Mumma’s early encounters with John Cage and David Tudor, his work with them in the ONCE Festival and other situations primed him for his eventual work with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.

Merce Cunningham was one of the great American dance artists of the 20th century. Cunningham was born in Centralia, Washington in 1919. He started off learning tap dancing from a local teacher where his ear for rhythm and sense of timing were honed from an early age. He later attended the Cornish School in Seattle from 1937 to study acting and mime, but didn’t take to it. He loved the way dance could be ambiguous while also allowing for full expression of movement. Martha Graham had seen him dance during this time period and she invited him to join her company. It was through Graham that Cunnigham’s life intersected with Cage in something of a chance operation. Graham had needed a musical accompanist for her dancers. One of her pupil’s, Bonnie Bird, recommended composer Lou Harrison, who declined, but suggested in his place the young Cage. Cunningham and Cage met in 1938 and later became romantically involved, and life partners until Cage’s death in 1992.

Cunningham sometimes played in Cage’s percussion group at the time, and they had become quick friends. Over the subsequent years Merce loved to talk to John about ideas. As each of their personal situations evolved in art and life, Merce finally took the step of establishing his own dance company in 1953 and Cage came along Cage for the ride as companies music director. Cunnigham’s Company had many opportunities as it grew over the years. Cage’s own career continued with more and more in the late 60s and throughout the 70s. As each pursued their vision other musicians needed to step in to the role of director when Cage wasn’t available. Mumma and Behrman, among others, were natural choices, due to their friendship and affinity.  Mumma states it was never very clear how he ended up working with the Cunningham Dance Company, but it was something he just drifted into through these associations.

In the 60s and 70s Cunningham’s troupe made increasing use of electronics and this was an area where Mumma’s expertise could shine. He was a perfect fit; primed by his dedicated work as a creative composer, a cunning electronic technician, and as someone for whom the collaborative mode was second nature. In Mumma’s work with Cunningham’s troupe he got a chance to use all of these aspects of his character and put them to the test on tours that tested the endurance and dedication of everyone involved. The programs often involved collaborative music making and separate choreography, the latter determined by chance operations. The musicians were free to draw from their personal repertoires, and combine it with original material. 

Mesa

The first major piece Mumma wrote for Cunningham’s company was Mesa in 1966 for the dance Place. He was already working on something with David Tudor, who worked regularly in the company, when this came about. Instead of starting over he decided to alter the work in progress to accommodate the commission. Tudor had gotten into playing the Bandoneon, a relative of the accordion and squeezebox that has become popular in Argentina. It became the perfect instrument for Mesa because of its wide frequency and dynamic range. The Bandoneon can also produce long sustained drones and sounds, just what Mumma for the monolith that was taking shape.
 
Like the geological feature after which it is named, Mesa, is a tectonic slab of music sustained at one level of thrust with occasional interruptions. He had thought of using tape for the piece, but the dynamic range he wanted couldn’t be contained with the tape. That was one concept for the piece. The other was his desire to use “an inharmonic frequency spectrum with extremes of sound density.” In the performace space the placement of different portions of the sound in different loudspeakers creates a spatial diffusion. The final mixing of the sound is in the ears of the listener.

To further extend the dynamic range of Tudor’s instrument and create the timbres he imagined Mumma needed to design a circuit. The piece represented a creative problem and a technical challenge. His electronics needed to be able to translate frequencies, equalize, and required the use of logic circuitry in tricky configurations to control musical continuity. It’s another composition where the circuit diagram and instructions are more of the score than notated music.

Mumma developed Voltage Controlled Attenuators (VCA) in collaboration with Dr. William Ribbens in Ann Arbor. These extended the range while also including envelope controls. Ribbens is a Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Aerospace Engineering at the University.

In performance six microphones are attached to the Bandoneon, three on each side. The microphones are different with each being sensitive to different frequency bands. As a way of “thickening the plot” and for other reasons Mumma fed one mic from each side into the other side of the circuit. Six channels of sound from one instrument source are being processed to create this massive place.

Using a logic circuit Mumma was able to route control signals and program signals to different channels during performance. He used a frequency shifter with equalization that processed parts of the sound determined by internal control signals or from Tudor playing the Bandoneon. The logic circuit itself determined the source and nature of the control signal.

Mumma used a multiplier to take portions of the spectrum and transform it by whole integers to further equalize the sounds. Phase and amplitude modulators also work with portions of the sound, gating parts of the spectrum transfer with the output from the multiplier. Further gates, formant modulators, pass band filters and other baroque electrical wizardry were also built into the circuit score of Mesa. In creating the piece he was setting up a cybersonic system.

The VCA also included delays that further shaped the envelope of the program signal. Mumma wanted to use very specific delays that were not possible with either electronic manipulation, or from a mechanical source, such as building a tape delay. Mumma writes, “the solution to this problem is inherent in the concept of MESA itself, since at this point in the system it is the envelope of the otherwise sustained sounds which is to be shaped. This is achieved by subjecting the VCA control signals to frequency-sensitive thermal-delay circuitry. The wide dynamic range of the VGA is due to special bias procedures.”

Every control signal for sound modification first comes from the Bandoneon. “Because the control signals are automatically derived from the sound materials themselves, I call the process, and the music, "cybersonic".”
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What Mumma has created in Mesa is  a situation where the Bandoneonist can play a duet with a piece of electronic circuitry. A third person, most often Mumma, in performance, tweaks the circuit live to override parts of the internal logic with an artist’s intuition. 

Telepos

One of the pieces by Mumma used by Cunnigham in a variety of settings including TV Rerun was his Telepos (1972). For this he made belts to be worn by the dancers that contained small accelerometers, a device that measures vibrations and accelerations in motion. The belts were also equipped with voltage controlled oscillators and a miniature UHF transmitter. Inspired by telemetry, or the transmission of device data that is read remotely at a different point of reception, the dancers made music by their movements “in a process similar to that encountered in space travel, undersea, or biomedical research.”

Mumma worked with the group for seven full seasons and also collaborated on works with individuals from the circle. He also continued to work with Cage. One such instance was as part of the creation of a soundtrack to an electronic game of chess.

Reunion was a big piece conceived by John Cage as a chess game to be played between himself and Marcel Duchamp and a second match with Teeny Duchamp. It had a collaborative musical element performed by Gordon Mumma, David Behrman, and David Tudor on an electronic chessboard designed by Lowell Cross. The chess board controlled certain aspects of the live electronic music.

Cage had first met Marcel in the early 1940’s when they were both in New York, but the meeting had been awkward, due to a blowup between Cage and Peggy Guggenheim, who had first introduced them. At that time Cage and his then-wife Xenia were being put up by Peggy after they had moved from Chicago. Cage took a gig at the Museum of Modern Art, when he also had a gig at Peggy’s new art gallery. She felt snubbed by him having a show she thought stole the spotlight from her presentation of his music in the city. At the time he was so in awe of Duchamp, he didn’t want to disturb him, but simply enjoyed in his presence.

In the winter of 1965-66 Cage’s circle and Duchamp’s overlapped again and they found themselves at the same parties. Cage had long been an admirer of Duchamp and they shared a number of sensibilities, one appreciating readymade objects and the appreciating readymade music of sound occurring everywhere in life. He wanted to reacquaint himself with Duchamp, but wasn’t sure how to go about it, until he asked Teeny if she thought Duchamp would tutor him in chess. She said to ask the man himself, and when he got the gumption to do so, Duchamp said yes.

He started to meet with Duchamp once a week to learn the game, and other social visits followed, including vacationing with the couple in Spain. Though he had used chess as a ruse to get to know the artist he admired, Cage was fascinated with the game and became a serious player. More often than not he lost to his teacher, who had played chess for decades.  
In 1968 the idea for Reunion was hatched. According to Mumma it “descended upon us at the same time” and the exact source of it was obscured amongst the collaborators. At the time Cage was very interested in expanding the people with whom he collaborated beyond the group of musicians and electronic pioneers who had clustered around him and Cunningham.

Lowell Cross was one of the people Cage was interested in working with. At the time Cross was writing a thesis that explored the history of electronic music and electronic music studios from between 1948 and 1953, and Cage played a large role in his thesis. Cross was studying media and society under Marshall McLuhan at the University of Toronto, and also ethnomusicology with Mieczysław Koliński, and electronic music with Gustav Ciamaga and Myron Schaeffer.

Cage had been interested in Lowell’s work as an instrument builder, and had known about his device called the Stirrer, which was a panning system for moving up to four sounds in space which he had created between 1963-65. Cage called him in February of 1968 and asked him if he could build him an electronic chessboard capable of selecting and diffusing sounds around an audience in a concert hall as a game unfolded. Cross at first declined, politely, because he was swamped with his work at school.

Cage then made his move and said, “Perhaps you will change your mind if I tell you who my chess partner will be.” When Duchamp’s name was dropped it was enough to persuade the assiduous student to get even busier and build what would become the 16-input, 8-output chessboard used in the subsequent performance.

The chessboard had sensors that triggered the electronic music being produced by the musicians according to the way the pieces were moved. The outcome musically was beyond the control of the performers, who each had their own systems and set-ups feeding into the mix. The board was also equipped with contact microphones that picked up the movement of the pieces.

At the performance on March 5th, which kicked of the “Sightsoundsystems” performance series organized by composer Udo Kasmets, the chess players sat and smoked cigarettes and drank wine while the musicians made electronic sounds. The performance lasted for four hours and was a celebration of everyday life as a form of art. Marshall McCluhan was noted to have been in the audience.
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It was these kind of collaborative group work situations that Mumma found himself to be drawn to and a part of over and over again. Mumma’s talent as a composer, player, electronics specialist and creative thinker made him an invaluable asset to all the groups and milieus he circulated within and between.

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Read the rest of the Radiophonic Laboratory: Telecommunications, Electronic Music, and the Voice of the Ether.

Back on the westcoast in 1966 Pauline Oliveros had been hired to direct the San Francisco Tape Music Center after it’s move to Mills college under the auspices of the Rockefeller grant they had received. The next year she got a competitive job offer at the University of California San Diego and left to take that position. Californians Lowell Cross and Tony Gnazzo replaced her but they soon left. When Roger Reynolds was asked if he wanted the job he’d already gotten another gig himself at UCSD as well, but he recommended Robert Ashley in his stead. In the fall of 1969 Ashley’s family packed up their bags and left Michigan for the golden sun of California. 

When he got into town he called upon Nick Bertoni for help in revamping and expanding the electronic studios at CCM. Bertoni had come to California to work on sound for film director Robert Altman. In 1968, he had settled in Berkley to form a collective household of writers, artists, musicians and scholars. Bertoni would go on to become a pioneer of the maker movement promoting the idea of tinkering as a learning method, first at the S.F. Exploratorium Museum, where he was manager of the Artist in Residence Program, and then in his own Tinkers Workshop in Berkeley where he explored electronics, woodworking, metal crafts and inventing and encouraged others to do so as well.

With Bertoni’s expertise he helped Ashley build a studio split into five sections. It included a recording studio, a tape library and a tape editing suite, a Moog synthesizer studio, and a workshop devoted to building musical instruments. Having a space whose sole purpose was the creation of new instruments kept CCM firmly at the forefront of the do it yourself ethos. This ethos was further enhanced when Ashley opened up the studio to people who weren’t even students at the college, making it a public access facility. In this way he continued the tradition and legacy of the San Francisco Tape Music Center from which it originated.

Running the studio ended up being a good career move for Ashley. After two years in that capacity he was invited by Mills to become a professor. He agreed under the condition that he be given tenure. The professorship was a situation he thought quite ironic when he considered how his own progress in music had been hindered more than helped by many of his past music teachers, Ross Finney chief among them. “I never thought of myself as a teacher. Teachers have mostly been the bane of my existence,” he later wrote.

Never the less where other teachers had failed for Ashley, he was able to guide a number of young composers on to successful musical careers. These include Maggi Payne, who in turn went on to become a co-director of the CCM and Paul DeMarinis who went on to explore many different parameters around the convergence of technology, communications and music. John Bischoff was another of his students whose work with the League of Electronic Music Composers is explored later in this chapter. DeMarinis also sometimes played with the League.
   
It was during his time in California that Ashley’s attention turned to opera. He had dabbled in the form twice before in the 60’s but now it started to consume him. Putting on an opera isn’t cheap, and the more experimental the work is, the harder a time a composer will have finding backers to support the work. At the same time, the lack of financial backing can lead to innovation as strategies for bypassing various obstacles are sought. This latter path was the way Ashley took when he started getting interested in the form, and during his tenure at the CCM between 1969 and 1981 he established a new genre of opera.

I was in the 1970’s that Stockhausen came up with the Licht superformula and himself started writing operatic works that would take the form outside of its traditional mold and into new territories. Something must have been in the air in the 1970s when the these two different musical minds were fertilized with operas.

Ashley’s genius was to create an opera intended for television, a music that could be enjoyed comfortably in someone’s living room. Keeping with the SFTMC’s multimedia tradition his operas include video, electronic music, and improvisation. His complex and literary libretti also show the influence of his time working at the Speech Research Institute at Michigan University. Not only do the texts of his operas have multiple levels of meaning, but the way the performers are instructed to utter, sing, declaim the libretti bring the focus in to the different ways voice can be used. Ashley brought the extended techniques so popular in the ONCE Groups instrumental music to bear on vocalists as influenced by his time as a speech analyst.

AUTOMATIC WRITING

One of the pieces he worked on at CCM was to be a direct precursor for the new mode of storytelling he established in his operas and it came out of a mild form of Tourette syndrome he’d noticed he had. It was composed in recorded form over a period of five years and not released as an album until 1979, but some of the musical features of the piece and the vocal phrasings would appear in his operas that he started working concurrently, progress on them overlapping with the years.

Ashley noticed there were certain words he muttered, certain phrases he repeated out loud. He got curious about these unconscious patterns that were emerging, and asked himself, as a composer, if he could find a way of working with them musically?  

He’d recalled how Morton Feldman had made a remark that any composer who walked around with a tune in his head should be locked up. Ashley knew he had to bring forth the mysterious utterances emerging from himself, and he knew that within them was a great creative potential. To not use these “tunes” coming out of his head in some way was to hold back his gift from the world.

After some false starts trying to use these involuntary tics in voluntary live performances, Ashley came to the conclusion that working on this material might be better as a studio project.  So he started making recordings, but they weren’t coming out the way he hoped, as the conscious element was still involved, like it had been in the performance attempts. Yet he kept at it and the necessary conditions finally came about one summer when the Mills campus was dead and empty. Students had gone home or gone wherever they went on summer break. With his head free from the responsibilities of teaching, the halls and studio quiet, he inched his mouth very close to the mic and made the involuntary utterances. Eventually he captured a total of forty-eight minutes of his Tourette derived speech onto tape, and this became the basis for Automatic Writing.

With the tape in place as the base structure he was now able to develop other material to ornament his voiced unconscious. His second wife Mimi Johnson (who would later start the Lovely Music record label that released this and many other recordings) read in French a translation of Ashley’s involuntary words. Her voice forms a second character for the work. A third was made with Ashley playing moog and organ tones beneath and around the voices -the unconscious ocean from which these voices emerged.

The way the words are said by Ashley, and the way they are recited by Johnson forms a kind of template for a way of using language that would be a hallmark in his later operas. Paul Demarinis, composer and master of circuitry, who was a student of Ashley’s and David Behrman’s while at CCM, designed a switching circuit used for the piece. The final result is a landmark work of hypnagogic music that is at once ambient, spoken word, and experimental. Just as the words seem to lull one on the edge of sleep, they will also disturb and make a person sit right up at attention.

The piece is a favorite of Steve Stapleton, the man behind surrealist music outfit Nurse With Wound.  Automatic Writing was a major on influence on the album A Missing Sense. Stapleton recalls, "A Missing Sense was originally conceived as a private tape to accompany my taking of LSD. When in that particular state, Robert Ashley's Automatic Writing was the only music I could actually experience without feeling claustrophobic and paranoid. We played it endlessly; it seemed to become part of the room, perfectly blending with the late night city ambience and the 'breathing' of the building."

MUSIC WITH ROOTS IN THE AETHER

As Automatic Writing came together in the CCM studio Ashley was still thinking of writing operas and new ways of presenting them. He was also thinking of television and how perfect television could be as a medium for new American music. Philip Glass had made a complaint that “the situation for the American composer can never improve because the only thing Americans are interested in is television and sports.” This statement got under Ashley’s skin and he took it into himself, stating the only thing he was interested in aside from music “as a composer, are television and sports: television, because like music I can have it in my home; and sports, because like in contemporary music nobody gets killed.”

Joining music with television seemed like a logical next step. He had already been composing for experimental films and also wanted to help get the music of American composers out there to the public. In a way this was a continuation of the impetus that had been behind the ONCE Festival: a forum for sharing what was happening now among American composers. Only instead of people having to drive from all across the country and show up in Ann Arbor, all they would have to do now was switch on their television set. Music in the Roots of the Aether was a way to seed the ideas of the new generation of American composers out into the minds of the public via the medium they were already entranced by. Because he liked the medium so much himself, it was obvious to combine it with opera.

“I know a lot of people who watch television for five hours straight; I do it myself. My idea of my music is to jump in bed, with whatever you like to be in bed with, drinks and whatever, there’s the TV, the music is coming out of the TV, and you watch it for six hours,” Ashley noted. He would be perfectly at home with contemporary streaming services and the habit of binge watching programs. 

With some funding he got from the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations he was able to move forward with the idea of combining television, opera, and conversation with his fellow composers to create a groundbreaking cross-genre work. With cash in hand he produced and directed Music with Roots in the Aether: video portraits of composers and their music. The project was a 14-hour television opera that was also a documentary about the work and ideas of seven American composers. For each composer an hour was dedicated to an unscripted conversation about their work and ideas, and another hour dedicated to a presentation of their music.

“I intended, first of all, to make a work of ‘musical theater’ in the medium of video, not a polemic. Music With Roots in the Aether  is the realization of an idea I had worked on in various ways for about ten years -- to make an opera of personalities and to illustrate those personalities with actual quotations, e.g., to quote the music of David Berhman by having David Berhman perform his music. … Because so much of my work has to do with ‘speech’ and its relationship to music, I conceived of Music With Roots in the Aether as a series of ‘duets' -- another composer and myself -- alternating with ‘solos’ by the composer. In each of those seven portraits the theater of the music is established in the landscape we inhabit and in the uninterrupted (‘performed’) camera style of the video recording.”
For the interviews he adopted a “casual and desultory” style. “They had to be, because of the manner in which they were made. They were made in front of a video camera, with the rule that there would be no video editing. So, the composers are just talking. Then, the conversations are edited for print to take out as much of the conversational looseness as possible.”

The composers included David Behrman, Philip Glass, Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma, Pauline Oliveros, Roger Reynold and Terry Riley. It premiered at the Festival d'Automne à Paris in 1976 and has since been shown worldwide in over 100 television broadcasts and closed-circuit installations.

The very nature of this work also relates to the spirit of public access television. The development of public access TV happened in parallel with developments of the open house studio concept at CCM. It was created between 1969 and 1971 by the FCC due to pressure being placed on the commission by media activists who were dissatisfied with the corporate behemoths who were the gatekeepers to the video airwaves. Even with the grant money to make the work there is an admirable scrappiness to the series.

But is it opera? According to Ashley it is, and the success of the series paved the way for him to further explore musical massage via America’s favorite medium.

PERFECT LIVES

Towards the end of his tenure as director of the CCM Ashley had worked on experiments and small pieces that later became the episodes The Park and The Backyard for his first proper TV opera Perfect Lives. Hearkening back to his Midwest origins, “These are songs about the Corn Belt / and some of the people in it / ... or on it.”

The pieces were developed musically in live performance in America and Europe. On the keyboard was Ashley’s collaborator “Blue” Gene Tyranny, whose harmonies, melodies, and playing define the character of Buddy. Ashley and Tyranny performed chamber versions on many occasions. One of these was at The Kitchen in 1978 and shortly after that concert Ashley was commissioned by The Kitchen to create Perfect Lives as an opera for television.

At the center of this work is the poetic, sing-song reading of Robert Ashley’s voice in a hypnotic syncopation. The ever-flowing words narrate a story of life in small town America updated to the time of its writing, the late 70s and early 80s. The story is filled with a number of characters but revolves around the lives of two musicians, the aforementioned Buddy who is “the World’s Greatest Piano Player” and “R”, a singer of myth and legend played by Ashley, and who can be viewed as a version of himself.

The composer describes the dramatic plot. "They fall in with two locals to commit the perfect crime, a metaphor for something philosophical: in this case, to remove a sizable about of money from The Bank for one day (and one day only) and let the whole world know that it was missing." One way to look at it is as a metaphysical heist drama.

As the tale unfold the couple Ed and Gwyn elope, the sheriff, his wife and a bunch old fogies at the old folks home unravel the mystery of the stolen money. Another character, Isolde, watches a sundown celebration from the door of her mom’s place. These and other characters act and sing across the television in the seven episodes that make up the opera.

Ashley described the plot as a “comic opera about reincarnation.” As such it is purportedly based on the Bardo Thodol or Tibetan Book of the Dead. Yet, since it deals with the corn belt, there are also fiery strains of midwestern evangelism threaded through the work. Or is that televangelism? Either way it amounts to a celebration of the everyday and perfect lives of those in the flyover states as the mundane and familiar gets transformed through music into a sublime meditation on the rebirth of the human soul.
Ashley put all the tools he had developed in collaborating with others at ONCE and CCM into practice in his operas.  “The collaborative aspect of the work follows principles I have used for many years in search of a new operatic style. The collaborators are given almost absolute freedom to develop characterizations from the textual and musical materials I provide. The musical and visual materials are coordinated through ‘templates’, a term I have come to use to describe the subjective assignment of emotional values and moods to visual forms and corresponding musical structures. Within the rules defined by the ‘templates’ the collaborators in all aspects of the work are free to interpret, ‘improvise’, invent and superimpose characteristics of their own artistic styles onto the texture of the work. In essence, the collaborators become ‘characters’ in the opera at a deeper level than the illusionistic characters who appear on stage.”

In 1980 using the templates provided by Ashley’s score, John Sanborn, who became the television director of the production, recorded the basic video tracks on location in Illinois. From this bounty of material, a preview version called The Lessons was produced through the TV Lab at WNET, the same place where Laurie Spiegel had worked on the sound production for The Lathe of Heaven.

Two years later a pre-sale was obtained from Channel Four Television in the UK that made it possible to complete work on the opera. John Sanborn masterminded a shooting and editing plan for the visual elements of Ashley’s score. Then in 1983 it went into post-porduction at VCA Teletronics where Sanborn worked with Dean Winkler on processing the images and editing it all together. In 1984 the opera celebrating the American Midwest premiered on Great Britain’s Channel Four. It has since been broadcast throughout Europe and in various cities in the United States. Perfect Lives was also expanded into a live version which included orchestral music layered onto tapes by composer Peter Gordon, and the singing of Jill Kroesen and David Van Tieghem.

In the U.S. its cult success is owed mostly to various recorded audio versions which became favorites for late night air play on community, college and other radio stations not beholden to record companies and ad revenue. In other words: stations that weren’t jailed into restrictive formats.

For the rest of his career Ashley would continue to work in the operatic form to create a uniquely American conception of opera both in subject matter and in the use of American language and ways of talking. Kyle Gann considers Perfect Lives and Ashley’s operas in general to be “performance novels” and I concur that this is an apt moniker.

Around this time in the late 70’s and early 80’s a number of different works, that could be considered to cross the genres of spoken word, radio play or opera, and otherwise contained spoken and sung narratives started to appear. David Rosenboom’s Future Travel from 1981 is one example, a sci-fi story set to Buchla Touché & 300 Series Electric Music Box, piano, violin and percussion.

The same year David Behrman, Paul Demarinis, Fern Friedman, Terri Hanlon and Anne Klingensmith recorded She’s More Wild at the CCM. It started life as performance art piece described by the artists as ‘Western Performance Noir.’ The record centers on a series of texts written by Friedman and Hanlon in which female narrators comically embody a series of iconic roles (The Recording Artist, The Former Movie Star, and The Rancher). Other lyrical themes include recurring references to the notorious cannibal pioneers, the Donner Party, an ironic take on Japanophilia, and the luscious “Archetypal Unitized Seminar,” a satirical poke at self-help culture, whose lyrics are rendered in Indian raga style to the accompaniment of electronic glissandi and toy noisemakers.

Records like these and other text pieces set to music sit in the same milieu that Ashley would command in further operatic works. As “performance novels” they are uniquely positioned for transmission via a variety of telecommunications channels and mediums.

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Read the rest of the Radiophonic Laboratory: Telecommunications, Electronic Music, and the Voice of the Ether.


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David Behrman was born in Austria in 1937 and came from a family of artists and performers. He was son of noted playwright and Hollywood screenwriter S.N. Behrman. His mother Elza Heifetz Behrman was the sister of violinist Jascha Heifetz. Performance, music, and the arts were all in his blood. The family piano was something always available to him, and he spent a lot of time sitting with the instrument. His inclination towards music was encouraged and he was able to continue to study it in the world of higher education. There he met some of the people who were working towards the awakening of a distinctive American music in the classical tradition, and others who would go on to have a lasting influence over his own musical trajectory.

From the American Five the American Four

In 1953 he went to the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. It was there he met a person one of his lifelong friends and musical companion, Frederic Rzewski. It was around this time period that he also met Wallingford Riegger. He became a student of Riegger’s who initiated him into the alternative current of American classical music.
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In an interview Behrman commented, “One person from whom I learned a lot, about music and also about feisty independence, was the composer Wallingford Riegger. One year in New York, when I was 17, I went twice a week to his little apartment to take composition lessons. Riegger had taught Morton Feldman and Bob Ashley and had been a friend of Henry Cowell and Edgard Varese.” Behrman was soaking in the ambience of some rarified musical circles.

His teacher Riegger had been born in Albany, Georgia, at some point moved to Indianapolis and from there went on to school at Julliard in New York. He graduated in 1907, a member of the prestigious music schools first graduating class. Riegger went to Germany for a spell in an attempt to become a conductor. He learned a lot and also improved his cello skills before coming back to the States in 1917. Back in New York in the twenties he devoted himself to composition when he couldn’t find work as a conductor. 

Riegger was one of what was called the “American Five.” The other members of the American Five included Henry Cowell, Charles Ives, John J. Becker, and Carl Ruggers. The group aimed to cast off the long shadow of European composition. Just as the Transcendentalists and later Walt Whitman had begun to build up an American identity in literature, these composers were feeling into the wide open spaces of a new and independent American music. In particular Riegger immersed himself in the work of the New Music Society started by Henry Cowell. This society put out publications and recordings to spread the work of American composers. Riegger also played a part in forming the Pan American Association of Composers that represented composers throughout the western hemisphere.

Within the American Five, Riegger was known as an early adopter of a twelve-tone system. Though he learned the technique from Schoenberg’s student Adolph Weiss, he wasn’t a strict adherent to serialism. He also wasn’t strict in the way he used Schoenberg’s method. He didn’t think he needed to always use rows with twelve tones and he didn’t necessarily transpose his rows. If he wanted to use a note, he used it, and if he didn’t, he didn’t. Twelve tone techniques were just another tool in his tool box, not a rigid compositional dogma. In this he was truly part of an American tradition of using whatever tools happened to be at hand and discarding them when they didn’t suit him.
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In 1957 Riegger got summoned to the House Un-American Activities Committee. He was on their list of suspects during their investigations into communism in the musical world. Behrman recalls his former teachers political views, “He was a courageous dissenter; because of his political views his music was blackballed during the McCarthy era. He used to alternate counterpoint lessons with lessons in radical politics. It was from him that I learned about some of the independent voices in American music - about Ives and Cowell, Varese and Cage. And I'm still a fan of Riegger's; his music had a wonderful sense of sonority and rhythmic vitality.”

​​Riegger had nurtured this spirit of independence and it found full flowering in many of his students, including Behrman and Ashley. This connection to two members of the Sonic Arts Union to one of the American Five, and the spirit of independence they picked up from him was a key influence on Behrman and Ashley. Perhaps, for their generation, another name for the Sonic Arts Union might have been the American Four.

Alternating Currents

Two of his other musical friends had a huge influence on him. “Frederic Rzewski and Christian Wolff, had a lot to do with what was on my mind in those days. Christian was a graduate student at Harvard when I met him. He and Frederic knew a great deal about new developments in European and American music. Frederic was always the first person in the area to order the latest scores by Stockhausen and Boulez. He got them way before the Harvard Music Library did.”

In 1959 Behrman was keen to get a taste of what was going on in Europe. He had become a fan of Stockhausen, especially impressed by Gesang der Juenglinge, which was in many ways the gateway drug for a generation of electronic music composers. His imagination fired by Stockhausen, he went to the Darmstadt composition class in the summer of 1959 to study with the composer. La Monte Young and Naim June Paik were fellow students in his class, while David Tudor and Cornelius Cardew were his advisers. “Stockhausen's course was an eye-opening experience for me, in part because of his intense devotion to new music, in part because he encouraged my efforts, in part because it was at that course that a long-lasting friendship with David Tudor began.”

Back in the United States his friends Wolff and Rzewski hatched a plan to bring David Tudor to Harvard for a concert. All three were members of the music club but they only had a small fee to give the musician. To their surprise “not only did Tudor accept, but he brought his friends John Cage, Morton Feldman and Earle Brown with him. Tudor played new European and American music brilliantly that night; it was a moment that considerably expanded the mental horizons of many of the students who were present.”

David Tudor’s influence got the younger students further interested in the possibilities of using both traditional and electronic instruments, alone and in combinations. When Behrman met Gordon Mumma at the 1963 Feldman/Brown concert the two became fast friends, and took up a lively pen pal correspondence which also included the exchange of circuit diagrams. Mumma started tutoring him in basic electronics through the mail and gave him instructions on how to build things. Electronic music offered a workaround for young composers in the early sixties. It was often hard to get musicians to play an unknown composers work, but in the DIY milieu that was coming up around electronic music, a composer could build their own equipment and play their own compositions; in part because the building of a circuit was essential to the structure of the piece, a crucial component of the score.    

 “From David Tudor and Gordon Mumma I learned how to build little battery-powered devices that could radically alter or hugely amplify acoustic sounds. Gordon Mumma's enthusiasm was catching; he wrote me a series of letters in 1964 that were like a basic course in electronic music before there were any books on the subject. The first letter had a circuit for a ring modulator, which I eagerly built. Before that I'd had the experience of composing scores and copying out parts and asking other musicians to play them; one was always in the situation of asking favors and that didn't usually feel very good. Better was the self-reliant feeling of performing oneself, and of using homemade instruments to create sounds that no human ears had ever before experienced!”
​
In 1965 Behrman had one of his electronic pieces played at the ONCE Festival. The next year the Sonic Arts Union would blossom. 

Wave Train and Runthrough

Behrman has written much fine music, well worth spending time with. Two pieces from the Sonic Arts Union era are noteworthy.

In Wave Train he uses guitar pickups placed around the body of a grand piano to explore properties of feedback and resonance. The gain on the guitar pickup is set high enough to excite the strings through its feedback. In performance Behrman would often have Mumma play the piano, while he moved the microphones around during various points in the piece, to showcase the different effects this would have on the piano.

Alvin Lucier said of the piece, “The performer’s job is to ride the feedback, raising and lowering the volume levels, creating arcs of sound waves. David likens this activity to surfing where one is constantly monitoring one’s position along a surging wave front.”
​
In one sense Wave Train is a prepared piano piece in the tradition developed by Cage and Tudor; in another it explores the properties of microphones being placed around an instrument, as Stockhausen had investigated in his Mikrophonie pieces from 1964 and 1965. 

Runthrough was a piece where all four of the Sonic Arts Union members played a variety of Behrman’s homemade instruments. It is built from “cheap circuitry put together at home” and is used to make improvised music. There isn’t a score, but two of the players use the sound generators, modulators, and dials and switch to play the electronic sounds. One or two other people use flashlights to control a photocell distribution circuit that acts as a kind of mixer for the other sound sources. The audio is fed into four or eight loudspeakers set in a circle around the listeners. Behrman suggests that no skill is necessary to play the music, so it is a fun piece for non-musicians to explore. The piece emerges as players run through the various combinations and settings of the equipment, each time the sound potentially different. “Because there is neither a score nor directions, any sound which results from any combination of switch and light positioning remains part of the 'piece.' (Whatever you do with a surfboard in the surf remains a part of surfboarding).”
​
This piece is an exercise in improvisation and intuition, a playful way for three or four people to listen to each other, a communion made in music and shared electricity.  

Choreographing the Music of Our Time

It was in the late 1960s that Behrman would get a job that helped bring a lot of the new music to a wider audience. He landed a gig at Columbia Records and worked on producing the “Music of Our Time” series of albums. Two of the most well-known records he helped produce for this series were by Terry Riley, his In C and A Rainbow in Curve Air. Other works that Behrman produced for the series included recordings by Robert Ashley, John Cage, Mauricio Kagel, Alvin Lucier, Richard Maxfield, Gordon Mumma, Pauline Oliveros, Henri Pousseur (under whom he had also studied), Steve Reich, David Tudor, and Christian Wolff.

Along with Mumma, Behrman had the privilege and opportunity to work with the Merce Cunningham dance troupe, writing music for their performances, a gig that came from their connections to Cage and Tudor. Of his time with the troupe Behrman said, “Merce Cunningham, besides being a great choreographer whose career has spanned more than a half century, has been a long-term champion of live music. He always has live music-makers in his performances and must be the only choreographer on earth who never tells the musicians he works with what to do. In 'Events' in particular -- Cunningham Company works in such a way that nothing at all about the music is prepared in advance -- musicians can explore the idea that 'a movement, a sound, a change of light' can all independently share the space and time of performance. Often coincidences occur among the media in a way that seems magical and that could never be planned.

The Cunningham Company tours have provided much experience over the years of performing repeatedly for large live audiences. Lately I've learned a lot about the use of interactive software on tours with fine musicians such as Kosugi, Stuart Dempster, Steve Lacy, Jon Gibson and others. Looking back on the earlier years, the memories of touring and performing with John Cage and David Tudor, Gordon Mumma and Maryanne Amacher are very precious.”
​
In 1969 fellow Sonic Arts Union member Robert Ashley was asked to come and direct the CCM at Mills College. In 1975 Behrman came and joined him as the co-director. Those years formed another chapter in his creative life.

In 1961 Sender built a small studio in an attic space at the conservatory. It didn’t consist of much but the schools Ampex tape recorders and some contact microphones that Sender, Oliveros and the others started playing around with. In December of that same year Sender and Oliveros put together a series of concerts called Sonics.

Each of these programs began with an improvisation, followed by playing a pre-recorded piece of tape music. At this point Morton Subotnick got it in on the fun, and joined them in their free improvisation. It wasn’t long before the idea for a studio got proposed, so they started building one.

The musical equipment the SFTMC wanted to use was expensive and their funding was meager. This forced the hands of the members to get creative and build some of their own equipment. It has served them, and the others who followed in their footsteps well as this DIY spirit was part of their whole attitude when creating the center in the first place. Building their own circuits from scratch just further baked in the can do, do it yourself attitude that was essential to the Californian spirit. The idea of circuit design as score was further reified by the essential work done at SFTMC.

Pauline had won a prize in the Netherlands for her choral piece Sound Patterns, so she was next to go off to Europe. When she came back Ramon and Subotnick had done the footwork to get the SFTMC incorporated as a non-profit, and from that point it was time to get busy making music.

Ramon Sender wrote of another aspect of their motivation to create the SFTMC. “We have felt that somewhere where the composer can find brought together all the necessities of his art in an atmosphere conducive to his developing his own personal utterance free from the pull and the tug of stylistic schools and from the competitive scramble that typifies much of the musical activity of today.

“Somewhere there should be a place where the fragmented elements of our musical life could be be melted together and recast through the reestablishment of the artist’s dialogue with his community in a new and vital way. A place where new music would find dynamic and vital expression for our own era, and by its own vitality not countenancing the isolative practices of the cliques that sicken the musical life of today.”
​
The SFTMC was to become such a place, born out of its rough and ready, rumble tumble beginning. With little in the way of funding they used whatever they could scrape together. Pauline said, “It was considered, what you called a classical electronic music studio, because it was built out of equipment that was never intended for making music. It was equipment for testing in laboratories and like that.” For instance there were no sound mixers at the time as we know them today. Instead they used a telephone patch bay to passively mix the sounds. The term "patch", still widely used in electronic music, especially in terms of modular synthesizers, came from this early use in telephony and radio studios, where extra equipment could be kept on standby and patched in at a moments notice should one device fail.  The reconnection was  achieved with these patch cords and patch panels, like the jack fields of cord-type telephone switchboards.

Over the course of its life the SFTMC had homes in a few different locations. The collective was given access to 1537 Jones Street in 1962. This was a huge mansion space that was going to be demolished in a year, but in the meantime it became the perfect spot for holding shows a normal venue wouldn’t touch, and an academic hall wouldn’t allow. Since they ran the space they could also experiment with multimedia and performance art. As experimental music made contact with the emerging psychedelic culture, and with Subotnick already having a hand in multimedia it was a natural outgrowth of their activities. Film, light shows, dance, poetry –all of these found a place at the SFTMC and often combined with new music.
​
Sender writes of the time, “Throughout this period we have remained independent of any university or college connection, and retained a balance in our relation to the community between our activities as a cultural agency on the one hand, and a sound recording studio on the other.”

The first year the SFTMC gave nine concerts. These included electronic pieces, and performances of new works by living composers. Lucio Berio and John Cage pieces would be rehearsed and put on their, as the teachers in the schools had no interest in this music, yet. Some of the pieces were radical for the time, such as a Robert Davis piece that had four naked people sitting on toilet seats.

This kind of venue, and the concerts put on by the ONCE Group in Michigan (to be discussed later in this chapter) became a template for the many iterations of the DIY music scenes that would emerge over the next several decades. Unutilized space was recreated in service to the arts.
​
Next the SFTMC moved to 321 Divisadero Street. The building there provided ample space for both the studio and the performance aspect, including two auditoriums. It was big enough to sublease rooms for other community groups, such as the Anna Halprin’s Dancers Workshop and KPFA, one of the flagship stations of the independent Pacifica radio network.

KPFA has been a prime disseminator of experimental and culture since it first went on the air in 1949. It reached a peak of new music experimentalism under the guidance of Charles Amirkhanian, who was the music director of KPFA from 1969 to 1992. KPFA was also the second home for Don Joyce of Negativland and his effervescent collage show Over the Edge, founded in 1981, which was another touchstone of experimental west coast culture.

In her work at the SFTMC studios Oliveros took a different tack than the time consuming and laborious tape editing process Morton Subotnick had used on his piece for the King Lear production, and standard in musique concrete. She thought the cut and splice method was all-together too intensive so she started learning how to use the tape decks as a delay system. This would be the precursor to the Enhanced Interactive System (EIS) that she used in consort with her live music playing in various versions throughout her career. She also liked to record very long sections onto tape and then play them together in continuity.

Another way she learned to manipulate her sound was by varying the record and playback speeds of the tape. She also experimented with difference tones and in doing so invented a new way of making electronic music. To create difference tones she used equipment with rich Lafayette tube oscillators, and set them above the range of hearing, around 40,000 hertz. This effect was exemplified in her 1965 piece created at the SFTMC, Bye Bye Butterfly.

Speaking of this in a 2016 lecture she said, “Then there would be differences between the two or three oscillators that I would use. If you know what a tube oscillator looks like, it has a big dial in the center of the face and it has the possibility of setting ranges so you can go above the range of hearing or in a certain range that is in hearing and below the range of hearing. The only way you could change the pitch of the sound was me to turn this dial, so that was not necessarily a good way to make some music. By setting these oscillators at above the range of hearing... I learned this from my accordion teacher. He taught me to listen to difference tones. Difference tones are the difference between two or more frequencies because they produce the difference between them below, and also above. At 40,000, in that range, you hear the low difference tones. When I first heard the difference tone sounding, and it corroborated my way, then I added the tape delay system that was used in ‘Bye Bye Butterfly.’ The way I was playing the oscillators was by just barely turning the dials. I had reduced that aspect of oscillator playing to being able to sense where you wanted to be in an improvisational way, and by listening to what was coming out. I was listening intently, and performing, to get the sounds that I got. I was very interested in layering sounds, and in taking the same tone and then microscopically varying [it] so that you got side bands, they were called. This was a simple setup, actually, but it could produce very complex results.”
​
Radio operators had already figured out how to use side bands for communication. Pauline figured out how to use the same principle for modulation of audio waves. The seed that had come from listening to her grandfather’s crystal set and her father’s shortwave radio had morphed into the transformational oscillations of Bye Bye Butterfly.

As the SFTMC got up and running it drew in many creative minds who wanted to work with tape. One of those minds was Don Buchla, a California native and inventor of the Buchla Modular Electronic Music System.
​
Buchla had been born in Southgate, California in 1937. His mother was a teacher and his father was a test pilot. As a kid he took naturally to working with electronics and made a hobby out of building crystal radio sets, tinkering with ham radio gear, and welding his own electro-acoustic instruments together out of scrap steel and various components. When he went to college at the University of California in Berkeley and got a degree in Physics and the pursued a Ph.D. While working in that direction he got some practice in building klystrons at the Lawrence Berkely National Laboratory.

Klystron’s were the first really powerful tool for making radio waves in the microwave spectrum. It was first built in 1937 by Russell and Sigurd Varian. It was made from a specialized linear beam vacuum tube that was used as an amplifier to boost the radio signals from the UHF range up to the microwave range. The low powered version of these instruments were used as oscillators for microwave relay communications links, and the high powered klystrons were used as output tubes for television transmitters and radar. They were also used to generate the strong burst of power needed for modern particle accelators, and it was for this last use that Buchla built these instruments. His technical skill enabled him to work on some NASA projects, as he worked towards his doctorate.

But he never got that Ph.D. The establishment at Berkeley wasn’t changing fast enough for Buchla, who got turned on and tuned in to the spiritual frequency of the sixties, and so, dropped out. 

Yet school had provided him with some very important turn ons. In addition to the klystrons and other emerging high-tech he also got exposed to musique concrète. It appealed to the same part of his creative mind that liked to make electro-acoustic instruments, and he wanted to mix his own musique concrète. His tape machine was limited in functionality, but soon, word got to him of the SFTMC where he could use their more versatile three-track tape recorder.

His visit to the SFTMC was one of those historical moments that give birth to a whole new strand in the web of his destiny.  Morton Subotnick was in the studio, and Subotnick mistook Buchla for someone he had been in contact with to design a ring modulator. It wasn’t Buchla but Buchla had the electronic chops to make it happen, and it wouldn’t be that hard for him. Even more it was just the kind of thing that got Buchla energized and excited. Buchla and Subutonic talked about what could be done.

Ramon Sender was also there and Subotnick and Sender started telling Buchla how they wanted to get away from the laborious processes involved with making electronic and electro-acoustic on tape and work with something more immediate. They wanted a tool that had the power of an analog computer but was also small enough for them to work with directly, something that could produce the results equivalent to that in a studio space but in a smaller set up.

Stemming from this meeting Subotnick and Sender commissioned Buchla to build an “electronic studio in a box.” Lucky for them they had just gotten a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation for the SFTMC’s 1964-65 season and they used five hundred dollars of that money to pay Buchla for his work.

Don had already worked with analog computers so he chose to use transistors and voltage-control for his nascent box. Voltage control was especially useful as it allowed the user to play discrete notes through the oscillators. So far in the electronic music that had been made with knob controlled test equipment, a composer would have to shift manually up or down through the frequencies to reach a desired note.

This innovation made many of the tape processes redundant (though they still have their own use and charm). The electronic composer would now be free from the task of splicing tapes of frequencies recorded off oscillators and other test equipment. This is also where the sequencer enters electronic music history. He had the idea to put sixteen preset voltages into his device, the musicians could switch between. In doing so he created the sequencer.
Buchla delivered on his commission in 1965. Besides the sequencer his box had ring modulators, oscillators and other features. It turned out to be a far out hit when it was played at the psychedelic festivals being put on by members of the counter-culture in San Francisco.

As Buchla worked in California, Robert Moog was on the east coast working on his own name sake synthesizer. Independently of each other they both created voltage controlled synthesizers. This simultaneous creation of the Moog on the one hand and the Buchla Box on the other also set into place what is now seen as two different schools of synthesis, west coast and east coast. Both styles have the patch at their heart, the way the cables are connected between inputs and outputs of the synth to create their characteristic sounds.

Moog’s east coast style was exemplified by subtractive synthesis, achieved through voltage controlled low pass filtering (VCF). These VCF’s have typically employed a transistor ladder circuit that give the Moog its punchy and sharp sound that has become its sonic signature. The oscillators can produce pulse, square and sawtooth waveforms from multiple outputs. These are then put through the filters which subtract some of the harmonic elements of the sound before being swept with resonance to create changes in timbre. The signal is then routed to the voltage controlled amplifier (VCA) before going into the speakers or headphones of the musician. Further envelopes can also be placed on the sound, shaping the wave through attack, decay, sustain and release. With a patch in place it was able to be played by a traditional keyboard, giving its otherwise alien appearance and sound a certain familiarity, making the Moog palatable to musicians across the land.

The west coast style differs by employing a form of additive synthesis to simple waveforms. Instead of removing harmonics they are added to the signal. Buchla wanted his synthesizer to mimic acoustically generated sounds through the manipulation of recorded audio. One of the tools he used to change the sound in the west coast systems was the waveshaper where the input and output of a signal are mapped and then have a mathematical shaping function applied to the sound in either a fixed or variable form. Another element that gives the west coast approach its unique sound is the use of low pass gates (LPG). These act as a combination of a VCF and VCA. The LPG works in the subsonic range and sounds are only heard when control voltage (CV) is employed.

Buchla’s creation was also unique for its use of vactrols, or a light emitting diodes and photo-resistors. When voltage passes through the LED it emits light into the photoresistor. When voltage is applied to the photoresistor it develops a current proportional to the voltage applied to the LED, making the photoresistor, in effect, a voltage-controlled resistor. A vactrol can be used to adjust any parameter that would normally be used by a potentiometer or variable resistor. It was another way of doing things that typified the west coast style. Buchla used the LPG and the vactrol to create naturalistic percussive sounds modeled on bongos, marimbas and other instruments.

As mentioned before, Buchla’s instruments also incorporated a sequencer into the design. These were not featured in Moog’s instrument. What made it even more exotic is that it featured touch plates that responded to the amount of skin applied to their surface. Moog’s instrument responds as a typical keyboard, depending on how hard or soft you press the key you get changes in dynamics. By changing the sound by how much skin was applied Buchla created a way for the human to have a close and intimate connection to the instrument. The lack of keyboard also gave his line of instruments a totally new look, feel and sound. The musician thus approaching them is able to sidestep some of the typical ways of thinking about music making, ways that the keyboard reinforces. Buchla’s designs allow the musician to enter a new sound world, where intuition and experimentation are encouraged.

This was all a natural outgrowth of the west coast mindset. This idea of interfacing with the circuit would later be taken up by the low voltage and circuit bent instruments of Q.Reed Ghazal, to be explored later, some of which allowed the electricity to pass through the human body and back into the instrument.

For Morton Subotnick, Buchla’s inventions would go on to be the basis for his most touted composition, the electronic and psychedelic masterpiece Silver Apples of the Moon (1968). For this piece of music Subotnick employed a larger, expanded and more complex set up, the “Buchla 100 Series Modular Music System.” Buchla’s wizardry as instrument maker was a boon to Subotnick, whose musical imagination proved to be a boon to Buchla. Buchla’s instrument helped unleash Subotnick’s genius and expose him to a greater audience, and Subotnick’s playful and inventive music exposed the genius of the man who made the instrument, creating interest among musicians and listeners in his synthesizers. 
​
The same year that Silver Apples of the Moon came out, introducing synth music to a larger audience, another album came out that exemplified the east coast approach to synth making: Switched On Bach by Wendy Carlos. Her choice of synth was the Moog, and her choice of what to play was from the classical repertoire, Bach. These different albums, both beautiful in different ways, set these schools of synthesis along their different routes of musical exploration. The west coast synths and emergent style charted out a new path linking them with the other west coast builders who had come before, and those were to follow.

The SFTMC eventually received a second Rockefeller Grant, this time for $200,000. The additional funds meant they would be able to do more with their studio and performance space. Yet before the Rockefeller’s would fork over money to the non-profit they wanted them “to have a responsible fiscal agent and that was Mills College, not us crazy artists,” according to Oliveros. So the SFTMC merged and became part of Mills College and Pauline became its first director. The grant had stipulated that it be a place “for the composition, study, and performance of contemporary music” and was shortly thereafter renamed the Center for Contemporary Music (CCM).

The transition from the SFTMC to CCM happened over 1966-67 years. Many exciting concerts and events were scheduled and performed. Stockhausen came to visit in January of ’67 and gave a lecture on Momente, his work for two pianos, ring modulation and shortwave radios which at that time was still a work in progress. He also gave Bay Area premiers of Zyklus, Mikrophonie No. 1, and Telemusik.

After only a year working as director of the center Pauline got a teaching gig at the University of California. Stockhausen’s technician Jaap Spek stepped into her shoes briefly, and was then followed by co-directors Anthony Gnazzo and Lowell Cross. It was in these years that David Tudor came and gave lectures at the CCM, and performances of Variations IV which featured many of the electronic music boxes Tudor had designed and built himself.
​
All of these influences laid a groundwork for musical experimentation and collaboration that was to follow in the next decade of the 1970s when the CCM was directed by Robert Ashley. For the next twelve years between 1969 and 1981, under his guidance the center became a remarkable nexus of creative activity in music, technology and art. Robert came to California by way of Ann Arbor, Michigan and the Cooperative Studio for Electronic Music which is another major circuit in the story of DIY electronic music.

RE/SOURCES: (for Part I and II)
https://www.kqed.org/arts/12248119/fifty-years-of-limitless-possibility-at-the-center-for-contemporary-music-at-mills-college

https://www.moogmusic.com/news/san-francisco-tape-music-center

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Harry-Partch

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Henry-Cowell

Lousi Barron / Bebe Barron, The Forbidden Planet OST

https://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2013/06/secret-circuits

https://thequietus.com/articles/19418-morton-subotnick-interview

https://nmbx.newmusicusa.org/morton-subotnick-the-mad-scientist-in-the-laboratory-of-the-ecstatic-moment/

The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde. Berkeley: University of California Press.

https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=San_Francisco_Tape_Music_Center

https://sfcmhistoryblog.wordpress.com/2014/12/18/ramon-sender-and-new-music-at-the-conservatory/

https://web.archive.org/web/20040220191722/http://www.otherminds.org/shtml/Amirkhanian.shtml

Pacifica Radio: The Rise of an Alternative Network by Matthew Lasar, Temple University Press; Updated, Subsequent edition (April 14, 2000)

https://moogfoundation.org/remembering-synthesizer-innovator-don-buchla-1937-2016/

Klystrons, Traveling Wave Tubes, Magnetrons, Cross-Field Amplifiers, and Gyrotrons by A.S. Gilmour, Artech, 2011

The Tube Guys, Norman H. Pond, Russ Cochran, 2008

https://www.kqed.org/arts/12248119/fifty-years-of-limitless-possibility-at-the-center-for-contemporary-music-at-mills-college

https://www.moogmusic.com/news/san-francisco-tape-music-center

http://www.synthtopia.com/content/2008/04/20/electronic-music-pioneer-bebe-barron-dead-at-82/

https://reverb.com/news/the-basics-of-east-coast-and-west-coast-synthesis

https://electronicmusic.fandom.com/wiki/Vactrol

https://www.mills.edu/academics/graduate-programs/music/center-contemporary-music/archives.php

A Wild Composer: Morton Subotnick Interviewed by Robert Barry https://thequietus.com/articles/19418-morton-subotnick-interview
​
Ankeny, Jason. "Pauline Oliveros Biography". Archived 2014-10-26 at the Wayback Machine 98.5 Kiss FM.

​The ancient philosophers and mystics of this world proposed the theory of the five elements and this theory is still seen at play, though transformed, in the science of the present day. From air, fire, water and earth we have gases, energy and heat, liquids and matter. The fifth element is the aether, the quintessence crowning the four other elements. And though science seems to have discarded the aether it is yet everywhere around us.

The early Ionian cosmologists thought there was an infinite and unbegotten divine substance, neither created nor ever to be destroyed, permeating the entire universe. Empedocles used the term elements and roots interchangeably, and the four classical elements had their roots in the divine everlasting substance. Combined in various ratios these four elements make up the physical universe.

Later Plato writing Timaeus of the air element said "there is the most translucent kind which is called by the name of aether.” His student Aristotle continued to explore the four elements, and introduced the fifth element in his book On the Heavens. Aristotle posited that there was another element located in the heavenly and celestial realm of the stars and planets. Aristotle considered this new element to be the first element, in that the other four elements had their origin and root in it. In his book he did not give it a name, but later writers commenting on his work started referring to this element as the aether, or fifth element.

The heavenly element of the aether was not the same as the four terrestrial elements. Aristotle held that it could not move outside of the natural circles made by the stars in their spheres. He related this idea of aethereal spheres to his observation of the planets and stars in their perfect orbits.  The scholastic philosophers of the medieval era thought that the aether might change and fluctuate in density, as they reasoned the planets and stars were denser than the universal substance permeating the universe.
The theory of the five elements continued to spread throughout medieval times, transmitted and passed in particular among the alchemists who embraced the idea as part of their secret lore. The Latin name for the fifth element was the quintessence and this word can be found throughout the many alchemical treatises penned over the centuries. The idea of the quintessence became especially popular among the medical alchemists for whom aetheric forces became part of healing substances and elixirs.

Robert Fludd, the great 17th century hermetic philosopher, Rosicrucian, natural magician and follower of Paracelsus, claimed that the nature of the aether was “subtler than light”. In this he started to point to later ideas of the aether as a kind of catch all for a variety of electromagnetic phenomena. Fludd cited the view of Plotinus from the 3rd century who thought the aether was non-material and interpenetrated the entire universe of manifest reality and its various forms.

Isaac Newton, himself a devoted alchemist, used the idea of the aether as a way to explain his observations of the strict mechanical rules he was writing about in his works on physics. In turn the physicists of the 18th century developed a number of models for various physical phenomena that came to be known as aether theories, used to explain how gravitational forces worked and how electromagnetic forces propagated.

19th century scientist and successful business magnate Baron Dr. Carl von Reichenbach took up the study of the field of psychology in 1839 after making important discoveries in the fields of geology, chemistry, and metallurgy. If it hadn’t been for Reichenbach’s research in the physical sciences and his study of the properties of coal we wouldn’t have creosote, paraffin, or phenol which he developed the process for extracting. When he set out to tackle the field of psychology after striking it rich from his many patents and factories he discovered that people he termed “sensitives” were able to pick up on things the rest of us couldn’t. This often led the sensitive person to develop emotional and mental problems. But he also noticed these sensitives could sometimes see a force field around such things as a magnet.

This led Reichenbach to the works of Franz Anton Mesmer who had already been deemed a heretic by people like Benjamin Franklin and other members of the scientific establishment of the time. What Mesmer called Animal Magnetism, Reichenbach called Odic Force. Reichenbach was in turn denounced for his studies of this force which he observed as behaving in ways similar to yet distinct from magnetism, electricity, and heat. He wouldn’t be the last to be called a crank and a catamount for his investigation of the life force.

The two terms of Animal Magnetism and Odic Force would both have been recognized by metaphysicians, occultists and philosophers as the aether.

By the time Albert Einstein had introduced special relativity the aether theories used by physicists wer discarded among the scientific intelligentsia of the time. Einstein had shown that Maxwell’s equations, which form the mathematical foundation for form the foundation of classical electromagnetism, classical optics, and electric circuits, did not need the idea of the aether for the transmission of these forces. Yet even Einstein admitted that his own theory could be thought of as an aether theory because it seemed to show that there were physical properties in the seemingly empty space between objects.

As the 20th century rolled on the idea of the aether continued to be propagated among theosophists, adherents of the new thought movement, and various other occultists. In 1907 the French philosopher Henri Bergson spoke of the Élan vital in his book Creative Evolution. Bergson used this concept as an explanation for evolution and development of organisms, which he linked closely with consciousness.

Psychologist Wilhelm Reich made his own discovery of the life force in the 1930s, which he called orgone. As a direct student of Freud, his concept of orgone was the result of work on the psycho-physiology of libido, of which he took an increasingly bio-energetic view. After Reich emigrated to the United States his attention increasingly turned to speculation about the nature of the universe, and ideas about biological development and evolution, even the weather. Reich was more at home in the mode of “natural philosopher” or “natural scientist” than in the ideologically strict compartmentalization that had occurred in the field of psychology.

Despite his documentation of the successful effects of orgone therapy, and his devices such as the orgone accumulator and cloud buster, Reich remained a heretic among doctors and scientists.  He lost his teaching position at the New School in 1941 after telling the director he had saved several lives using orgone therapy. Due to his associations as a socialist he was arrested by the FBI after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He continued to be persecuted throughout the 1950s. It’s an interesting story and too long to tell in detail for the present purposes, but suffice it to say through various injunctions the FDA destroyed his orgone accumulators and later burned six tons of his journals, books, and papers.

Then he was thrown in jail where he died. All because he was audacious enough to believe in, study, and experiment with the life force, what he called orgone, and what the ancients have called aether.

​

Those who haven’t been afraid to stand on the fringe and hang out in the margins, have continued to research and investigate the nature of the aether and various means for utilizing it.  There is a lot of work and experimentation to be done, and the relationship between musical healing modalities, electronics and the aether promises to be an area full of vitality.

As a wellspring of creativity the aether continues to inspire musicians and composers. Robert Ashley asked the question “Will something of substance replace the Aether? Not soon. All the parts are in disarray.”

Ashley also said “Aether fills the void, as in not knowing when you might get a chance to hear somebody make music, or where is the nearest town where something might be going on… or whether you got the idea that wakes you up at night from the hard-to-hear part of what comes over the radio, or from something you read about in a magazine about electricity, or from something you just dreamed up.”

Artists, writers and musicians such as him have continued to think of the aether and tap into it as a prime source. The music of the spheres continues to inspire those of us down here on earth who do their best to translate it into new compositions. Musicians continue to look up to the stars as a source of creativity. They take that aetheric light from the stars into themselves to create new works that show our relationship with the rest of the cosmos.
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Where do ideas come from? Transmitted over the aether they spill into the head of the artist, who is the vessel. They give voice to the aether. With the tools of radio, telecommunications, images and data from satellites and the sonic possibilities opened up by electricity, they have a lot of rich source material to translate the voice into compositions. This chapter explores some of these works inspired by the celestial realms. ​

Not all the musicians who use radios to make music take the output from the transmission directly into the input of the mixing board or microphone to capture the voice of the aether. And not all of them used it as a source of direct audio sampling either. Some have trawled the megahertz and found inspiration in the voices they heard on the radio talk in shows, in the banter to be heard on the citizens band, and in the back and forth between hams in long distance rag chews over the shortwaves.
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Paddy McAloon found so much inspiration listening to the radio, he created an entire album and the based the lyrical elements off of the various conversations he had heard and taped at his listening post.  Paddy had been writing songs since he turned 13, but in 1999 at the age of 42, the ease with which he could write songs suddenly changed. Not from the level of his mastery of melody, hooks, and poetic pop lyricism, but on a physical level, when he suffered from the detachment of both his retinas one right after the other. Suddenly blind, he was bound to the house with nothing but free time.

Not only had Paddy been writing songs since he was 13, but he’d been in the habit of making chart topping albums with his band Prefab Sprout, started with his brother Martin, in Witton Gilbert, County Durham, England. The band played in a down on its heels gas station owned by their father, and were joined by a friend down the street, Michael Salmon drums, forming in 1977. Five years later after forging some musical chops they went into the studio to record their first single, Lions in My Own Garden (Exit Someone) with a b-side called Radio Love. The lyrics are seemingly innocuous but hide a tragic undercurrent, and it’s hard not to read an eerie prescience into the tune for Paddy’s later album Trawling the Megahertz. It starts with the static and whine of a shortwave set, and ends with the same, and the voice of a distant announcer.
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“Requests for everyone / Love is on / Radio love is strong / Radio love / Shortwave for everyone / It was on the news, someone had drowned / She keeps hearing it over / All night long / All night long”. 

All the years spent listening to everything from David Bowie, to Igor Stravinsky, to T. Rex, put the band in good stead as Paddy continued to refine his craft of songwriting. Having written most of his songs using guitar Paddy had a crisis around the instrument, thinking he’d exhausted it, picked up a Roland synth, and started using that to write songs with just as they were poised to start making albums. It was around this time that vocalist Wendy Smith was recruited for the band.

In 1984 came Swoon followed by 85’s Steve McQueen. This was followed by another string of album leading to Jordan in 1990. The band then went on hiatus until work began on Andromeda Heights, the last album to feature Wendy as vocalist. It was released in 1997.
Two years later Paddy’s retina detached, possibly from congenital factors. Repairing his eyes required extensive surgery and he was left blind and stuck in the house. Composing hunched over the keyboard had become impossible, and he was starting to twitchy, unable to work on new songs, and unable to read. Radio became his solace.

“I found all this frustating as I've been writing songs since 1971, and am subject to itchy, unpleasant withdrawal symptoms if I cannot work. So, unable even to read, I passed the time by listening to and taping all kinds of T.V and radio programmes, concentrating on phone-ins, chat shows, citizen's band conversations, military encryptions - you name it, I was eavesdropping on it.”

McAloon found a lot of what he taped to be boring and banal, but within all the day to day chit chat of people talking on the air, he caught glimpses of the sublime, and started having moments of inspiration. In his mind he began to edit what he had heard into the spoken word lyrics for what would become his next album.

"Odd words from documentaries would cross-pollinate with melancholy confidences aired on late night phone-ins; phrases that originated in different time zones on different frequencies would team up to make new and oddly affecting sentences. And I would change details to protect the innocent (or guilty), to streamline the story that I could hear emerging, and to make it all more...musical, I suppose."
Using the snippets of radio conversation he had recorded, and further riffing off "mental edits" he’d made of these, he found the poetic moments within the plaintive complaints he heard on the  radio and mixed these with things he had heard on various documentaries. A specific word like "ether" or "anesthetic" would strike him, and he started using these as launch points for his own writing. All the radio transmissions had been like a fertilizer, seeding his imagination.

“After awhile I got enough of these sentences and radio thoughts, and I thought, well, I’m not going to be able to finish the thought by listening to radio to find the words I need, so sometimes I’ll fill them in.”

He started writing musical parts to go with the words on his 1987 era Atari computer. Paddy had developed a philosophy of not wanting to use all the latest gear. “You find a piece of software you can use, you do it well, and then someone will tell you the computer you've got will break down, it's old now, you'll need to go over to a Mac. Let me tell you - I still use an Atari computer from 1987. I didn't like where the software went after that. Even on the Mac. I don't care how sophisticated it got - I knew how to use the old software in my limited way. And, finally, my eyes are not great. So I resent the learning curve with new equipment. I don't have Garage Band. I don't have a Mac. That’s what it is with me and old technology. I can't be bothered. Nor do I have the money to spend in the way I used to have. I don't have a massive guaranteed advance from a record company. I work very slowly by myself. BUT - I have a message on my studio wall that says: ‘Imagine that you crash landed on a desert island, but you've survived, you've walked away, and there's a small town there, with a recording studio, the recording studio is very old-fashioned. How thrilled would you be, having survived your plane crash and how thrilled you'd be for the most basic recording equipment?’ That's me. That's me in my home studio full of this old gear that's out of date that other people can laugh at.”

Working with the Atari computer to compose the title track on I Trawl the Megahertz, the limitations of the software gave the piece a form to materialize within and determined the length of the title track. “I spent a long time working on that just as a computer piece, using the same old rubbishy synth sounds. Do you know why it is as long as it is? This is a terrible thing to tell you! 22 minutes of music is the length you'll get on an Atari! That's a bad reason for it. But in the end when I figured out the structure of it was just gonna fall within what an Atari could do.”
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The piece ends up being something of a movie to watch with your eyes closed, a narrative to listen to if you have been left without sight. Culled from the airwaves, it is also perfect piece to be played on the radio. While Paddy is mostly known for his pop songs, this long player of a track, is in a way akin to the kind of storytelling heard in the music Laurie Anderson and in the operas of Robert Ashley. It is so perfectly suited for transmission itself. While not a radio drama, it can be listened to as a radio drama, these kind of works could form the basis for revivification of radio drama, infused with specially composed music, and a delight to people to near and far, who happen to tune, out of the blue and right on schedule.

And though written on the Atari, the album proper ended up being recorded with a classical crossover ensemble, Mr. McFalls Chamber. Co-producer Calum Malcolm and composer David McGuinness helped Paddy to take his original MIDI versions and produce scores from them for the final recordings. The final result is an breathtaking excursion into neo-romantic chamber pop. Echoes of Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and Leonard Bernstein swirl and coalesce with the tender reading of his poetic text by vocalist Yvonne Connors.
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On the second side there are eight more tracks, mostly instrumental. I’m 49 is the only one to use samples of the actual recordings he’d made off the air to deliver a melancholic meditation on one man’s post-divorce mid-life crisis. At a time when Paddy had been suffering from the trials and travails of his own life, and the curveballs it had thrown at him, he plumbed the depths of our shared human condition, and found companionship and comfort in the voices that called out to him across the expansive aether. 

Special thanks to One Deck Pete for reminding me of this story. 

Read the rest of the RADIOPHONIC LABORATORY series. 

REFERENCES:

Paddy McAloon, I Trawl the Megahertz , Liberty EMI, 2003

Prefab Sprout, I Trawl the Megahertz (Remastered), Sony Music 2019


https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2020/jun/30/paddy-mcaloon-thomas-dolby-how-we-made-steve-mcqueen-album

https://www.hotpress.com/music/interview-prefab-spout-paddy-mcaloon-trawl-megahertz-tales-22809556

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/music/prefab-sprout-s-paddy-mcaloon-like-gandalf-on-his-way-to-work-in-the-house-of-lords-1.3765658

https://archive.org/details/PaddyMcAloonPaddyMcAloonITrawlTheMegahertzInterview

http://www.hanspeterkuenzler.com/paddy-mcaloon.html

Another way Information Theory has been used in the making of music is through the sonification of data. It is the audio equivalent of visualizing data as charts, graphs, and connected plot points on maps full of numbers. Audio, here meaning those sounds that fall outside of speech categories, has a variety of advantages to other forms of conveying information. The spatial, tempo, frequency and amplitude aspects of sound can all be used to relay different messages.  

            One of the earliest and most successful tools to use sonification has been the Geiger counter from 1908. Its sharp clicks alert the user to the level of radiation in an area and are familiar with anyone who is a fan of post-apocalyptic sci-fi zombie movies. The faster the tempo and number of clicks the higher the amount of radiation detected in an area.   
A few years after the Geiger counter was invented Dr. Edmund Fournier d'Albe came up with the optophone, a system that used photosensors to detect black printed typeface and convert it into sound. Designed to be used by blind people for reading, the optophone played a set of group notes: g c' d' e' g' b' c. The notes corresponded with positions on the reading area of the device and a note was silenced if black ink was sensed. These missing notes showed the positions where the black ink was and in this way a user could learn to read a text via sound. Though it was a genius invention the optophone didn’t catch on.
Other areas where sonification did get used include pulse oximeters (a device that measures oxygen saturation in the blood), sonar, and auditory displays inside aircraft cockpits, among others.

In 1974 a trio of experimental researchers at Bell Laboratories conducted the earliest work on auditory graphing; Max Mathews, F.R. Moore, and John M. Chambers wrote a technical memorandum called “Auditory Data Inspection.” They augmented a scatterplot -a mathematical diagram using Cartesian coordinates to display values for two or more variables in a data set- using a variety of sounds that changed frequency, spectral content, and amplitude modulation according to the points on their diagram.

Two years later the technology and science philosopher Don Ihde wrote in his book, Listening and Voice: phenomenologies of sound, "Just as science seems to produce an infinite set of visual images for virtually all of its phenomena--atoms to galaxies are familiar to us from coffee table books to science magazines; so 'musics,' too, could be produced from the same data that produces visualizations." Ihde pointed to using the tool of sonification for creativity, so that we might in effect, be able to listen to the light of the stars, the decomposition of soil, the rhythm of blood pulsing through the veins, or to make a composition out of the statistics from a series of baseball games.

It wasn’t long before musical artists headed out to carve a way through the woods where Ihde had suggested there might be a trail. 

Sonification Techniques
           
There are many techniques for transforming data into audio dada. The range of sound, its many variables and a listener’s perception give ample parameters for transmitting information as audio. Increasing or decreasing the tempo, volume, or pitch of a sound is a simple method. For instance, in a weather sonification app temperature could be read as the frequency of one tone that rises in pitch as temperature and lowers as it falls.  The percentage of cloud cover could be connected to another sound that increases or decreases in volume according to coverage, while wind speed could be applied as a resonant filter across another tone. The stereo field could also be used to portray information with a certain set of data coming in on the left channel, and another set on the right.

            The audio display of data is still in a wild west phase of development. No standard set of techniques has been adopted across the board. Do to the variables of information presented, and the setting of where it is presented, researchers in this field are working towards determining which set of sounds are best suited for particular applications. Programmers are writing programs or adapting existing ones to be able to parse streams of information and render it according to sets of sonification rules.

            One particular technique is audification. It can be defined as a "direct translation of a data waveform to the audible domain." Data sequences are interpreted and mapped in time to an audio waveform. Various aspects of the data correspond to various sound pressure levels. Signal processing and audio effects are used to further translate the sound as data. Listeners can then hear periodic components as frequencies of sound. Audification thus requires large sets of data containing periodic components.

            Developed by Greg Kramer in 1992 the goal was to allow listeners to be able to hear the way scientific measurements sounded. Audification has a number of applications in medicine, seismology, and space physics. In seismology, it is used as an additional method of earthquake prediction alongside visual representations. NASA has applied audification to the field of astrophysics, using sounds to represent various radio and plasma wave measurements. There are many musicians who are finding inspiration in using the sets of data culled from astronomy and astrophysics in the creation of new works. It’s an exciting development in the field of music.

            American composer Gordon Mumma had been inspired by seismography and incorporated it into his series of piano works called Mographs. A seismic wave is the energy moving through the Earth's layers caused by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, magma movement, large landslides and large man-made explosions. All of these events give out low-frequency acoustic energy that can be be picked up by a seismograph. A seismogram has wiggly lines going all across it. These are all the seismic waves that the seismograph has recorded. Most of the waves are small because no one felt them, little tiny waves called microseisms can even be caused by ocean waves hitting the beach, heavy traffic of rumbling semi-trucks, and other things that might cause the seismograph to shake. Little dots along the graph show the minutes so the seismic waves can be seen in time. When there is seismic activity the P-wave is the first wave to be bigger than the small normal microseisms. P waves are the fastest moving seismic wave and these are usually the first to be recorded by a seismograph. The next set of waves on the seismogram are the S-waves. S-waves have a higher frequency than the P-waves and appear bigger on the seismogram.

Mumma based the structure and activity of each Mograph around data derived from seismogram recordings of earthquakes and underground nuclear explosions. The seismograms he was looking at were part of cold-war research that attempted to verify the differences between various seismic disturbances. The government wanted to know if it was a nuke that had hit San Francisco or just another rumbling from the earth. For Mumma, the structural relationships between the way the patters of P-waves and S-waves traveled in time, and their reflections, had the “compositional characteristics of musical sound-spaces”. One of the strategies he used to sonify the seismograms into music was to limit the pitch-vocabulary and intervals in each work. This gave Mumma the ability draw attention to the complexity of time and rhythmic events within each Mograph. 
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With these themes in mind, listening to the Mograph is like hearing tectonic plates being jostled around, here hitting each other abruptly, and there in a slow silence that grinds as two plates meet. It is the sound of very physical waves rumbling through earth and stone and dirt, and beneath concrete, as interpreted by the piano, or pairs of pianos used in some arrangements. In making these pieces from seismograph data Gordon Mumma sketched a process for others to use in future works of sonification. 

By the Code of Soil

Another down to earth sonification project deals with the soil beneath our feet. It started out as a commission for artist Kasia Molga from the GROW Observatory, a citizen science organization working to take action on climate change, build better soil and grow healthier food, while using data provided by the European Space Agencies Copernicus satellites to achieve their goals.

Kasia began her project by analyzing the importance and meaning of soil, and she looked at what is happening to the soil now and how that impacts farmers, urbanites, and well, everyone. She listened to the concerns of the scientists at GROW and spent a chunk time parsing the data from the GROW sensors and the Sentinel-1A satellite that is used to asses soil moisture across Europe.

In the course of her background work Kasia wondered how she could get important information about soil health out there to the largest number of people and she hit upon the idea of using a computer virus. The resulting project, By the Code of Soil, ended up working with peoples computers and smart phones. The program didn’t install any malware, self-replicate, or actually infect anyone’s computer, but rather worked as a way to interrupt those people who spend most of their time in front of screens and remind them of the real analog world underneath their feet.

She recruited a few other people to work with her on the project, tech artists Erik Overmeire and Dan Hett, and musician Robin Rimbaud, aka Scanner.  Their project turns soil data into digital art that appears on a participants’ computer (downloaded as an app) whenever land-mapping satellite Sentinel-1A passes overhead.

The Sentinel satellite missions include radar and super-spectral imaging for land, ocean and atmospheric monitoring. Each Sentinel mission is based on a constellation of two satellites that fulfill and revisit the coverage requirements for each individual mission. This provides a robust dataset for researchers to access here on Earth. Sentinel-1 provides all-weather, day and night radar imaging for land and ocean services. GROW Observatory has gotten involved by deploying thousands of soil sensors all across Europe to improve the accuracy of the observations from the orbiting birds.
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Kasia designed the video art for the piece. Twice a day the Sentinel-1 passes overhead in Europe and the artwork and sounds change in real time as driven by the data.

Kasia writes, “The artwork takes control of user’s computer for a minute or two in full screen mode. It manifests itself in a quite unexpected manner – that is it only will become visible on the computer when the Sentinel-1A satellite passes by the computer’s location – approximately twice within 24 hours but never at the same time of the day.” This is how it reacts like a virus, erupting unexpectedly (unless you happen to be tracking the movement of the satellite).

To portray the soil data visually Kasia started with a pixel and a matrix. She thought of these as single grains of soil, from which something else can be created and emerge. She used visual white noise, like that of a TV on station with a channel with no broadcast,  to show a signal coming out of the noise when the satellite passes, activating the algorithm written for the piece. “Various configurations of the noise – its frequencies, shapes, speed of motion and sizes – reflect the moisture, light, temperature and texture of the land near to the participant’s computer based on its IP address.”

Meanwhile Scanner handled the sound design for the project. He took a similar approach as Kasia and looked at the granular aspects of sound. “Trying to score data was a seemingly impossible task. How to soundtrack something that is ever changing, ever developing, ever in flux, refusing to remain still. Most times when one accompanies image with sound the image is locked, only to repeat again and again on repeated viewing. By the Code of Soil refuses to follow this pattern. Indeed it wasn’t until I watched the work back one evening, having last seen it the previous morning, that I realized how alive data can really be.

The only solution sonically was to consider sound, like soil, as a granular tool. The sound needed to map the tiniest detail of alterations in the data received so I created sounds that frequently last half a second long and map these across hundreds of different possibilities. It was a like a game of making mathematics colorful and curiously one can only hear it back by following the App in real time. I had to project into the future what I felt would work most successfully, since I never knew how the data would develop and alter in time either. As such the sound is as alive as the images, as malleable as the numbers which dictate their choices. Data agitates the sound into a restless and constantly mutable soundscape.”

He spent many hours designing a library of sounds with Native Intstruments Reaktor and GRM Tools and then mapping them into families. These families of sound were in turn mapped onto various aspects of the data. With the data coming into the satellite from the sensors, and the data collected from the sensors feeding into the program, different sets of sounds and visuals were played according to the system.
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The success of this project for Kasia Molga and Scanner has led to them working together again in creating another multimedia work, Ode to Dirt, using soil data as a source code, for content, and inspiration. In this piece “(de)Compositions bridges the source (input) and the data (output) through inviting viewers to take part in a multi sensory experience observing how the artwork - a fragment of the ‘land’ - changes through time - its form, sound and even smell - determined by the activities of the earthworms.”

READING MUSIC: LISTENING AS INFORMATION EXTRACTION

Many musicians know how to read sheet music. For composers it’s a basic tool. But what if average people learned how to read music, that is, listen to a composition and extract information from it as if it were a couple of paragraphs of text, or for really long works, a whole book? 

It strikes me that this is a distinct possibility as the field of sonification grows. Just as we have learned to signify and interpret letters and words, we may eventually come to have another shared grammar of sound that allows people to listen to the music of data and interpret that text with our ears.
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This new way of reading music as information has the possibility of transforming the field of radio as the imagination is opened up to new ways of receiving knowledge. It would be interesting to create radio that included sonified data as a regular part of news stories.
This project of mapping knowledge to sound is implicit in Hesse’s description of the Glass Bead Game. Sonification is another way to bring it about as a reality. Yet to make the most of this listening opportunity, to listen to music in a way analogous to reading a book, we will have to grow new organs of perception. Pauline Oliveros started the work of carving out new pathways for the way we perceive the world in her Deep Listening workshops, concerts and work in general. This work is being continued by her partner Ione, and others trained in the skills of Deep Listening. Kim Cascone has also taught workshops on the subject of what he calls Subtle Listening. Through a variety of meditation and other exercises Kim teaches his students how to “grow new organs of perception”. Perhaps through techniques such as these we may learn to listen to data in a way that engages the imagination and transforms it into knowledge. 

REFERENCES:

Listening and Voice: A phenomenology of sound by David Idhe, State University of New York, 2007

David Tudor & Gordon Mumma, Rainforest / 4 Mographs, Sections X and 7 from Gestures, New World Records, 2006

https://archive.growobservatory.org/code-of-soil.html

https://sentinel.esa.int/web/sentinel/missions/sentinel-1

https://vertigo.starts.eu/calls/2017/residencies/ode-from-the-dirt/detail/

Robin Rimbaud (project documentation sent in personal communication, September 29 2020)

http://www.studiomolga.com/codeofsoil/
http://scannerdot.com/
https://vertigo.starts.eu/article/detail/by-the-code-of-soil-in-greece/
https://sonicfield.org/2014/03/subtle-listening-how-artists-can-develop-new-perceptual-circuits/

https://www.deeplistening.rpi.edu/deep-listening/
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​Read the rest of the RADIOPHONIC LABORATORY series. 

Karlheinz Stockhausen’s opera cycle LICHT is many things and as a great work of art it is subject to multiple, if not endless, interpretations. These interpretations are multiple because the opera is made up of living symbols. As Carl Jung taught, it is possible to distinguish between a symbol and a sign. A symbol is the best possible expression for something that is unknown, whereas a sign is something specific, such as the insignia worn by a military officer showing his specific rank.

 For this work the specific and very rich symbolism of LICHT will be set aside to look at it from a structural and systems point of view. The way Stockhausen gave his work specific limitations shaped the work in unique ways. His adept and intuitive grasp of combinatorial procedures within the limits of the system gave him a wide ranging freedom to play with the materials he had chosen, shaping the raw ingredients into an astonishing and sensual feast of sound, color, and movement.
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Opening up the lid of the opera cycle it’s possible to see how its individual components create a musical engine whose individual circuits sync together in a series allowing for a dynamic flow of energies and psychoacoustic forces. Let’s look under the hood of LICHT to see how its various pieces fit together.

Conception of LICHT: Formula & Super Formula   

            Great ideas often come as revelatory seeds into the mind of those who are prepared. By the mid-seventies Stockhausen had been composing for a quarter of a century and he had already explored a vast territory of sound implementing new ideas for the arrangement of music in time and space. He had played with intuitive music, aleatory processes, and had mastered new electronic music techniques in the studios of WDR, just for starters. The soil of his mind and spirit were fertile, waiting for the next big idea to be planted.

Another tactic basically invented by Stockhausen was formula composition and it came out of his deep engagement with serialism. It involves the projection, expansion and ausmultiplikation of either a single melody-formula, or a two- or three-voice contrapuntal construction. In serial music the structuring features remain basically abstract but in formula composition properties such as duration, pitch, tempo, timbre, and dynamics are also specified from the formula. By using concise and specific tone succession based on the single melody formula both the macro structure and micro details of the composition can be derived.
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The roots of his method of formula composition can be traced back to his once withdrawn orchestral piece Formel where the first basic pattern of notes are gradually transformed over the course of the work. The central pitch is first broadened out before the notes are removed leaving only the low and high extremes. He continued to use serial operations on his next batch of works, Kreuzspiel and Punkte, and then introduced musical pointillism into the methods as explored in Kontrapunkte and Gruppen.

​Then for a time he moved on to other musical tactics and explorations but came back to the practice with ferocity in Mantra from 1970. Written for two ring modulated pianos, the pianists are also required to play a chromatic cymbals and a wood block. One of the players also has a short-wave radio tuned to a station sending morse code, or when CW isn’t readily available live on the air, a tape recording of morse code is played. It was the first composition that he wrote where he used the term formula, and was one of many watershed moments in his musical thinking. The formula involved the expansion and contraction of counterpointed melodies. 

His next piece to use formula composition was Inori from 1974. By this time Stockhausen had already been working extensively with writing music that incorporated elements of theater. Inori took it to another level and he had the insight that he could use the formula, not just for music, but as a way to compose gestures. This was another component that would become essential in LICHT.
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Inori is a long work with performances lasting around seventy minutes. The formula for the piece is made up of fifteen notes using 5, 3, 2, 1 and 4 pitches respectively. When the formula is used on the macros scale for the work these five phrases are split into five segments Stockhausen to create a narrative sequence. Robin Maconie says it “lead[s] from pure rhythm . . . via dynamics, melody, and harmony, to polyphony: —hence, a progression from the primitive origin of music to a condition of pure intellect. The entire work is a projection of this formula onto a duration of about 70 minutes”

In 1977 Stockhausen went back to Japan to work on a commission for the National Theater of Tokyo. The idea for intermodulation of music had come to him in his first Japanese commission with Telemusik and he had played his music alongside nineteen ensemble musicians in the special spherical chamber designed for him at the World Fair in Osaka in 1970 for about five and a half hours a day, 183 days in a row. Japan had been a good country for his musical expression. The piece he came to work on when LICHT was conceived was to being written for traditional Gagaku orchestra and Noh actors. The dramatic elements for the production however came to him in a dream, just one of many dreams that gave him direct inspiration for compositions. While composing what became Der Jahreslauf, (Course of the Years), he had a revelation about a way to represent different levels of time by different instrument groups: millenniums are depicted as three harmoniums, centuries by an anvil and three piccolos, decades by a bongo and three saxophones, and years by a bass drum, harpsichord and guitar. These instrument groups became representations of vast forces and scales of time.

            This idea of composing music around the theme of various increments of time stayed with the composer for the rest of his life. While working on this commission, another idea was also transmitted into his mind, the super-formula that became the basis for LICHT. In a flash a small seed became the basis for a work of cosmic proportions. Subsequently he used Der Jahreslauf as the first act of Dienstag aus LICHT (Tuesday from Light). 

            In LICHT he realized his formula technique could be considerably expanded. The entire cycle of seven operas is based on three counterpointed melody formulas. Each of these is associated with one of the three principal characters that make up the dramatic element of the production. (Stockhausen himself said the formulas are the characters.) The melodies then define the tonal center and durations of scenes, and zooming in, give detailed melodic phrasing to more refined elements. The three characters are Eve, Lucifer, and Michael, and they are each associated with a specific instrument, bassett horn, trombone, and trumpet in turn.
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This explains formula composition, but what about a super-formula? 

In 1977 Stockhausen had been composing for just over twenty-five years.  In the super-formula he synthesized nearly all of his musical ideas into a musical tool that would occupy him for the next twenty-seven years until 2003 when the last bars for Sonntag aus LICHT were drying on the staff paper.

He had the insight to take the three formulas he had come up with for Eve, Lucifer and Michael and layer them horizontally on top of each other to make the super-formula. Now they existed as one, each with their own layer, named after the character, or force, in question. The super-formula then gets subdivided again, vertically, into seven portions, of two to four measures each. These seven vertical rows form the days of the week.

Combined the horizontal and vertical rows make up the rich matrix out of which the overall structure of LICHT is built. To expand the formula in time, every quarter note of the super-formula is equal to 16 minutes of music. This is how the maestro -or magister- used it determine the durations of the opera cycles various acts and scenes.

Stockhausen also decided to create a kind of skeleton key, bare bones version of the super formula for each of the three characters. These he called “nuclear formulas” (kernformel) and consisted of just the pitches, duration and dynamics. Boiling the bones down even further provides the broth that the music is bathed in. When the nuclear formulas are reduced to just the notes what is left is essentially a serialist tone row. These are known as the kernels, central tones, or nuclear tones. Nuclear, because they form the very atoms of the music.

With all of this in place the fun has a chance to begin. The super-formula can now be used in all manner of ways. Sometimes Stockhausen employed it in an inverted or retrograde fashion (upside down or backwards). It is very often stretched out across the time frame of scenes and whole acts. Other times it is transposed vertically. Once the listener becomes familiar with each of the formulas for the characters or forces, it is possible to pick out those forces at work in the music even though the formula is not really used as a recurring theme in the typical sense of classical music. Rather, as Ed Chang said, “In LICHT, the MICHAEL, EVE and LUCIFER formulas are used more as structural forces whose tonal characteristics exert a kind of planetary gravity over the surrounding musical ether.”

            LICHT is a complete system. The superformula, nuclear kernels, and nuclear tones form the mathematical and musical parts of the systems ecology. The content of the opera, its symbolism based around the days, and the spiritual realities of Eve, Michael, and Lucifer are another aspect of the system. All of this gave Stockhausen the raw material out of which to craft his magnum opus. The music and symbolism mix together and all are now subject to a remarkable game of combination and recombination. The system of LICHT forms the matrix of possibilities, and displayed within that matrix are an extraordinary blending and synthesis of constituent forms.

The idea of ausmultiplikation, which can be translated as "multiplying-out" bears further looking at in terms of how formula composition creates musical forms mirrored on the macro and micro scales. Stockhausen described the technique as when a long note is replaced by shorter "melodic configurations, internally animated around central tones". This bears a strong resemblance to the Renaissance musical technique of diminution or coloration, where long notes are divided into a series of shorter, frequently melodic, values. But Stockhausen also used the term to refer to when he substituted a complete or partial formula for a single long tone, often as background layer projections of the formula. Formula composition and its various components like ausmuliplikation can be seen as  Stockhausen’s way of creating a way to practice the Glass Bead Game in music.
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Robin Hartwell had the insight that when this is done at more than one level results resemble those of a fractal. If the formula compositions are fractal like, and he also used the idea of spirals throughout his work, one way of looking at LICHT is as a composed fractal music. Zooming in and out, the same structure is played in both minutely on the microscopic level, and at large on the macroscopic across the range of an entire work. Having boiled down of the musical components to microscopic levels, and having diluted them out to the macro, was one way Stockhausen prevented signal loss and maximized the transmission of his musical information. The super-formula is present and exists on every level and in every moment of LICHT.

Modular Music

Another way Licht can be seen as a musical system is by how it is structured in component modules. First of all, it should be considered that each of the operas is a work capable of being appreciated and understood unto itself, without having to hear or see the other sections. While listening to the whole cycle certainly enhances the experience of individual parts, those individual parts can also be enjoyed one at a time in and of themselves. Each opera, act, scene is self-sufficient. Even some parts of scenes can be extracted as solitary works. Certain other extra-curricular or auxiliary works have also been extrapolated out of the formulas of LICHT and its modular structure. All of these contain the essence of LICHT and give the listener one of many ways of enjoying the various elements of the cycle.  
           
This was all made possible due to the practical aspects of Stockhausen’s life as a composer. After he began LICHT, when he received a commission for a new work from this or that person or cultural institution, prescribed for this or that choir group, string quartet, or other group of instrumentation, he would incorporate the work on that commission into LICHT. It was an elegant solution that allowed him to finish the massive project.
           
​Some of the examples of modular works that can be extracted from LICHT include Klavierstucke XII and Michael’s Reise from Donnerstag; Weltraum is an assemblage of the electronic greetings and farewells of Freitag; Kathinka’s Chant for flute and electronics is an extract from Samstag; Angel Procession’s for choir comes from Sonntag; Ypssilon for flute and Xi for basset horn from Montag; the electronic layer from the second act of Dienstag becomes the piece Oktophonie; and the infamous Helicopter String Quartet is a section from Mittwoch. These are just a few of the pieces he was able to write in a modular fashion to fulfill a commission and thus complete a section of LICHT. Alternately he was able to adapt an already written section of LICHT as a module to fulfill a commission and thereby create a smaller chamber type work. 

Ars Combinatoria
            These smaller modules, extracts and auxiliary works from LICHT represent another fractal like aspect of the cycle as a system. They are separate and yet also a part of the system. The formula and super-formula interact with themselves, alongside the set symbolism of the days of the week, to produce an array of combinations perceived and permutated through Stockhausen’s intuitive imagination. Through this thoroughly disciplined act of creation and applied artistry Stockhausen has shown himself to be a “Magister Ludi” or master of the Glass Bead Game.

            He has fused mathematics and music together and along these strands and placed connecting beads from the various religious and mystical traditions of the world. He used traditional correspondences, such as in Samstag for instance, associated with Saturday, and the planet Saturn, and it’s symbolism of contraction, limitation, and death. In Samstag he wrote the section Kathinka’s Gesang as Lucifer’s Requiem. Thus the mysteries of death become a main feature of this section of the work. In this piece the flautist performs a ritual with six percussionists. The ritual consists of twenty-four exercises based on Stockhausen’s study of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. It was written as a chant protecting the soul of the recently departed (in this case Lucifer) by means of musical exercises regularly performed for 49 days after the death of the body, and lead the recently deceased into to the light of clear consciousness. For these exercises he permutated the Lucifer formula into a showstopper of extended flute techniques of deft virtuosity.
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            And the piece may really be used by the living, and played for 49 days after the departure of a loved one to help assist them in their afterlife transition. 

The entire cycle is filled with this plentitude of subtle correspondences between music, science and various world cultures. These become the raw data for his applied musical calculus that is dancing in an elaborate play upon all these correspondences, inside a defined system, to express in multiplexed forms, that which is universal. 
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            After finishing the 29 hours of Licht, a feat some of his critics never expected him to complete, Stockhausen begin writing a series of chamber pieces called Klang, with the intent of writing one for each of the twenty-four hours of the day. Having conceived the musical forces of the days of the week, he was zooming in again to explore the musical forces behind each hour of the day. Formula composition gave him the tool he needed to explore these hours. Having written 21 of the pieces the cycle was unfinished at the time of the composer’s unexpected death in 2007 when he voyaged forth into the greater harmonies of cosmic space and time.

Read the rest of the Radiophonic Laboratory series.

References:
Other Planets: The Complete Works of Karlheinz Stockhausen 1950–2007, by Robin Maconie,Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Maryland, 2016. 

Ed Chang's website in general has been super helpful in understanding the super-formula. It is a great journey through the Space of Stockhausen. 
http://stockhausenspace.blogspot.com/2014/08/a-brief-guide-to-licht-pt-1-drama-and.html
http://stockhausenspace.blogspot.com/2014/09/a-brief-guide-to-licht-pt-2-super.html

Threats and Promises: Lucifer, Hell, and Stockhausen's Sunday from Light" by Robin Hartwell in Perspectives of New Music 50, nos. 1 & 2 (Winter–Summer): 393–424.

Into the Middleground: Formula Syntax in Stockhausen's Licht" by Jerome Kohl in Perspectives of New Music 28, no. 2 (Summer): 262–91.

Shannon wasn’t the only one looking at the way signals were transmitted. The same year he published his breakthrough paper, another mathematician published a book that would leave a lasting impression on a number of different fields, electronic music among them. The man was Norbert Wiener and his book was Cybernetics: or control and communication in animal and machine. Wiener defined cybernetics as "the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine".

Wiener was a child prodigy. Born to Polish and German Jewish immigrants, on his fathers side Nobert was related to Maimonides, the famous rabbi, philosopher and physician from Al Andalus. The predisposition to intellectual greatness was hardwired into his system. Norbert’s father Leo was a teacher of Germanic and Slavic languages and avid reader and book hound who put together an impressive personally library which his son devoured. His father also had a gift for math and gave his son additional instructions in the subject.
At age 11 Norbert graduated Ayer Highschool in Massachussettes and then began attending Tufts College where he received a BA in mathematics at the age of 14. From there he went on to study zoology at Harvard before transferring to Cornell to pursue philosophy, where he graduated at the ripe old age of 17 in 1911, when his classmates from Ayer were probably just entering college if they went at all. Then he went back to Harvard where he wrote a dissertation on mathematical logic, comparing the works of Ernst Schröder with Bertrand Russel and Albert North Whitehead. His work showed that ordered pairs could be defined according to elementary set theory. His Ph.D. was awarded before he turned twenty. Later that same year he went to Cambridge and studied under Russel, as well as at the University of Göttingen where to learn from Edmund Husserl.

After a brief period teaching philosophy at Harvard, Wiener eventually found a position at MIT that would become permanent.  In 1926, Wiener returned to Cambridge and Göttingen as a Guggenheim scholar, on a trip that would have important implications for his future work. He spent his time there investigating Brownian motion, the Fourier integral, Dirichlet's problem, harmonic analysis, and the Tauberian theorems.

​Harmonic analysis and Browninan motion in particular would go on to have a key role in the development of cybernetics.

Harmonic analysis is a branch off the great tree of math that is concerned with analyzing and describing periodic and recurrent phenomena in nature, such as the many forms of waves: musical waves, tidal waves, radio waves, alternating current, the motion and vibration of machines. And it branched off the research of French mathematician Joseph Fourier (1768-1830). Fourier was interested in the conduction of heat and other thermal effects, a trail later followed by Nyquist in his own investigations of thermal noise. 

According to the Encyclopedia Brittanica the motions of waves  “can be measured at a number of successive values of the independent variable, usually the time, and these data or a curve plotted from them will represent a function of that independent variable. Generally, the mathematical expression for the function will be unknown. However, with the periodic functions found in nature, the function can be expressed as the sum of a number of sine and cosine terms.” The sum of these is known as a Fourier series. The determination of the coefficients of these terms is became known as harmonic analysis.

Brownian motion or movement relates to a variety of physical phenomena where some quantity of substance undergoes small and constant but random fluctuations. When those particles that are subject to Brownian motion are moving inside a given medium, and there is no preferred direction for these random oscillations to go, the particles will over time, spread out evenly in the substance.

Both Browninan motion and harmonic analysis can be considered stochastic processes. A stochastic process is, at its core, a process that involves the operation of chance. It is a process where values change in a random way over time. Markov chains are another important form of stochastic process that has been applied to music. Stochastic process can also be used to study noise, and Wiener was a student of this mathematical noise.

Amidst the conflicts of WWII Norbert was called upon to use his prodigious brain for solving technical problems associated with warfare. He attacked the problem of automatic aiming and firing of anti-aircraft guns. This required the development and further branching of even more specialized math. It also introduced statistical methods into the recondite area of control and communications engineering, which in turn led to his formulation of the cybernetics concept.

His concept of cybernetics was eerily close to Claude Shannon’s information theory. What they both had in common was knowledge of the influence of noise and the desire to communicate or find signals in, above, and around the noise. One of the ways Wiener figured out how to do this was through filtering. Enter the Wiener filter. It works by computing statistical estimates of unknown signals using a related signal as an input and filtering that to produce an estimated output. Say a signal has been obscured by the addition of noise. The Wiener filter removes the added noise from the signal to give an estimate of the original signal.

Cybernetics is also related to systems theory, and studied in particular the idea of feedback, or a closed signaling loop. Wiener originally referred to the way information or signals effect relationships in system as “circular causal”. Feedback occurs when some action within the system triggers a change in the environment. The environment in turn effects another change in the system when it feeds back the now transformed signal into the originating source.  Wiener, through his study of zoology was applicable to biological and social systems, as well as the mechanical ones his research had originally grown out of. Cognitive systems could also be understood in terms of these circular causal chains of action and reaction feeding back in on itself.

Cybernetic’s essential idea of feedback was also directly applicable to the new electronic musical systems defined by the advent of the microphone, amplifier, and speaker. When these devices are connected together in a circuit audio feedback is one possible result stemming from holding the mic close to the speaker. Everyone has experienced the unintentional noise when a PA is being tested. Musicians quickly adapted the idea of using intentional feedback, and distortion (noise on a signal) to give their recordings and live performances a new sound.

Cybernetics is not limited to mapping the flow of information, distorted or otherwise, in and out of systems. It also includes concepts of learning and adaption, social control, connectivity and communication, efficiency, efficacy, and emergence.
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The related fields of information theory, cybernetics and systems theory would have huge impacts on music and the arts, as the theories trickled down from places like Bell Labs, the Macy Conferences with their focus on communication across scientific disciplines, and the success of Wiener’s book outside of strictly scientific circles.

The word cybernetics sounds kind of cold and inhuman. It conjures up the chrome clad computerized villains made famous by Doctor Who, the cybermen who speak only in monotone and whose overriding program is to delete organic life. Yet the word cybernetics itself comes from the Greek kybernḗtēs, or "steersman, governor, pilot, or rudder.” Human systems require a guide, someone to steer them. Wiener had picked up the word from the French mathematician and physicist André-Marie Ampère who coined the word "cybernetique" in an 1834 essay on science and civil government. Governments and other systems of human invention require steersman and guides with a firm hand on the rudder to give direction and control the effects of feedback.
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The creation of systems is a human trait, and their guidance, via our input, doesn’t have to be cold. It can be done with intuition, insight, and artistic flair. Writing on systems in the world of art for the 1968 Cybernetic Serendipity art and music show at the ICA gallery in London, Jasia Reichardt wrote, "The very notion of having a system in relation to making paintings is often anathema to those who value the mysterious and the intuitive, the free and the expressionistic, in art. Systems, nevertheless, dispense neither with intuition nor mystery. Intuition is instrumental in the design of the system and mystery always remains in the final result."

The Discreet Music of Brian Eno
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Designing musical systems can result in extraordinary beauty. In the mid-1960s while attending Ipswich Art School Brian Eno had his first encounter with cybernetics. It would go on to have a lasting influence. Under the mentorship of Roy Ascott who had developed the controversial “Groundcourse” curriculum adopted by a number of other art colleges Eno absorbed Ascott’s philosophy of systems learning, making mind maps, and playing mental games.

Eno started thinking of the music studio and groups of musicians in terms of cybernetic systems. Making great musical compositions started with designing the parameters, limits, inputs and outputs that would give a composition its ultimate form. Creating these systems and letting them run was how many of his first, and the first, ambient music records were made. 

The liner notes for Eno’s 1975 album Discreet Music contain a block diagram of the system he created for the music. He had been given an album of 18th century harp music to listen to while laying in the bed in the hospital, where he was recovering from a car accident injury. A friend who had been visiting put the record on for him before she left but the volume was turned down too low. Outside it was raining and he listened to “these odd notes of the harp that were just loud enough to be heard above the rain.” The experience “presented what was for me a new way of hearing music—as part of the ambience of the environment just as the color of the light and the sound of the rain were parts of that ambience.”

Eno connected this experience to Erik Satie’s idea of “furniture music” that was intended to blend into the ambient atmosphere of the room, and not be something focused on directly. Furniture music could mix and combine with the sounds of forks, knives, tinkling glasses and conversation at a dinner.

After Eno’s listening experience in the hospital he set out to make his own ambient music, setting off a musical cascade and defining and kick-starting a genre that at the time of this writing is now forty-five years old.

In the liner notes to Discreet Music, Eno wrote these now famous lines, “Since I have always preferred making plans to executing them, I have gravitated towards situations and systems that, once set into operation, could create music with little or no intervention on my part. That is to say, I tend towards the roles of the planner and programmer, and then become an audience to the results.”

The liner notes also contain a block diagram of the system he set up. Eno had wanted to create a background drone for guitarist Robert Fripp to play along with. He was working with an EMS Synthi AKS with built-in memory and a tape delay system. He kept being interrupted in his musical work by knocks on the door and phone calls. He says, “I was answering the phone and adjusting all this stuff as it ran. I almost made that without listening to it. It was really automatic music.”

Discreet music started with two melodic phrases of differing lengths played back from the digital recall of the synth. That signal was then ran through a graphic equalizer to change its timbre. After the EQ the audio went into an echo unit and the output of that was recorded to a tape machine. That tape runs to the take-up reel of  a second tape machine, whose output is fed back into the first machine which records the overlapping signals and sounds. When Fripp came by the next day to have a listen Eno accidentally played the recording back at half-speed. Eno says of the result “it was probably one of the best things I’d ever done and I didn’t even realize I was doing it at the time.”

Autonomous Dynamical Systems

Another example of musical systems in practice comes from the work of David Dunn. David is a composer, sound artist, bioacoustics researcher and an expert at making audio recordings of wildlife. A deep interest in acoustic ecology informs his work. Ecological thinking and systems thinking go hand in hand and this sensibility is present in many of David’s works.

His 2007 album Autonomous Dynamical Systems touches on ecology, fractals and chaos theory, graphic imagery to sound conversions, and feedback loops. The album consists of four compositions. Lorenz from 2005 is a collaboration with chaos scientist James Crutchfield. James has a long history of work in the areas of  nonlinear dynamics, solid-state physics, astrophysics, fluid mechanics, critical phenomena and phase transitions, chaos, and pattern formation, having published over 100 papers in his field of mathematics and physics.

The Lorenz attractor was first studied by meteorologist Edward Lorenz in 1963. He derived the math from a simplified model of convection in the earth's atmosphere and is most frequently expressed as a set of three coupled non-linear differential equations. In popular culture the idea of the “butterfly effect” comes from the physical implications of the Lorenz attractor. In any deterministic nonlinear system one small change, even the small disturbances in air made by the flight of a butterfly, can result in huge differences to the system at a later time. This shows that systems can be deterministic and unpredictable at the same time. When the Lorenz attractor is plotted out graphically it has two large interconnected oval shapes resembling a butterfly or a pair of wings.

For the piece Lorenz, David Dunn used a piece of software written by Crutchfield called MODE (Multiple Ordinary Differential Equations) plugged into the interface program OSC (Open Sound Control), a networking protocol that allows synthesizers, computers, and other multimedia devices. OSC is then in turn fed into sound synthesis program. The sound synthesis program is then fed back into OSC and again into MODE. The entire piece is a feedback loop originating from chaos controlled sound. As such its structure embodies the very principles it seeks to express as music. Another piece on the album, Nine Strange Attractors from 2006 steps up the game even further in its creative use of mathematics to explore feedback loops.
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Another piece uses feedback loops in a different way. Autonomous Systems: Red Rocks from 2003 used environmental field recordings fed into computer systems. Saved in the memory a chaos generator program chooses from among the sounds in a non-linear fashion and plays them back, sometimes electronically transformed, other times not. The composition is done, not by performing live, but by setting up and programming the system, then stepping away, sitting back, and listening to the results.   
John Cage said, “My compositions arise by asking questions.”  The music of systems proceeds from this same curious spirit. When designing new electronic works the composer must begin by asking questions of herself. Then systems can be designed to ask that question in different ways and to find out different answers. 

Wobbly and his Smart Phone System

Wobbly, aka Jon Leidecker, a solo artist, member of Negativland, and now host of radio show Over the Edge after the death of Don Joyce has also made a very interesting album by working with systems.

Between 2015 and 2018 Wobbly worked on an album called Monitress, released in 2019. He created an innovative system leveraging musical pitch tracking apps and synthesizers on a group of mobile phones and other mobile devices. Each of the devices was sent an audio signal. This was picked up by the pitch tracking app and coverted to MIDI data used to drive the synth. The resulting sound is then fed into an analog mixer. Once the signal is going into the mixer it can be routed and fed back into another mobile device also running a pitch tracking app and synth. The resulting effect is a cascade of sound between the devices.

​As Jon writes in the liner notes for the album, “ Feedback loops similar to acoustic or electrical feedback occur when you close the circle. The pitch-tracking apps are prone to errors, especially when presented with complex multiphonics or polyphonies;  they get quite a few notes fascinatingly wrong.  But more striking is the audible reality of their listening to each other.  Unison lines are an elemental sign of musical intelligence; we are entrained to emotional reactions when hearing multiple voices attempting the same melody.  These machines may not meet our current criterion for consciousness, but every audience I’ve played this piece in front of quickly realizes they're not listening to a solo…

The technology used to create these sounds existed before the mobiles, but this music would not have been made on earlier equipment -- it's a result of the relationship developed with a machine that is always present, and always listening. This was the project I dug into as we woke up to the true owners of these tools, a frame to make the relationship between ourselves and our machines audible while we think about the necessary steps to take next.”

The textures on this album are sublime, the kind of things that could only be heard through this a cascade of forces, each triggered by the preceding and affecting the whole in tandem. Wobbly did do post production editing of this work, but the initial results he captured once the process was set in motion is where the real magic lies. This is the kind of music that can’t be predicted. It couldn’t be written by a composer note for note. Rather the job of the composer is to design systems capable of eliciting beauty.
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The three examples of systems music explored here are only a few of many. Musical systems is a large category within the new common practice generally. Other ways of thinking about it is in terms of modular set ups, various configurations of test equipment, systems of feedback in the way guitar pedals are arranged, and more. I don’t know if Norbert Wiener ever thought of music as one of the places where cybernetics would take flight. To hear the music made with its principles is an artistic way of exploring the rich ecology of sound.  

Read the rest of the Radiophonic Laboratory  series. 

References: 

The Information: a history, a theory, a flood by James Gleick, Pantheon, 2011

A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman, Simon & Schuster, 2018

Encyclopedia Britannica: https://www.britannica.com/science/harmonic-analysis

Brian Eno, Discreet Music, Obscure Records, 1975

David Dunn,  Autonomous and Dynamical Systems, New World Records 2007

Wobbly, Monitress: https://hausumountain.bandcamp.com/album/monitress

From the ice cold farms and fields of Michigan to the halls of MIT and then onwards to Bell Labs at Murray Hill, Claude Shannon was a mathematical maverick and inveterate tinkerer. In the 1920s, in those places where the phone company had not deigned to bring their network, around three million farmers built their own by connecting telegraph keys to the barbed wire fences that stretched between properties. As a young boy Shannon rigged up one of these “farm networks so he and one his friend who lived half a mile away could talk to each other at night in Morse code. He was also the local kid people in the town would bring their radios to when they needed  repair and he got them to work. He had the knack.
 
He also had an aptitude for the more abstract side of a math and his mind could handle complex equations with ease. At the age of seventeen he was already in college at the University of Michigan and had published his first work in an academic journal, a solution to a math problem presented in the pages of American Mathematical Monthly. He did a double major in school and graduated with degrees in electrical engineering and mathematics then headed off to MIT for his masters.
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While there he got under the wing of Vannevar Bush. Vannevar had followed in the footsteps of Lord Kelvin, who had created one of the world’s first analog computers, the harmonic analyzer, used to measure the ebb and flow of the tides. Vannevar’s differential analyzer was a huge electromechanical computer that was the size of a room. It solved differential equations by integration, using a wheel-and-disc mechanisms to perform the integration.
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At school he was also introduced to the work of mathematician George Boole, whose 1854 book on algebraic logic The Laws of Thought laid down some of the essential foundations for the creation of computers. George Boole had in turn taken up the system of logic developed by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Might Boole have also been familiar with Leibniz’s book De Arte Combinatoria? In this book Leibniz proposed an alphabet of human thought, and was himself inspired by the Ars Magna of Ramon Lull. Leibniz wanted to take the Ars Magna, or “ultimate general art” developed by Lull as a debating tool that helped speakers combine ideas through a compilation of lists, and bring it closer to mathematics and turn it into a kind of calculus. Shannon became the inheritor of these strands of thought, through their development in the mathematics and formal logic that became Boolean algebra.  

​Between working with Bush’s differential analyzer and his study of Boolean algebra, Shannon was able to design switching circuits. This became the subject of his 1937 master thesis, A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits. 

 Shannon was able to prove his switching circuit could be used simplify the complex and baroque system of electromechanical relays used in AT&T’s routing switches. Then he expanded his concept and showed that his circuits could solve any Boolean algebra problem. He finalized the work with a series of circuit diagrams.

In writing his paper Shannon took George Boole’s algebraic insights and made them practical. Electrical switches could now implement logic. It was a watershed moment that established the integral concept behind all electronic digital computers. Digital circuit design was born.

Next he had to get his PhD. It took him three more years, and his subject matter showed the first signs of multidisciplinary inclination that would later become a dominant feature of information theory. Vannevar Bush compelled him to go to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory to work on his dissertation in the field of genetics. For Vannevar the logic was that if Shannon’s algebra could work on electrical relays it might also prove to be of value in the study of Mendelian heredity. His research in this area resulted in his work An Algebra for Theoretical Genetics, for which he received his PhD in 1940.

The work proved to be too abstract to be useful and during his time at Cold Spring Harbor he was often distracted. In a letter to his mentor Vannevar he wrote, “I’ve been working on three different ideas simultaneously, and strangely enough it seems a more productive method that sticking to one problem… Off and on I have been working on an analysis of some of the fundamental properties of general systems for the transmission of intelligence, including telephony, radio, television, telegraphy, etc…”

With a doctorate under his belt Shannon went on to the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey where his mind was able to wonder across disciplines and where he rubbed elbows with other great minds, including on occasion, Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel. He discussed science, math and engineering with Hermann Weyl and John Von Neumann. All of these encounters fed his mind.
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It wasn’t long before Shannon went elsewhere in New Jersey, to Bell Labs. There he got to rub elbows with other great minds such as Thornton Fry and Alan Turing. His prodigious talents were also being put to work for the war effort. 

 It started with a study of noise. During WWII Shannon had worked on the SIGSALY system that was used for encrypting voice conversations between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. It worked by sampling the voice signal fifty times a second, digitizing it, and then masking it with a random key that sounded like the circuit noise so familiar to electrical engineers.

Shannon hadn’t designed the system, but he had been tasked with trying to break it, like a hacker, to see what its weak spots were, to find out if it was an impenetrable fortress that could withstand the attempts of an enemy assault.
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Alan Turing was also working at Bell Labs on SIGSALY. The British had sent him over to also make sure the system was secure. If Churchill was to be communicating on it, it needed to be uncrackable. During the war effort Turing got to know Claude. The two weren’t allowed to talk about their top secret projects, cryptography, or anything related to their efforts against the Axis powers but they had plenty of other stuff to talk about, and they explored their shared passions, namely, math and the idea that machines might one day be able to learn and think.

Are all numbers computable? This was a question Turing asked in his famous 1937 paper On Computable Numbers. He had shown the paper to Shannon. In it Turing defined calculation as a mechanical procedure or algorithm.

This paper got the pistons in Shannon’s mind firing. Alan had said, “It is always possible to use sequences of symbols in the place of single symbols.” Shannon was already thinking of the way information gets transmitted from one place to the next. Turing used statistical analysis as part of his arsenal when breaking the Enigma ciphers. Information theory in turn ended up being based on statistics and probability theory.

The meeting of these two preeminent minds was just one catalyst for the creation of the large field and sandbox of information theory. Important legwork had already been done by other investigators who had made brief excursions into the territory later mapped out by Shannon.

Telecommunications in general already contained within it many ideas that would later become part of the theories core. Starting with telegraphy and Morse code in the 1830s common letters expressed with the least amount of variation, as in E, one dot. Letters not used as often have a longer expression, such as B, a dash and three dots. The whole idea of lossless data compression is embedded as a seed pattern within this system of encoding information. 

In 1924 Harry Nyquist published the exciting Certain Factors Affecting Telegraph Speed in the Bell System Technical Journal. Nyquist’s research was focused on increasing the speed of a telegraph circuit. One of the first things an engineer runs into when working on this problem is how to transmit the maximum amount of intelligence on a given range of frequencies without causing interference in the circuit or others that it might be connected to. In other words how do you increase speed and amount of intelligence without adding distortion, noise or create spurious signals?

In 1928, Ralph Hartley, also at Bell Labs, wrote his paper the Transmission of Information. He made it explicit that information was a measurable quantity. Information could only reflect the ability of the receiver to distinguish that one sequence of symbols had been intended by the sender rather than any other, that the letter A means A and not E.

Jump forward another decade to the invention of the vocoder. It was designed to use less bandwidth, compressing the voice of the speaker into less space. Now that same technology is used in cellphones as codecs to compress the voice and so more lines of communication can be used on the phone companies allocated frequencies.

WWII had a way of producing scientific side effects, discoveries that would break on through to affect civilian life after the war. While Shannon worked on SIGSALY and other cryptic work he continued to tinker on other projects. Shannon’s paper was one of the things he tinkered and had profound side effects. Twenty years after Hartley addressed the way information is transmitted, Shannon stated it this way, "The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point, either exactly or approximately, a message selected at another point."

In addition to the ideas of clear communication across a channel Information theory also brought the following ideas into play:

-The Bit, or binary digit. One bit is the information entropy of a binary random variable that is 0 or 1 with equal probability, or the information that is gained when the value of such a variable becomes known.

-The Shannon Limit: A formula for channel capacity. This is the speed limit for a given communication channel.
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-Within that limit there must always be techniques for error correction that can overcome the noise level on a given channel. A transmitter may have to send more bits to a receiver at a slower rate but eventually the message will get there.

His theory was a strange attractor in a chaotic system of noisy information. Noise itself tends to bring diverse disciplinary approaches together, interfering in their constitution and their dynamics. Information theory, in transmitting its own intelligence, has in its own way, interfered with other circuits of knowledge it has come in contact with.

A few years later psychologist and computer scientist J.C. R. Licklider said, “It is probably dangerous to use this theory of information in fields for which it was not designed, but I think the danger will not keep people from using it.”

Information theory encompasses every other field it can get its hands on. It’s like a black hole, and everything in its gravitational path gets sucked in. Formed at the spoked crossroads of cryptography, mathematics, statistics, computer science, thermal physics, neurobiology, information engineering, and electrical engineering it has been applied to even more fields of study and practice: statistical inference, natural language processing, the evolution and function of molecular codes (bioinformatics), model selection in statistics, quantum computing, linguistics, plagiarism detection. It is the source code behind pattern recognition and anomaly detection, two human skills in great demand in the 21st century.
 
I wonder if Shannon knew when he wrote ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’ for the 1948 issue of the Bell Systems Technical Journal that his theory would go on to unify, fragment, and spin off into multiple disciplines and fields of human endeavor, music just one among a plethora.

Yet music is a form of information. It is always in formation.  And information can be sonified and used to make music. Raw data becomes audio dada. Music is communication and one way of listening to it is as a transmission of information. The principles Shannon elucidated are form of noise in the systems of world knowledge, and highlight one way of connecting different fields of study together. As information theory exploded it was quickly picked up as  a tool among the more adventurous music composers.

Information theory could be at the heart of making the fictional Glass Bead Game of Herman Hesse a reality. Herman Hesse also dropped several hints and clues in his work that connected it with the same thinkers whose work served as a link to Boolean algebra, namely Athanasius Kircher, Lull and Leibniz who were all practitioners and advocates of the mnemonic and combinatorial arts. Like its predecessors, Information Theory is well suited to connecting the spaces between different fields. In Hesse’s masterpiece the game was created by a musician as a way of “represent[ing] with beads musical quotations or invented themes, could alter, transpose, and develop them, change them and set them in counterpoint to one another.” After some time passed the game was taken up by mathematicians. “…the Game was so far developed it was capable of expressing mathematical processes by special symbols and abbreviations. The players, mutually elaborating these processes, threw these abstract formulas at one another, displaying the sequences and possibilities of their science.”

Hesse goes on to explain, “At various times the Game was taken up and imitated by nearly all the scientific and scholarly disciplines, that is, adapted to the special fields. There is documented evidence for its application to the fields of classical philology and logic. The analytical study had led to the reduction of musical events to physical and mathematical formulas. Soon after philology borrowed this method and began to measure linguistic configurations as physics measured processes in nature. The visual arts soon followed suit, architecture having already led the way in establishing the links between visual art and mathematics. Thereafter more and more new relations, analogies, and correspondences were discovered among the abstract formulas obtained this way.”

In the next sections I will explore the way information theory was used and applied in the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Read the rest of the Radiophonic Laboratory series.

REFERENCES:
A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman, Simon & Schuster, 2018

The Information: a history, a theory, a flood by James Gleick, Pantheon, 2011

The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse, translated by Clara and Richard Winston, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1990

Information Theory and Music by Joel Cohen, Behavioral Science, 7:2
(1962:Apr.) 

​Information Theory and the Digital Age by Aftab, Cheung, Kim, Thakkar, Yeddanapudi

​Logic and the art of memory: the quest for a universal language, by Paolo Rossi, The Athlone Press, University of Chicago, 2000.