Serveur © IRCAM - CENTRE POMPIDOU 1996-2005. Tous droits réservés pour tous pays. All rights reserved.

Introduction

It is now twenty years since Max V. Mathews and his team at Bell Telephon Laboratories in the USA began their experiments with computer programs for digital sound synthesis and over ten years since the appearance of the first serious compositions. A number of different but nevertheless closely related programs, compilers and systems for computer music synthesis have been developed during this period. Some of them, notably MUSIC 5 and MUSIC 360, have already been used quite widely. Although there is continuing need for development, the Seventies have seen the establishment at IRCAM (Paris), Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Princeton University, M.I.T. and other centres in North America of relatively stable and well-defined systems. This together with the advent quite recently of the digital synthesiser, which is causing designers of digital sound synthesis systems to reconsider their ideas and plans, suggests that computer music is entering a new stage where more and more composers not necessarily familiar with computing techniques will be able to use the systems. The arrival of composers with a broad musical outlook can only prove beneficial in bringing about the development of installations more closely geared to the needs of musicians.

One area where composers are beginning to have more and more influence is in the development of facilities for processing prerecorded material with the computer. Hitherto the overriding tendancy has been to use the computer as a synthesiser building more or less complex sounds from basic building blocks. In his "Introductory Catalogue of Computer Synthesized Sounds" Jean-Claude Risset demonstrated how instrument-like and new sounds could be synthesised according to basic acoustic principles. However, the computer can be used to simulate all the functions of the conventional sound studio, and in this report I shall describe some of the possibilities for treating 'concrete' prerecorded material. Although I will discuss these in terms of the MUSIC 5 system set up on the DEC PDP-10 computer in the Computer Department at IRCAM, most of the established sound synthesis programs, such as MUSIC 360, MUSIC 10 and MUSIC 11, have modules for reading in sound files input via analogue-to-digital convertors, and some of the ideas presented will be transportable to systems employing the other sound synthesis languages.

I would like to thank Jean-Claude Risset and the Computer Department for giving me the opportunity to use IRCAM's facilities and James Anderson Moorer for his frequent and patient advice.

Stanley Haynes, January 1979

The first generation of computer synthesised music, which includes some fine pieces by Jean-Claude Risset, John Chowning, Barry Vercoe, J. K. Randall and others, consists of works which use the computer as a sound synthesiser. Even where live instruments play together with the tape, as in the case of Risset's "Dialogues" for flute, clarinet, piano & percussion or my own "Pyramids-Prisms" for piano & tape, and it is desired to make reference to the instrumental sounds when creating the tape, these are synthesised using additive synthesis or one of the global synthesis methods, such as frequency modulation or non-linear distortion. Recently a number of centres in North America and IRCAM in Paris have been able to set up relatively stable and well documented systems. These are much more accessable and as a result are being used by a new generation of composers who are not necessarily familiar with computing techniques. There is increasingly a desire to be able to process prerecorded material with the computer, and most of the sound synthesis languages include facilities for reading computer files created by digitising sound with analogue-to-digital convertors. The MUSIC 5 system set up on the DEC PDP-10 computer at IRCAM has some particularly powerful features, and I will discuss some of the possibilities and problems I have become aware of using this system. I will also refer to my work on the realisation of York Höller's "Arcus" for 17 instruments and computer-transformed tape during the summer of 1978, but this is more fully discussed in my "Report on the Realisation of York Höller's ARCUS" (December, 1978), which is available from IRCAM.

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Serveur © IRCAM-CGP, 1996-2008 - document mis à jour le 20/06/1997 à 11h03m40s.