Something Digital

1 Can computers make music? Suppose we buy a computer with a big disk, a modern programming environment , an audio-quality DAC, or two, or eight, and ampliiers and speakers. In theory we can now make any sound that our speakers can emit (I owe this observation to Richard Moore). We could simply type in a few million samples if nothing easier comes to mind. One major goal of computer music research has been to make this process practical, that is, to nd good speciication languages for sound. This quest started at Bell Laboratories with the rst experiments of Max Mathews and John Pierce, and gave rise to the dozens of \MUSIC" programs by a dozen authors. Later, there were also languages and editors for manipulating scores, sound editing scripts, spectra, \control signals", wave-forms, \patches" (as in a modular analog synthesizer), and so on. But computer music should be something more than the art of shaking a speaker cone in a pre-speciied way. A piece of music could, in principle, be reduced to a succession of excitations of the modes of vibration of a listening room, but can we make music from this point of view? Only in the very limited sense in which \tape music" can be considered music. An essential part of \real" music is the live element, the undeenable but undeniable interaction between players and audience which makes music exciting. It is hard to prove this interaction is there (and our psychoacousticians still lack any way to measure it) but any musician will swear to its reality, and to its importance to the music-making process. It exists if only because musicians think it exists; that's enough if it changes the way they play music. To make live music with the hypothetical Computer Music Workstation of the rst paragraph we must make it work in real time: connect one or more gestural input devices to it, compute each sample only slightly in advance of the time it is needed for conversion by the DACs, and make the sample computation dependent in some musically useful way on what has come in recently from the 1