle level around the performance area. These  activated and triggered different sound sources as the performers, and audience who came in close to watch, moved around the set up.
​
 Video artist Naim June Paik compared the roaring noise of Variations VII  to a Niagra Falls of sound. Nothing like it had ever been heard before. And since so many of the sounds came from live sound sources an exact sound replica can never be recreated. Paik also considered to be Cage's masterpiece performance in the realm of electronic music. 

​The Maker and Hacker movements have had a great success in continuing to build relationships between the technically minded and the artistically minded. Ham radio has different restrictions imposed on it by the FCC. However it seems to me that somehow Hams could still work in creative ways with artists and musicians, and continue to forge vital connections between art and technology. 

​Sources:
Begin again: a biography of John Cage by Kenneth Silverman, Alfred Knopf, New York, 2010.
Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists, by Kay Larson, Penguin Press, New York, 2012.
Reception: the radio works of Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage, by Alana Pagnutti, Smith and Brown, 2016.
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9_Evenings:_Theatre_and_Engineering
http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=611   

​The development of telecommunications technology and electronic circuits had a major impact on the creation of new musical instruments from the very beginnings of the field. But it was only in 1951 that a composer first got the idea that the radio itself could be used as a musical instrument.  Since then the use of radio as a source for live, unpredictable sound, music, and voice has become commonplace across the genres of contemporary classical, and the various styles of electronic, rock and pop music. The next several installments of the music of radio series will explore some of the key composers and pieces of music that used radios as the primary instrument. Using the radio as an instrument has become part of what composer Alvin Curran has called "the new common practice" or grab-bag of themes, principles, and methods being used to create the sonic backdrop of the landscape that everyone now inhabits in this age of electronic multimedia.

"It's not a physical landscape. It's a term reserved for the new technologies. It's a landscape in the future. It's as though you used technology to take you off the ground and go like Alice through the looking glass." John Cage wrote this about his series of Imaginary Landscape compositions that first began in 1939 with No. 1, written for two variable-speed turntables, frequency recordings, muted piano, and cymbal. It was potentially the first piece of electroacoustic music ever composed. The turntables played test tones. Some were constant, others had a sliding pitch. From the very beginning the piece was envisioned for radio, to be performed for either live or recorded broadcast. Since Cage had been a boy, he had been fascinated by the medium. Born in 1912 broadcasting was still in its infancy when it first reached his ears. Radio was so new anything could be done with it. The lackluster formats most common on the broadcasting portions of the spectrum now could well use an injection of the wonder the medium held in those first few decades.

Imaginary Landscape No. 1 was written while Cage held a teaching position at the Cornish School in Seattle. The school had been founded by Nellie Cornish, who had received some education in radio technology from Edward R. Murrow when visiting him at the CBS station in New York. In 1936 she created at Cornish the first school for radio technology in the United States. The studio at the school was equipped with the latest broadcasting and recording gear. It was there that Cage first began to experiment with the use of electrical sounds for musical purposes. At that time he was deep into writing percussion music and he began incorporating the sounds of radio and oscillator frequencies into these pieces. Reporting on Imaginary Landscape No. 1 the Seattle Star wrote that it was a "staccato roar of radio static and ghastly, ghostly whistles with intermittent shrieks". While this might have terrified listeners of the time, anymore people take such music as a matter of course, paying it no mind, especially when it is used in such things as the soundtrack or incidental music in film and television.

In 1941 Cage had found himself spending a large part of the year in Chicago. It was here that his interest in radio music continued to grow. Around this time he had published an article "For More New Sounds" in the journal Modern Music. In this essay he wrote about the similarities to be found between the materials used to create sound effects in radio studios and the instruments in the percussion wing of an orchestra. One of his interests was to bring radio sound-effects to the concert hall. He wrote, "organizations of sound effects, with their expressive rather than representational qualities in mind, can be made. Such compositions could be represented by themselves as 'experimental radio music'". That same year he got to work with the poet Kenneth Patchen in creating a radio play for CBS. The first draft of the musical score was scrapped by the sound engineers however. Some of the sounds he wanted to create, such as the escape of compressed air were too expensive to produce for the program, he was told. After some revisions he eventually gave CBS something they considered acceptable. The resulting piece by Cage and Patchen, The City Wears a Slouch Hat, was broadcast on May 31st, 1942. The surreal text by the poet was mixed with sounds of telephones, crying babies, rain, foghorns and Cage's metallic percussion instruments. In 1942 he also wrote No. 2 and 3 in the Imaginary Landscape series. No. 2 was written for tin cans, conch shell, ratchet, bass drum, buzzers, water gong, metal wastebasket, lion's roar and amplified coil of wire. No. 3 required musicians to play tin cans again, muted gongs, audio frequency oscillators, variable speed turntables with frequency recordings and recordings of generator whines, amplified coil of wire, amplified marimbula (a Caribbean instrument similar to the African thumb piano), and electric buzzer.

Imaginary Landscape No. 4 was first performed in 1951 and is scored for 12 radios played by 24 musicians, two on each radio, one to control the tuning, the other to control the volume. It is a great example of indeterminate music. The only guarantee about the piece is that no performance of it will never be heard the same way. This is guaranteed because John incorporates chance operations to determine how much the dials of each radio are to be turned by each performer. The novelty of each performance is also guaranteed by the nature of radio itself. Depending on the place and time of a performance, the things coming out of the radio speakers are going to be different. During its premier concert at Columbia University's McMillin Theater those in the audience heard the word "Korea" over and over again, as well as snippets of a Mozart violin concerto, news about baseball, static, and silence. The performance took place around midnight and many of the stations in New York had already gone off the air for the night.  Of course the silence never bothered Cage, who considered  in an integral part of the experience. He had said that "silence, to my mind is as much a part of music as sound."

Listening to a recording of this piece from 2008 reveals the prevalence of country music and commercials. Voices come in and say things like "60 percent off" and read the weather and the latest buzz words in the news cycle. Many people listening today might be as confused about the "musical" quality of such a piece as they were back in 1951. But what John Cage has done  is to ask people to tune in and experience the unpredictable sounds and signals coming in from the radios and from the world, as a form of music.

The Imaginary Landscape compositions came to a close with No. 5  a work for magnetic tape recorder and any 42 phonograph records. This piece in the series was written in the same year as he began work on Williams Mix, for eight simultaneously played independent quarter-inch magnetic tapes, that became the first piece of octophonic music. As John Cage continued to compose until his death in 1992, he continued to work musically with new technology, including early computer music compositions in the 1960's.  A number of other composers and musicians have taken a vast amount of inspiration from Cage's work with radio and continued to build on it. These will be explored in further transmissions.     

A lot of these recordings are available to listen to on the wonderful UbuWeb:
http://www.ubu.com/sound/cage.html

Sources:
Begin again: a biography of John Cage by Kenneth Silverman, Alfred Knopf, New York, 2010.
Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists, by Kay Larson, Penguin Press, New York, 2012
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_Landscape

Speech synthesis confers a number of benefits to technology end users. It allows individuals with impaired eyesight to be able to operate radios and computers. For those who cannot speak, and who may also have trouble using sign language, speech units such as the device employed by Stephen Hawking allow a person to communicate in ways unthinkable a century ago. For these individuals speech synthesizers play an integral role in adding quality to their day to day lives. On our local repeaters synth voices make announcements about nets and club events, and speech synths read the weather on the NWS frequencies. Beyond these specialized uses, one of the ways everyone can share in the joy of chip talk is through the medium of music.      

The IBM 704 was the first computer to sing. It was first introduced in 1954 and 140 units had sold by 1960. The programming languages LISP and FORTRAN were first written for this large machine that used vacuum tube logic circuitry. Bell Telephone Laboratories (BTL) physicist John Larry Kelly coaxed the 704 into singing Daisy Bell aka A Bicycle Built for Two using a vocoder program he wrote for the 704. 

Lovely as the a cappella computer was, it was deemed in need of instrumental accompaniment. For this part of the song the expertise of fellow BTL employee Max Vernon Mathews was sought out.  Max was an electrical engineer whose first love of music enabled him to become a pioneer in electronic and computer music. In 1954 he wrote the first computer program for sound generation, MUSIC, also used on the IBM 704. The accompaniment to the voice portion of Daisy Bell was programmed by Max in 1961 using the IBM 7090.   

The IBM 7090 was the transistorized version of the 709 vacuum tube mainframe. The 7090 series was designed for "large-scale scientific and technological applications." The first of 7090's was installed in late 1959 at a price tag of close to $3 million. Adjusted for inflation the price today would be a whopping $23 million buckaroos. Besides its musical capabilities, the 7090's other accomplishments included being used for the control of the Gemini and Mercury space flights. IBM 7090's were also used by the Air Force for the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System up until the 1980s. Daniel Shanks and John Wrench used it to calculate the first 100,000 digits of pi. Yet none of the above uses compare, in my mind, to the beauty of the IBM 704 joining forces with the IBM 7090 on the song Daisy Bell. 

Another computer, HAL 9000, still gets most of the credit for this electronic version of Daisy Bell. Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, happened to be visiting his friend and colleague John Peirce at BTL when John Larry Kelly was making his demonstrations of speech synthesis with the IBM 704. He was so fascinated by witnessing this computational marvel that six years later he wrote that version of Daisy Bell into his screenplay, as sung by HAL in the middle the machines climactic mental breakdown. The song was on the vinyl platter "Music from Mathematics" put out by the Decca label a handful of decades ago (listen to video above.)

Daisy Bell went on to have a notable reprise for the Commodore 64 when Christopher C. Capon wrote his program "Sing Song Serenade". The sounds for his version were played direct on the hardware by rapidly moving the read/write head of the computer. . The resulting audio was emitted from the floppy disk drive. 
 
Max Mathews continued to make strong contributions to the humanities in the realms of music and technology. In 1968 he developed Graphic 1, a graphical system that used a light pen for drawing figures that could be converted into sound. In 1970 Mathews developed GROOVE (Generated Real-time Output Operations on Voltage-controlled Equipment) with F. R. Moore. GROOVE  was the first fully developed music synthesis system for interactive composition and realtime performance. It used 3C/Honeywell DDP-24 (or DDP-224) minicomputers.

An algorithm written by Mathews was used by Roger M. Shepard to synthesize Shepard Tones. These tones (named after Roger) consist of a superposition of sine waves separated by octaves. When the base pitch of the tone is played moving upward or downward, it is known as the Shepard Scale. Playing this scale creates an auditory illusion of a tone that continually ascends or descends in pitch, yet seems to get no higher or lower. It is the musical version of a barber pole or of the Penrose stair, a type of impossible object in geometry, made famous in the drawing Ascending and Descending by M.C. Escher.  

Max also made a controller, called a Radio-Baton and Radiodrum, used to conduct and play electronic music. Developed at BTL in the 1980s it was originally a kind of three-dimensional mouse. The device has no inherent sound of its own, but produces control signals that are used to trigger sounds, sound-production, effects and the like. The Radio-Baton is similar to a theremin. Magnetic capacitance is used to locate the position of the conductors baton, or mallets in the case of the drum. The two mallets are antennas transmitting on slightly different frequencies. The drum surface, also electronic, acts as another set of antennas. The combination of these antenna signals is used to derive X, Y and Z, and these are interpreted according to the assigned musical parameters.

Many of these mainframe musical programs are now available in the program Max that can run off a laptop.

ARTIKULATION

​

​Besides the use of Daisy Bell in the soundtrack for 2001, director Stanley Kubrick used a wide range of work by modern composers. The piece Atmospheres written by Gyorgy Ligeti in 1961 was used for the scenes of the monolith and those of deep space. Ligeti's earlier electronic work Artikulation, though not used in the film, shares an interesting connection to some of the ideas behind speech synthesis. Artikulation was composed in 1958 at the Studio for Electronic Music of West Deutsche Radio in Cologne with the help of Cornelius Cardew, an assistant of Karlheinz Stockhausen (whose works involving shortwave radios will be explored in time). The piece was composed to be an imaginary conversation of multiple ongoing monologues, dialogues, many voices in arguments and chatter. In it Ligeti created a kind of artificial polyglot language full of strange whispers, enunciations and utterance. 

Sources:
Music from Mathematics: Played by IBM 7090 Computer to Digital Sound Transducer,  Decca LP 9103.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_704
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_7090
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy_Bell
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Mathews
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Larry_Kelly,_Jr.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiodrum
Gyorgy Ligeti: Continuum / Zehn Stucke fur Blaserquintett / Artikulation / Glissandi / Etude fur Orgel / Volumina, Wergo 60161, 1988. 

Who doesn't remember changing their voice as a kid by talking into a fan? Or sneaking off with baloons at a party or dance to inhale the helium and try to talk like a character from a cartoon? One year for Halloween I got a cheap voice changer toy that had three settings and I remember playing with it for hours. But voice changers weren't always so cheap, and the original was room-sized instead of hand held. The initial reason behind its development had nothing to do with keeping kids amused and was not driven by aesthetic concerns. It was only after Ma Bell and the military had wrapped up their use for the Vocoder that it came to be appreciated for its musical qualities, first by experimental electronic musicians, and later pop, rock and rap artists. The next few editions of the Music of Radio series delves into the story of electronic speech synthesis, from the Vocoder, to the Voder and on to the first text-to-speech computer programs written for gargantuan mainframes. It takes us deep into the stacks of the Bell Laboratory Archives and into the belly of WWII crypto communications before emerging in the 1960's and '70's when the stage was set for mind melting explorations in sonic psychedelia. Just as the Vocoder is still be used for artistic effects the original ideas behind it, compression and bandwidth reduction, continue to be used in new hardware and software applications for radio and telecommunications. 

Homer Dudley, the inventor of the Vocoder, was an electronic and acoustic engineer whose primary area of focus revolved around the idea that human speech is fundamentally a form of radio communication. In his white-paper The Carrier Nature of Speech he wrote that "speech is like a radio wave in that information is transmitted over a suitably chosen carrier." This realization came to Dudley in October of 1928 when he was otherwise out of commission in a Manhattan hospital bed. Discoveries are often made from playfully messing around with things, either in horseplay or boredom, and Dudley was keeping himself entertained just as a kid might by making weird sounds with his voice through changing the shape of his mouth. He had the insight that his vocal cords were acting as a transmitter of a periodic waveform. The nose and throat were the resonating filters while the mouth and tongue produced harmonic content, or formants to use linguistic lingo. He also observed that the frequencies of his voice vibrated at a faster rate than the mouth itself moved. 

These insights went on to have implications for the work he pursued at Bell Laboratories, a true idea factory, where money and resources were thrown at any old project that might bear the AT&T monopoly some form of fruit or further advantage in their already sprawling playground of wires and exchanges. Once recovered and back at work Homer thought his discovery might have an application in the area of compression and he made it his ambition to free up some of the phone companies precious bandwidth hoping to pack in more conversations onto the copper lines. He was given a corner and allowed to go work in it, devoting himself to his obsession.  

He exploited his research in the invention of the Vocoder, or VOice CODER, first demonstrated at Harvard in 1936. It works by measuring how the spectral characteristics of speech change over time. The signal going into the mic is divided by filters into a number of frequency bands. The signal present at each frequency gives a representation of the spectral energy. This allows the Vocoder to reduce the information needed to store speech to a series of numbers. On the output end to a speaker or headphone the Vocoder reverses the process to synthesize speech electronically. Information about the instantaneous frequency of the original voice signal is discarded by the filters giving the end result it unique robotic and dehumanized characteristics. The amplitude of the modulator for each of the individual analysis bands generates a voltage that controls the amplifiers in each corresponding carrier band. The frequency components of the modulated signal are mapped onto the carrier signal as discrete amplitude changes in each of the frequency bands. Because the Vocoder does not employ a point-by-point recreation of the wave, the bandwidth used for transmission can be significantly reduced. 

There is usually an unvoiced band or sibilance channel on a Vocoder for frequencies outside the analysis bands for typical talking, but still important in speech. These are words starting with the letters s, f, ch or other sibilant sounds. These are mixed with the carrier output for increased clarity, resulting in recognizable speech but still roboticized. Some Vocoders have a second system for generating unvoiced sounds, using a noise generator instead of the fundamental frequency.

To better demonstrate the speech synthesis ability of the decoder part of his invention Dudley created another instrument, the Voder (Voice Operating Demonstrator). This was unveiled during the World Fair in New York in 1939 where Ray Bradbury was among the attendees who witnessed it firsthand.  The Voder synthesized speech by creating the electronic equivalent of a vocal tract. Oscillators and noise generators provided a source of pitched tone and hiss. A 10-band resonator filter controlled by a keyboard converted the tone and hiss into vowels, consonants and inflections. Another set of extra keys allowed the operator to make the plosive sounds such as "p" and "d" as well as affrictive sounds of "j" in "jaw" and "ch" in "cheese". Only after months of practice with this difficult machine could a trained operator produce something recognizable as speech. 

At the world fair Mrs. Helen Harper, who was noted for her skill, led a group of twenty operators in demonstrations of the Voder where people from the crowd could come up and ask the operator to make the Voder say something. 

Homer Dudley had great success in his aim of reducing bandwidth with the Vocoder. It could chop up voice frequencies into ten bands at 300 hertz, a significant reduction of what was required for a phone call back in the day. Yet it never got used for that purpose. The large size of the equipment was impractical to install in homes and offices across the country even if it created more channels on the phone lines. For a time Dudley worked at marketing the Vocoder to Hollywood for use in audio special effects. It never made much of an impact there as other voice changing devices such as the Sonovox started being used in radio jingles and in cartoons. Before it could be discovered by musicians Homer Dudley's tool for voice compression had to eb put into service during America's efforts in WWII where it was used as part of the SIGSALY encryption program. The details surrounding the coding of the voices of MacArthur and Churchill will be explored in next months column.                    

 Sources:
How to Wreck A Nice Beach: The Vocoder from WWII to Hip-hop: The Machine Speaks by Dave Tompkins, Melville House, 2010
The Carrier Nature of Speech by Homer Dudley, The Bell System Technical Journal, Vol. 19, No. 4, October 1940
Fundamentals of Speech Synthesis by Homer Dudley, Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, Vol. 3, No. 4, October 1955
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocoder
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voder

Lev Theremin's skill at invention was not lost on the Soviet machine. Not long after his musical instrument was patented, the radio watchman security device it was based on started being employed to guard the treasures of gold and silver Lenin had plundered from church and clergy. The watchman was also being used to protect the state bank. Setting up and installing these early electronic traps took him away from his primary interest in scientific research. Just as he was approaching the limits of his frustration his mentor at the Institute gave him a new problem to solve, that of "distance vision" or the transmission and reception of moving images over the airwaves. The embryonic idea for television was in the air at the time but no one had figured out how to make it a reality. The race was on and the Soviets wanted to be first to crack the puzzle.  
​   
Having researched the issue extensively in the published literature, Lev was ready to apply the powers of his mind towards a solution. In the Soviet Union parts weren't always readily available. Some were smuggled in, and others had to be scavenged from flea markets -the latter a process very familiar to radio junkies. By 1925 he had created a prototype from his junk box using a rotating disk with mirrors that directed light onto a photo cell. The received image had a resolution of sixteen lines, and it was possible to make out the shape of an object or person but not the identifiable details. Other inventors in Russia and abroad were also tackling the issue. Fine tuning the instrument over the next year he doubled the resolution to 32 lines and then, using interlaced scanning, to 64. Having created a rudimentary "Mechanism of Electric Distance Vision" he demonstrated the device and defended his thesis before students and faculty from the physics department at the Polytechnic Institute. Theremin had built the first functional television in Russia. 
    
After this period Lev embarked to Europe and then America where he lived for just over a decade engaging the public, generating interest in his musical instrument, and doing work with RCA. As Hitler gathered power he was anxious about the encroaching war and returned home to the Soviet Union in 1938. He barely had time to settle back in when he was sent to the Kolmya gold mines for enforced labor for the better part of a year. This was done as a way of breaking him, a fear tactic that could be held over his head if he didn't cooperate: do what we say or go back to the mines. The state had better uses for him. He was picked up by the police overlord Lavrenti Beria who sent him to work in a secret laboratory that was part of the Gulag camp system. One of his first jobs was to build a radio beacon whose signals would help track down missing submarines, aircraft and smuggled cargo.

With WWII winding to a close the Cold War was dawning and Russia was on the offensive, trying to extend its reach and gather intelligence on such lighthearted subjects as the building of atomic bombs. In their efforts at organized espionage the Soviets sifted for all the data they could get from foreign consulates. Having succeeded with his beacon Lev was given another assignment. This time the goal wasn't to track down cargo or vehicles but to intercept U.S. secrets from inside Spaso House, the residence of the U.S. Ambassador. Failure to do the bidding of his boss would mean a return to the mines. His boss had high demands for the specifications of the bug Lev was to plant. The proposed system could have no microphones and no wires and was to be encased in something that didn't draw attention to itself.
  
The bug ended up being put inside a wooden carving of the Great Seal of the United States and was delivered by a delegation of Soviet Pioneers (their version of Boy Scouts) on July 4, 1945. Deep inside this "gesture of friendship" was a miniature metal cylinder with a nine inch antenna tail. The device was passive and was not detected by the X-Rays used at Spaso house in their routine scans. It only activated when a microwave beam of 330 Mhz was directed at the seal from a nearby building. There was a metal plate inside the cylinder that when hit with the beam resonated as a tuned circuit. Below the beak of the eagle the wood was thin enough to act as a diaphragm and the vibrations from it caused fluctuations in the capacitance between the plate and the diaphragm creating a microphone. The modulations this produced were picked up by the antenna and then transmitted out to the receiver at a Soviet listening post. Using this judiciously the Soviets were able to gain intelligence to aid them in a number of strategic decisions. The Great Seal bug is considered to be a grandfather to RFID technology.    

This wasn't the last time Lev was asked to develop wireless eavesdropping technology. For the next job his overseers upped the ante on him. No device could be planted in the site targeted for surveillance. The operation was code named Snowstorm. Lev used his interest in optics to figure out a method. Knowing that window panes in a room vibrate slightly when people talked he needed a method to detect and read the vibrations from a distance. Resonating glass contains many simultaneous harmonics and it would be a difficult to find the place of least distortion to get a voice signal from. Then there was the obstacle of reinterpreting the signal back into a speech pattern. Using an infrared beam focused on the optimum spot and catching its reflection back in an interferometer with a photo element he was able to pick up communications. Back at his monitoring post he used his equipment and skills to reduce the large amounts of noise from the signal.   
A few years later Lev was released from his duties at the lab, but was kept on a tight leash and not allowed to leave Moscow.

HOW TO BUILD A THEREMIN FROM THREE AM RADIOS 
    
For those amateurs wishing to build and play a theremin there are many commercial kits available on the market. However a simple theremin can be built using just three AM radios. If you don't already have these laying around the house they can easily be obtained from your local thrift store.

One of the radios will be a fixed transmitter, another a variable transmitter and the third would be the receiver. The volume knobs on the fixed and variable transmitters can be turned all the way down, as they are just used to produce the intermediate frequency oscillations that will be picked up by the receiver. The receiver radio should be set on an unused frequency in the upper range of the AM band such as 1500 Khz. If it is in use tune to a nearby space where only static is heard. The fixed and variable transmitters should then be tuned 455 Khz below where your receiver is set, in this example 1045 Khz. 455 Khz is a common difference in the local oscillator frequency, although there can be variations. As these frequencies are set the receiver should start to make a whistling type sound, the production of a beat frequency.

The next step is to open up the variable radio and look for the variable capacitor, often housed in white plastic with four screws. Find the terminal that takes the station out of tune and use an aligator clip attached to the antenna, or solder a wire from the antenna to the oscillator terminal. Now the controls will have to be adjusted slightly again. Tune the fixed transmitter until the receiver starts whistling and have fun playing with the sounds it creates.          

Sources:
Theremin: Ether Music and Espionage by Albert Glinsky, University of Illinois Press, 2000
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Theremin
How to Make a Basic Theremin by eltunene: https://app.box.com/s/kgdstzwaoc/1/17284427/181802859/1