lectura 6 machine songs iii music in the service of science science in the service of music

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Machine Songs III: Music in the Service of Science-Science in the Service of MusicAuthor(s): Jon AppletonSource: Computer Music Journal, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Autumn, 1992), pp. 17-21Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3680847

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JonAppletonBregmanElectronic Music Studio

Dartmouth CollegeHanover, New Hampshire 03755 USA

[email protected]

M a c h i n e S o n g s I I 1 :

M u s i c in t h e S e r v i c e

o f Science-Sciencent h e S e r v i c e o f M u s i c

In many non-Western cultures the power of musicis synonymous with magic. Music is as much a partof life as the air that one breathes. There is no at-

tempt to explain music, nor is it often the topic ofconversation. In Western culture the desire to ex-

plain the power of music is characteristic of intel-

lectuals. For the masses, too, music is a frequenttopic of conversation-the songs they enjoy and thelives of popularperformers.Where does this desireto understand music in terms other than itselfcome from? Let me suggest that it is a by-productof self-conscious, rational thought, which we callscience-the idea that everything can and should be

explained. As our civilization develops and evolves,an increasing tension can be observed between dis-

ciplines that lend themselves to scientific inquiry(such as acoustics) and those, like music, that seemto constantly evade satisfactory explanation. Who

among us today, aware of the recent advances inthe study of cognitive processes, would attempt toaccount for the power of music? LeonardB. Meyer(1967)has written that,

For two thousand years music theoristssearched for a "natural"explanation of musi-cal pitch systems and syntax. Their point of

departurewas, as a rule, some sort of acousti-cal data-the lengths of vibrating strings, the

overtone series, or some other naturalpropertyof sound. Using such data, an attempt wasmade to show that this or that system wasnatural-and hence, by extension, necessaryand valid. Toward the beginning of the 20th

century this search for a natural justificationfor music was abandoned. The development of

ComputerMusic Journal,Vol. 16,No. 3, Fall 1992,? 1992 MassachusettsInstitute of Technology.

new tonal systems in the West, the study ofthe history of Western music, and research in

comparative musicology made it clear that

musical styles are not natural forms of com-munication, but are learned andconventional.

Even if we conclude that music is a cultural phe-nomenon, perhapsa benign artifact of our powers of

speech and hearing,we still cannot ignore the inti-mate relationship between music and modern sci-ence. It has been the subject of discourse by bothscientists and musicians since 1636,when Mersennewrote that "sounds can shed more light on philoso-phy than any other quality, which is why the sci-ence of music should not be neglected, even if all

singing and playing were completely abolished and

forbidden"(Cohen 1974).During the last 400 years the pendulum has

swung between periods in which music was regard-ed as an "art"and those in which its kinship toscientific disciplines was touted. JacobOpper (1973)has written that "Rameau,in the tradition of Des-

cartes, Huygens, and implicitly, Newton, [regarded]music and musical composition not as somethingarbitraryand dependent on mere personal choice,but as a physical phenomenon which can be known

properlyif it is treatedas a mathematical and de-ductive science reduced to its basic axioms."

In the 19th century, music and science were con-sidered separatespheres. It is striking that the let-ters of Beethoven, Schumann and Liszt hardlymention the momentous scientific accomplish-ments of their time. Furthermore,an individuallike Borodin,who was both an important chemistand a greatcomposer, observedlittle connectionbetween his two worlds. Although his mentor, thechemist Nikolai Zinin, once wrote, "Mr.Borodin,concern yourself a little less with songs. I am pin-

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ning all my hopes on you to prepareyou as my suc-

cessor, and you think of nothing but music; youcannot hunt two hares at the same time." Borodin's

recent biographersstate that he "didnot think

about 'two hares' at all. In letters to friends and

acquaintances he emphasized that his musical en-

thusiasm was only 'relaxation"' (Figurovskiiand

Solov'ev 1988).In the 20th century, owing particularlyto the

acceptance of modern, experimental psychology,the validity of intuition and creativity were recog-

nized by the scientific community because it wasfelt that they could ultimately be explained. R. K.

Zaripov (1963)has observed that "not only in artis-

tic creativity does intuition play such an importantrole-scientific discoveries, too, are unthinkablewithout intuition. Thus, a mathematician does not

know in the beginning how to prove a new theo-

rem, and he does not know whether he will be able

to do so at all. Not always even afterthis is he in a

position to explain how the idea for solving this

problem came to him, how this idea was born and

brought to maturity in his consciousness. [. ..] If

creativity and intuition exist, then their rules indu-bitably exist also, and the task of science is to getto know them objectively."

It has been observed that within the intellectual

community, an unusually high proportionof scien-

tists practice the musical arts. Since we can assume

that music was the first discipline to come into

their lives, is it then possible to conclude that mu-

sic inspires the kind of rational thought necessaryto productive scientific work? LazareSaminsky(1957) in his book Physics and Metaphysics of Mu-

sic and Essays on the Philosophy of Mathematics,

states that "the acoustical substratum of musiclends it a kind of immanence and makes music a

correlative of the universe in the same sense that

mathematical norms are. In music too, there is an

eerie residue of fictional reality or feasibility some-how related to norms of being: the same as in pure-ly mathematical symbols and allusions-infinity,constants, curved dimensions, imaginarynumbers."

In both the Middle Ages and the 20th century,composers have celebrated music's link with the

logic of mathematics by introducing parametricsystems of organization (primarily n the pitch do-

main), which are largely unrelated to auralpercep-tion. In the Middle Ages these techniques were

invariablyhidden, existing below a surface thatconformed to stylistic norms. In the 20th century,some composers used a technique that introduced anovel way of orderingpitches, but did so within thecontext of traditional musical forms. It is PierreBoulez who is perhapsbest remembered for castingaside any remnants of tradition and declaringhis

own music to be the expression of a new "rhetoric"more akin to the sciences than to the intuitive pro-cedures of traditional art. In his Penser la musiqueaujourd'hui, Boulez (1963)wrote that "music is a

science as much as an art."Stephen Travis Pope(1991)has discussed the renewed consideration ofmusic as science within the context of develop-ments in computer science in "Music Representa-tion, Compositional Methodologies, and

Computers."Perhapsit is a characteristic of the rapidchanges

that have taken place in the 20th century, a time

when science assumed the place of religion inWestern culture, that within a lifetime one couldhave witnessed, on both political and artistic

fronts, the rise and fall of great experiments meant

to "liberate"mankind from economic and musical

systems that were seen to cripple society. JustasMarxist-Leninist thought led to forms of govern-ment meant to remedy the excesses supposedlycaused by the exhaustion of capitalism, so Sch6n-

bergian-Boulezianpractice was touted as the alter-native to an exhausted system called "tonality."These attempts to revolutionize, respectively, our

economic and musical worlds had several otherthings in common besides their Germanic origin.The application or enactment of both ideologies

requiredthat their alternatives-and those who

would supportthem-be publicly denounced and

discredited, and a form of double-speakwas em-

ployed in supportof these "revolutionary" deas.The apologists writing in Pravdaheld sway in sup-port of a failing system in the same way that Her-bert Eimert, Milton Babbitt,and Charles Wuorinendominated the pages of Die Reihe and Perspectives

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of New Music for many years. What is so interest-

ing is the suddennesswith which these applicationsof science-some have saidpseudo-science-to eco-nomics and music have been rejected and are nowseen as merely interesting experiments that failedbecause they denied basic human realities: econom-

ic and cultural diversity in the political realm and

the necessity for perceptual forms of organizationand the power of intuitive processes in the world ofmusic.

It is my intention to explore the positive aspects

of the interaction of practitioners of music andscience in more recent times, beginning with themore difficult side of this question, namely, what is

it that musicians have contributed to science? H. F.

Cohen (1974)concludes his important book on thescience of music between 1580 and 1650 by statingthat "art ndeed influences science; that the nature

of such influences cannot be found by drawingbroadanalogies but only by searching for preciseand detailed causation patterns;and, finally, that

developments in art may effect themselves over

long stretches of time, but many may just as well

make themselves felt in the development of sciencewith surprisingimmediacy." A specific example ofthis kind of influence was the work done by Max V.Mathews at the AT&T Bell Telephone Laboratories

duringthe 1960s and 1970s. Although inspiredbyhis own love of music, Mathews also realized that

musical communication served in many instances

as a less complicated model for the way human

beings process speech. While the results of his re-

search ultimately producedtools of benefit to

musicians, it was music itself that inspired these

productive years of research into another discipline.

However, it is more their love of music than thenature of musical phenomena that draws scientistsinto musical research. "Forunlike all othersciencesthe science of music deals with a changing subject.

Light rays, or moving bodies, if repeatedly subjectedto a given treatment, invariably display the samebehavior. [.. .] But in the science of music this is

not so. Owing to the unidirectional course of music

history there is a difference in the way a musicalinterval was perceived by a 13th century musicolo-

gist and the way it is perceived now, after seven

centuries of harmonic development have passed"(Cohen 1974). One need only peruse the theoretical

writings of polemicists such as Iannis Xenakis

(1971)or Allen Forte(1973) to understandhow the

misapplication of scientific methods of inquiry canresult in opaque and ultimately meaningless music

"theory."Significant applications of science to music in

our time have occurredin three main areas:theinvention of new tools for the production and re-

production of music, the study of timbre, and the

creation of new forms of musical instruments.Most of this work would have been impossiblewithout the use of high-speed, digital processors.More than a decade ago, F. Richard Moore (1980)suggested, "music and technology have become so

interpenetrated [that]the futures of music are littledifferentfrom the futures of technology, and that to

glimpse one, we must examine the other." Many ofthe important discoveries that led to practical ap-plications were conducted in laboratories free of the

pressureof commercial exploitation. Work done atStanfordUniversity in the United States, CNRS

and IRCAMin France,the Royal Institute of Tech-nology in Sweden, and other such institutions, has

providedthe basis on which giant companies like

Phillips, Siemens, Sony, and Yamaha have been ableto mass market products that daily transform ourmusical culture. It is the scientist, free to experi-ment, and the private inventor turned entrepreneurwho continue to make discoveries that have an

impact on the way music is made. The path is not

always an easy one, however, as nearly every inven-tor of new musical instruments who has sought to

bringhis or her creations to market has ultimately

been frustratedby corporategreedand stupidity.Such talented inventors such as Sydney Alonso,Donald Buchla, RobertMoog, and Thomas Ober-heim have all had their progressthwarted-andsometimes their own companies taken from

them-by businessmen and accountants for whomthe development of musical culture was never aconsideration.

The results of scientific researchhave broughtabout a fundamental change in the way music is

presented to listeners; most music now heard is

Appleton 19



prerecordedon tape or disk and broadcast from aremote location. Within the first decade of the 21st

century, another profoundtechnological changewill be complete-most music heard will be com-

posed, played, and distributedby digital techniques.At this stage, this revolution is occurringmore

for economic than for aesthetic reasons. The syn-thesized and "sampled"sounds that imitate con-ventional instruments in many film scores and

commercials are farcheaperto produceand record

than are similar sounds played by traditional in-

strumentalists. Many digital keyboardsare also far

cheaperto buy-and apparentlymore attractive to

young musicians-than aremost conventional in-

struments. This is reflected in the fact that thesales of conventional instruments continue to de-cline. Currently, many of the synthesized imita-

tions of conventional instruments are much lesssubtle and much less flexible than the original in-

struments themselves. Digital musical instrumentswill continue to improve, however, and to gainrecognition as instruments "unto themselves" with

subtlety and flexibility that farexceed (andneed

not imitate) conventional instruments.The dramaticappearanceof the musical instru-

ment digital interface (MIDI),which, among other

things, enables someone to play a saxophone and

sound like a marimba, or play a marimba and sound

like a clarinet, and so forth, has markedly altered

the traditional concept of the performer n our cul-ture. While advances in digital electronics accountfor many changes occurringin contemporarycul-

ture, in music these revolutionary developmentswere possible, in part,because of discoveries in the

timbre domain. It seems remarkable that only 30

years ago we had little understandingof whatmakes a sound interesting to the human ear. The

pioneering work of Jean-ClaudeRisset, and laterDavid L. Wessel (1978),as well as a growing num-ber of psychologists and acousticians, led to evermore convincing techniques for music synthesis.David Cope (1991)and others have begun to pro-duce serious studies that illuminate the constructsof musical style. The work of JohanSundberg(1983)and his colleagues, who have extended per-ceptual studies from the micro to the macro level,

has further advanced the practice of the musicalartsby explaining what it means to be a musical

performer.It is in this arena,the way in which people make

music, that I believe we will shortly see remarkable

developments. It is rare that an essentially philo-sophical observation about musical performanceleads to a radically new approach,but this has re-

cently happenedwith the invention of the radiobaton by Max V. Mathews at StanfordUniversity.Mathews (1991) observed that many individuals are

capableof expressing musicality even though their

musicianship, the physical techniques needed toexecute musical tasks in a short span of time, maybe limited. He also observedthat most styles ofWestern music were not improvisatory, that thenotes one played were fixed by the composer andwere not subject to modification by performers.Thus, Mathews posited, why should the performerbe burdened with years of study to acquirewhat heconsidered a meaningless task-playing the rightnote at the right time. Why couldn't this task be

assigned to a computer, leaving the human perfor-

mer free to concentrate on the parametersand vari-ables over which he or she had meaningful control?How this instrument will be used by both amateurand professional musicians remains to be seen. It is

clear, however, that the invention of the radio ba-ton will provide amateurs with the ability to playcomplex musical works that would formerly havebeen too difficult for them.

There is generally a greaterdegreeof musical

literacy today than in previous centuries. This oc-curred with the rise of the middle class and thecreation of more leisure time. During this century

universal education has become established, evenfor the working class, and parents'aspirations fortheir children's education have often included

study of a musical instrument. The sudden and

explosive growth of the recordindustry at mid-

century temporarilyhalted universal musical edu-cation as young people became passive consumersof music rather than active performers.New formsof musical instruments will reverse this trend, ascan be seen by the enormous popularity of the elec-tric guitarand keyboard synthesizer.

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Universal education has also, of late, come to

include computer literacy. Even a decade ago it was

fashionable in some circles to exhibit ignorance of

computers. This is no longer the case, with young

people becoming aware of how many opportunitiesare open to them if they are computer literate.

These opportunities now include musical ones.

What is still left to accomplish is the integrationof musical and scientific education. There are in-

creasingly more individuals who, like Jean-ClaudeRisset and John Chowning, practice both science

and music at a professional level. There would bestill more if the rigidity that characterizes our insti-

tutions of higher education were eliminated. This

is truly the important task confronting scientists

and musicians today who care to invest in future

generations. Musical studies must take their placein our engineering schools and scientific laborato-

ries. Engineering, computer science, acoustics, and

cognitive psychology must be embraced by conser-

vatories and schools of music.

The ultimate triumph of the collaborative inter-

change between science and the musical arts will

be, ironically, the invisibility of technology. The

positive public reception of early motion picturesrelied less on content than on the unprecedented

technological feat of filmmaking. It did not take

long for filmmakers to master the technology, and

consequently the art form assumed the sophistica-tion that we have come to expect today. Musically,we are in a transitional period in which the miracle

of digital recording and computer music often

seems more important than the musical product.It will not be long before the technology of pro-duction is of little interest to the listener.

References

Boulez, P. 1963. Penserla musique aujourd'hui. Paris:Gonthier.

Cohen, H. F. 1974. QuantifyingMusic: The Science ofMusic at the FirstStage of the Scientific Revolution,1580-1650. Dordrecht:D. Reidel Publishing Company,pp. 17, 250, 252.

Cope, D. 1991. Computers and Musical Style. Madison,Wisconsin: A-REditions,Inc.

Figurovskii,N. A., and Y. I. Solov'ev. 1988. Aleksandr

Porfir'evichBorodin:A Biography.Berlin:Springer-Verlag,p. 18.

Forte,A. 1973. The Structureof Atonal Music. NewHaven:Yale University Press.

Mathews,M. V. 1991."The RadioBatonandConductor

Program, r:Pitch, the MostImportant nd LeastExpres-sive Partof Music."ComputerMusicJournal15(4): 7-42.

Meyer, L. B. 1967.Music, the Arts and Ideas. Chicago:University of Chicago Press,p. 288.

Moore, F. R. 1980. "The Futuresof Music." Perspectivesof New Music 19:(1):215.

Opper,J. 1973. Science and the Arts. Rutherford,New

Jersey:FairleighDickinson University Press,p. 71.

Pope, S. T. 1991. "MusicRepresentation, CompositionalMethodologies, and Computers."In Proceedingsof the2nd Symposiumon Music and the Sciences. Seattle:

University of Washington.Saminsky, L. 1957. Physics and Metaphysics of Music

and Essays on the Philosophy of Mathematics. The

Hague:Martinus Nijhoff.Sundberg,J. 1983. Studies of Music Performance.Stock-

holm: Royal SwedishAcademy of Music.

Wessel, D. L. 1978. Low Dimensional Controlof MusicalTimbre. Paris:Centre Georges Pompidou.

Xenakis, . 1971.FormalizedMusic;Thoughtn Mathemat-ics in Composition.Bloomington:ndianaUniversityPress

Zaripov,R. K. 1963. "Cyberneticsand Music." Perspec-

tives of New Music 7(2):117.

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