Electronic Music
ROBERT A. MOOG
INTRODUCTION: What is electronic music? Is it a
brand new kind of music, or is it rooted firmly in our
musical traditions? Must it use only sounds that are
electronically generated, or are electronically processed
"natural" sounds also permissable? Must electronic
music be consigned to tape's magnetic domains, or may
the performer be allowed to play directly to an audience2
And how about the sounds themselves.'? May traditional
timbres be simulated? Must electronic music sound "elec-
tronic"?
The above questions are sufficient to convulse the
argumentative among us into paroxysms of noisy, futile
debate. Electronic music has existed as a potential artistic
resource for a century, as a subject of widespread ex-
perimentation since the end of the World War II, and as a
major factor in the music business for the past decade,
Throughout the development of electronic music, there
have been uncountable attempts to categorize and restrict
its musical domain, yet today it is nigh impossible to
identify an area of music that has not been enriched
through the use of electronics. Synthesizer recordings
have shed new, clarifying light on the substance of
traditional music, while opening our ears to new timbres
and textures. The vast expanse between pure sound effects
and pure music has been explored with electronic instru-
ments in opera, film, TV, and records. Students from
kindergarten through graduate school are gaining new
insight into the acoustical and physiological aspects of
music as well as the aesthetic aspects. And, of course,
composers and performers are producing music that would
be impossible with only traditional acoustic instruments,
In fact, with each succeeding year, it becomes more and
more difficult to objectively consider electronic music as a
distinct, bounded entity,
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My own definition of electronic music is therefore very
broad: Electronic Music is music which is made with
electronic equipment. This particular definition simply
serves to point out that electronic music is a medium of
musical expression which, as it happens, is miscible in
any proportion with the traditional pallette of acoustic
musical instruments. Although it has spawned an aware-
ness of tone color as a compositional element, the elec-
tronic music medium has been employed to interpret the
song anddanceof vernacularmusicandthe tonalcounter-
point of baroque as successfully as it has been used to
develop and realize the most aggressively avant garde
composition.
In focussing on the musical resources rather than the
technological features of the electronic music medium, we
identify four distinct areas:
1) Electronic circuits vibrate (produce audio signals) in
ways that are fundamentally different from those of
acoustic instrument components. This is because elec-
tronic circuits are almost always discrete systems that are
described by ordinary differential equations, whereas
acoustic components are distributed systems, and are
therefore described by partial differential equations.
2) It is often useful to separate the sections of an
electronic audio signal producing system so as to allow the
musician to assemble his own combination of elements,
and to adjust each element according to his particular
needs. In other words, with electronics it is practical to
supply a musician with a "kit of parts" out of which he
assembles his own "instrument." This capability does not
exist with acoustic instruments.
3) The means for electronically generating and modify-
ing audio material may be kept separate and independent
from the control interfaces which the musician "plays,"
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ROBERT
A.MOOG
or through which he otherwise issues commands, in order
to produce the audio signal changes that constitute music,
This affords musical instrument designers the freedom to
optimize some portions of an instrument system for best
audio signal production, while optimizing other portions
for the most efficient communication of the musician's
commands. Except for very few cases such as the pipe
organ, acoustic musical instruments have vibrating ele-
ments which also serve as control elements. An example is
the violin string which vibrates while the musician's finger
is actuallyon it.
4) Electronic technology includes the capability of
storing sequences of sound events and, more recently, the
capability of storing sequences of command (control)
signals that define sound changes. This single capability is
perhaps the most profound contribution that technology
has ever made to music. Not only has it freed the musician
from the necessity of making his music in real time (live),
but it has enabled him to physically manipulate and
arrange sounds by handling a recording medium such as
magnetictape.
In examining specific uses of the electronic music
medium, the most interesting question to ask is: "To what
extent are those features of the medium that differentiate it
from acoustic music being utilized? It is simply not
necessary or desirable to argue the purist's position that
only certain types of music are "right" for realization
through electronic music, that there are fundamental
musical limitations to the medium, that live music is better
than recorded music, or that the musician does not have
the right to "cherry pick" as he strolls through the
orchards of technology in search of musical resources,
Neither is it worthwhile to even consider the question, "Is
electronic music less natural than music played on acous-
tic instruments?" No music is natural! Music is produced
only after people invest strenuous and extended effort to
gain intimate control over vibrating systems such as vocal
cords, a violin, or a synthesizer. Furthermore, all musical
instruments, except for the human voice, are highly
contrived technological artifices. They are differentiated
not by their degree of "naturalness," but by the
technological periods in which they were developed. The
string instruments were perfected when woodworking was
a flowering technology. Piano designers utilized the pro-
cesses of a fully industrialized society. And the electronic
music medium is being developed now, a time when
electronic technology is dominant and the golden age of
manufacturing appears to be yielding to what people are
calling "the postindustrial era." What people really mean
when they accuse electronic music of sounding unnatural,
mechanical,' or, worst of all, inhuman, is that it sounds
just plain different from what they are used to, or that the
musician, in exploring the new medium, has not yet
succeeded in gaining the control necessary to properly
realizehis music,
This discussion of electronic music deals primarily with
the relationships between the functions of electronics
devices, and the types of resources that musicians have
found useful. It will steer clear of making subjective
evaluations or discussing aesthetic aspects of specific
856
pieces of music. First, however, it will sketch a brief
history of electronic musical instruments to illustrate that
precious little is new under the sun.
ELECTRONIC MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS PRIOR
TO 1945
Much of the information in this section is taken from
Dr. Thomas L. Rhea's Ph.D. thesis [1]. Through the
years, the technologists of the electronic music medium
have tended to be frustrated musicians and chronic putter-
ers. Thaddeus Cahill, developerof the Telharmonium,
was also endowed with the ability to think big. Although
not strictly electronic (it predated the invention of the
vacuum tube by about a decade), the Telharmonium
embodied many basic principles that have been used in the
electronic music medium: the generation of pitched tones
from alternating electricity, the addition of harmonics to
determine tone color (additive synthesis), and a touch
sensitive keyboard to shape the sounds and control their
strengths. Cahill generated his signals with a bank of over
a hundredalternators,each capableof producingas much
as 15 killowatts of power. The tones were combined in
giant mixing transformers, and then sent out over leased
telephone lines to subscribers who heard the music on
telephone receivers fitted with horns. The musicians
performed at the touch-sensitive keyboard console, while
listening to their playing over "monitor speakers" of the
same type that subscribers had. Cahill's Telharmonium
was built in'Holyoke, Massachusetts, and shipped to New
York in 1906 in some thirty railroad box cars. This first
polyphonic, touch sensitive music synthesizer remained in
service in New York for only a few years, until the forces
of electronic technology (the invention of radio) and crass
economics conspired to end telharmonic music as a viable
commercial venture. The basic idea was resurrected again
in the 1930s in an instrument that was somewhat more of a
commercial success: the Hammond Organ. Instead of
monstrous generators, the Hammond Organ used tiny tone
wheels to generate individual pitches, and employed
electronic amplification to boost the tone wheel signals to
drive loudspeaker. Designed and tooled by a group of
master machinists (Hammond manufactured electric
clocks before it got into the music business), the Ham-
mond organ offered musicians a few potent musical
resources plus that rarest attribute of all: reliability.
Hammond remained the largest manufacturer of electronic
organs for decades, a tribute to the enduring value of a
well designed musical resource.
The Themmin was one of the very first wholly elec-
tronic musical instruments. Developed during the 1920s
by a Russian physicist and amateur musician, Lev
Sergeivitch Terman, the Theremin is played without being
touched. The performer moves his hands in the space
surrounding the instrument to vary pitch and loudness of
the tone. Terman licensed RCA to make and sell his
instruments in the United States. RCA built Theremins on
the same production line as their first superhet receivers,
and attempted to sell them through the same dealer
network of radio stores. From this venture, RCA learned
that introducing a new musical instrument into the con-
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sumer marketplace requires a combination of delicacy and
tenacity. A merchandising approach involving classical
promotion and distribution is sure death. This lesson is
being relearned even today by musical instrument man-
ufacturers large and small. After a brief time in the
musical instrument marketplace during which only a few
hundred Theremins were sold, RCA discontinued produc-
tion and sold the rights back to Terman, who continued
developing the instrument as an experimental venture,
In Europe, the same pattern emerged with different
instruments and inventors. Friedrich Trautwein developed
the Trautonium, an electronic musical instrument control-
led by a fingerboard-like rheostat. The rights were sold to
none other than Telefunken, which, it is reported, made a
grand total of fifty instruments before bowing out.
Maurice Martenot, a French instrument designer, de-
veloped the Ondes Martenot, a monophonic (single tone)
electronic musical instrument whose control means in-
cluded a six-octave keyboard, continuously variable pitch
band, and touch sensitive articulator bar. Unlike Terman
or Trautwein, Martenot not only kept production of his
instrument under his own control, but he also established a
school for developing and teaching performance
techniques. Original compositions for Martenot are
routinely performed in Europe, even today,
All of these instruments, Theremin, Trautonium, and
Martenot, pointed the way to experimentation with new
control devices for electronic musical instruments. The
Solovox, and similar instruments that were less success-
fully marketed, were some direct precursors of the whole
class of instruments called synthesizers. The Solovox
contained a single tone generator and a variety of
waveshaping, frequency dividing, filtering, and envelope
shaping circuits. Each circuit could be switched in by the
musician. In other words, the musician synthesized, or
assembled out of aural components, the sound quality he
desired. Manufactured by Hammond, the Solovox was
designed to be mounted on a piano right in front of the
keyboard. By depressing a specified combination of
switches, the player could set up an orchestral-like timbre,
which he could then play monophonically with one hand
while he played the piano with the other,
The use of electronic technology to assemble, store, and
manipulate sound sequences may be traced back to the
Coupleaux-Givelet Synthesizer, which was introduced in
1929 at the Paris Exhibition. The Coupleaux-Givelet
system used punched paper tape to pneumatically activate
controls that determined the parameters of four independ-
ent voices. Programmed mixing and level control was
accomplished by varying the coupling between two coils,
by moving 6ne of them with a bellows. The Hanert
Electrical Orchestra, developed by John Hanert around
1945, enabled the musician to draw a "score" (px'ogram)
for a piece of electronic inusic on a continuous roll of
paper. A carriage containing an elaborate photocell array
travelled down the paper, "reading" the score and "con-
ducting" the ensemble of sound producing circuitry. After
World War 11, the RCA Electronic Sound Synthesizer was
developed under the direction of Dr. Harry F. Olson.
Programmed by a paper roll punched with a set of binary
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codes, the RCA Synthesizer produced four independent
lines of sound (Fig. 1). Each line was programmed with a
degree of detail that allowed the sound parameters to be
redefined as often as thirty times a second.
ENTER THE TAPE RECORDER
The development of the Theremin, Trautonium, and the
many other performance instruments early in the elec-
tronic music medium followed in the tradition of acoustic
musical instruments. Musicians mastered these instru-
ments simply by developing suitable manual dexterity,
and applied these skills to real-time performances of a
limited (or even unique) set of tone colors and response
modes. The instruments of Coupleaux-Givelet, Hanert,
and RCA, on the other hand, sought to bypass the
performing musician by going directly from composer's
score to finished music. The availability of the tape
recorder immediately after World War II added a new
dimension to electronic music. With tape recording, any
sounds, electronic or acoustic, brief or extended, ordinary
noises or pure pitches, could be manipulated, assembled,
fragmented, combined and stored. The work of experi-
mental musicians in Cologne, Paris, and New York
focussed on developing technical procedures and aesthetic
rules for tape composition. Music using electronically
generated sounds came to be known as just plain "dec-
tronic music," music using recorded "natural" sounds
came to be known as "musique concrete," and the
facilities that were established to support tape composition
came to be called "classical studios."
A typical classical studio consists of three main sec-
tions: sound generating and modifying, mixing and patch-
ing, and recording. A basic feature of the classical studio
that differentiates it from both the early electronic per-
formance instruments and the early programmed synth-
esizers is the separation of the studio components from
one another. In a classical studio, all signal paths are
established with patch cords. The musician organizes his
studio to provide the desired function or operation. Tape
composers working in classical studios soon learned that
there is a conceptual continuity between physically or-
ganizing sounds on tape on the one hand, and assembling
a network of electronic components to produce or modify
Fig. 1. The RCA electronic sound synthesizer.
857
ROBERT A. MOOG
sounds, on the other hand. It became possible to regard the
medium itself, as well as the pallette of sounds of which it
is capable, as a carrier of musical content. Music need not
be defined only by fixed patterns that imply underlying
harmonic structures. With patch cords and enough things
to patch together, music can also imply elegantly-
proportioned networks of signal flow. Thus, in addition to
greatly increasing timbral resources available to musi-
cians, the classical studios added a whole new dimension
to musical communication,
THE VOLTAGE CONTROLLED SYNTHESIZER
As first conceived, the voltage-controlled synthesizer is
not a uniquely defined piece of equipment, but rather an
approach to systems design in which a) each system
component performs a single signal generating, modify-
lng, or control function, b) a large number of signal path
networks is possible, and c) the principle of voltage
control is utilized to expand the means of sound control,
The combination of these properties results in an open-
ended, generalized musical instrument system that can
easily be used (and indeed has been used) to produce
virtually any type of music. Each of these features will
now be described in detail, and their musical value will be
discussed.
As in the classical studio, the signal generating, modify-
lng, and controlling of a voltage-controlled synthesizer are
performed by single function components which are con-
nected into a network by the musician. Audio signals
originate in oscillators that generate regularly repeating
waveforms, in noise sources that produce random
waveforms, or in devices external to the synthesizer,
Regularly repeating,waT,,eforms give rise to pitched tones,
The shape of the wav_e itself determines its harmonic
content and thereforeJts beginning tone color. The repeti-
tion rate of the waveform determines the perceived pitch
of the resultant tone. Random waveforms give rise to
pitchless, hissing-type sounds,
Audio signal modifier components consist of three main
groups: filters, amplifiers, and mixers. Filters attenuate
some portions of the signal's spectrum (set of frequencies)
while allowing other portions to pass. Amplifiers (or
attenuators), merely change the amplitude of the signal,
while mixers combine signals in a predetermined propor-
tion.
These are the basic audio signal generating and modify-
lng processes of electronic music. In a classical studio,
these processes are static or quasi-static. That is, the
functional components are set up to produce a sound or
group of.sounds. During the actual production of the audio
signals, the operating parameters of the components re-
main constant, or at most are slowly varied by manual
control. In a voltage-controlled synthesizer, the main
operating parameters of the modules (functional compo-
nents) may also be vaired by applying control signals,
These control signals are entirely separate from the audio
signal path. They do not correspond directly to sound
vibrations, but to changes in the properties of the produced
sound. As an example, consider a voltage- controlled
oscillator, the output of which is an audio pitched tone.
858
Now, a second oscillator is brought into the picture.
Assume the second oscillator produces a 5 Hz sine wave.
If the second oscillator signal were mixed with the output
of the first, no sound change would be heard. If, on the
other hand, the second oscillator signal were fed to the
frequency control input of the first oscillator, then the
frequency of the first oscillator would rise and fall with
each cycle of the second oscillator's output. The first
oscillator's tone would have a periodic pitch variation, or
vibrato. Using synthesizer terminology, we would call the
first oscillator the tone or audio oscillator, and the second
oscillator, the control or modulating oscillator. It is
important to note that these two oscillators are not distin-
guished because they have different capabilities, but
because they are being used in fundamentally different
ways. A wide range voltage controlled oscillator may be
used for either audio or control signal generation. Furth-
ermore, a control oscillator can itself be the receptor of a
second control signal. A hierarchy of control signals thus
enables extremely complex sound textures to be generated
by a single audio source.
QUANTITATIVE ASPECTS OF VOLTAGE
CONTROL
Acousticparametersare generallyproportionalto the
exponentials of musical (subjective) values. In particular,
musical pitch intervals are frequency ratios. Stated another
way,' frequency is exponentially related to pitch.
Likewise, audio signal amplitude is exponentially related
to subjective loudness.
Voltage-controlled oscillators (VCOs)whose frequen-
cies are exponentially related to the magnitudes of their
applied control voltages are ideal for electronic music
applications. Since the introduction of the early voltage-
controlled synthesizers of Buchla and Moog in 1964, this
type of oscillator has become a standard of the electronic
music medium. The usual control voltage input/frequency
output relationship is: a control signal increase of one volt
doubles the frequency, or raises the pitch by one octave.
The equally tempered chromatic scale is generated simply
by increasing the frequency control voltage in 1/12 volt
steps; pitch transposition is accomplished by adding mul-
tiples of 1/12 volt to the control signal that produces the
pitch pattern. Furthermore, timing relationships are just as
simplymanipulatedwhenthe voltagecontrolledoscillator
is operated in the subsonic region. If an oscillator is
programmed to produce a control signal.sequence for a
rhythmic pattern, a one volt increase in the control signal
applied to it will double the speed of the pattern, a 7/12
volt increase will give very close to a 3:2.speed increase,
and a 5/12 volt increase will produce a nearly 4:3 speed
increase.
It is desirable to design voltage-controlled filters
(VCFs) so that the relationship between the filters' charac-
teristic frequencies and the voltages applied to their
control inputs are the same as the exponential oscillator
frequency output/control voltage input relationships de-
scribed above..If, for example, the center frequency of a
voltage-controlled bandpass filter increases one octave for
each one-volt increase in control input, then that filter will
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impart the same pitch patterns to "noisy" (randomly
pitched) audio material as an oscillator would produce
when controlled by a given control signal sequence. When
voltage controlled oscillator and voltage-controlled filter
are driven by the same control sequence, then the filter
tracks the oscillator, thus establishing a harmonic structure
that is independent of pitch,
Voltage-controlled amplifiers with exponential gain/
control voltage input relationships are also useful for
music production. In a typical VCA, a one-volt increase in
control signal input quadruples the amplifier's gain, or
increases it by 12 dB. A negative-going control voltage
ramp causes the amplifier's gain to decay exponentially,
thus imparting a percussive amplitude envelope to a con-
stant-amplitude audio signal being fed through the VCA. A
positive-going control ramp results in an exponential in-
crease in gain. Adding a fixed voltage to a given VCA
control signal pattern shifts the loudness level without
affecting the shape of the amplitude/time contour; a nega-
tive-going ramp to which one volt has been added imparts
a percussion envelope to an audio tone that is simply 12 dB
louder than that imparted by the ramp itself,
Accurate, wide range voltage control was first made
practical by the availability of silicon diodes and transis-
tors. In fact, the volt-ampere characteristic of a typical
forward-biased silicon junction is accurately exponential
over five decades of current. The first exponentially
voltage-controlled synthesizer circuits, developed in
1964, used conventional silicon transistms and diodes to
compute the exponential control characteristic. Those
early VCOs were typically accurate to 1% over a 10:1
frequency range, and the exponential scale factor was
proportional to the absolute temperature of the circuit
components. The most accurate currently-available VCOs
use temperature-regulated silicon junctions and precision
integrated circuits to achieve an accuracy of 1% over a
1000:1 frequency range, with a scale factor that is in-
dependent of normal variations in ambient temperature,
For a musician, this improvement is of crucial importance,
Tuning for tonal music was always difficult with the early
VCOs, while the newest circuitry is suitable for micro-
tonal as well as diatonic music,
THE SYNTHESIZER SYSTEM
Most present-day voltage controlled modular synthesiz-
ers incorporate the same basic components: wide-range
multiwaveform VCOs for audio pitch and periodic control
signal generation, wide range VCAs for imparting
amplitude/time contours to audio as well as control sig-
nals, and one or more types of VCFs for imparting
dynamic spectrum variations to audio material. The most
popular type of VCF is the 24 dB/octave lowpass/resonant
filter; the sound variations it produces have become
identified with "pop" electronic music more than any
other single device. Other audio signal generating and
modifying modules include fixed frequency filter arrays,
reverb units, mixers, and noise generators. Control signal
generators include envelope (transient) generators, audio
signal envelope extractors, and sequential pattern
generators. Manual controllers (performer interfaces) in-
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ELECTRONIC MUSIC
clude keyboards, touch sensitive plates, fingerboard-like
ribbon controllers, and pitch-to-voltage converters. Most
modular systems utilize conventional patch cords to estab-
lish signal paths; other systems use pin or switch matrices.
In all cases, the synthesizer system is completely general.
Any logical interconnection network (as well as a large
collection of illogical but interesting patches) contains the
potential for making music. The musician is free to think
of music making either as the construction of a process, or
as the production of a series of well-defined sounds. Fig. 2
shows a modular system designed primarily for process
construction. A bank of sequential controllers, each cap-
able of triggering off others, provides the means for
generating elaborate hierarchies of control patterns, which
are then used to produce continuous successions of sound
movements.
THE COMMERCIAL ASPECT OF ELECTRONIC
MUSIC
The listening public first became aware of the elctronic
music medium subliminally, through radio and TV com-
mercials. Eric Siday, Raymond Scott, and other pioneers
of the sound logo, explored electronic sounds in widely-
heard commercials during the 1950s and 1960s, well
before electronics infiltrated pop music through the rock
and roll idiom. The early commercial musicians were
generally aware of the activity in tape composition. They
were the first to use modular synthesizers for commercial
music. One of these musicians, Walter Carlos, studied at
the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center before
setting up his own multitrack tape studio in a comer of his
living room (Fig. 3). Working part time in his studio over
the 2-year period from 1966 to 1968, Carlos developed his
technique and, in collaboration with Benjamin Folkman,
produced the music for Switched-on Bach, the largest
selling classical LP album of all time.
The success of Switched-on Bach and the trend toward
heavy use of electronics in pop music spurred a furious
activity in electronic music record production during the
late 1960s. A few of these were successful. In response to
requests by musicians for small synthesizers for live
performance., several manufacturers introduced relatively
Fig. 2. Joel Chadale explains the synthesizer system at the
Electronic Music Studio of the State University of New York at
Albany.
859
 ROBERTA. MOOG
small-scale prepatched instruments during the early
1970s. English keyboardist Keith Emerson pioneered the
use of synthesizers in rock music by including a program-
med modular synthesizer in his act. At the present time,
music production techniques that are tracable to the
classical electronic music studio are routinely employed
· ' by, musicians in studios and on stage. Several successful
performance groups play on nothing but synthesizers and
related electronic hardware. Musical experiments of the
50s and 60s are now earning points toward clich_ status,
And synthesizers are the fastest-growing segment of the
musical instrument industry,
THE DIGITAL COMPUTER
The use of large digital computers to synthesize audio
signals predates the introduction of the voltage-controlled
synthesizer by nearly a decade. In terms of hardware
operation, digital computers make audio signals in entirely
different ways than analog synthesizers. Waveforms are
computed one point at a time. Each point is a high
accuracy number that specifies the magnitude of a narrow
time slice of the desired waveform. The numbers are fed
in sequence to a digital-to-analog converter that constructs
the continuous audio waveform. Instructions from the
musician are fed to the computer through punched cards or
other conventional data entry means. The computer gener-
ally takes longer than the actual duration of the sounds to
compute all of the waveforms,
In terms of software, however, sound synthesis prog-
rams such as Music IV and Music V are closely related to
the operation of a voltage-controlled synthesizer. These
programs present the musician with a collection of func-
tional elements that correspond closely to synthesizer
modules. The musician assembles the elements into "in-
struments," and the instruments into an "orchestra," by
conventional computer programming rather than by patch-
ing and knob-turning. In effect, the digital computer
models an analog synthesizer, which in turn models a
simple vibrating system,
Direct digital synthesis provides an extremely powerful
experimental resource. However, the operation is nonin-
[]
Fig. 3. Walter Carlos' studio, where Switched-OnBach was
made. Carlos built the 8-track recorder out of surplus Ampex
parts, and designed and built his own mixing board.
860
teractive. In practice, a musician spends several hours to
program a short segment of music, then waits several
hours or days more until the computation and conversion
are complete.
In order to have a real time interactive audio signal
generating system with the advantages of digital data
processing, Max Mathews and his colleagues at Bell Labs
designed and built the GROOVE system (Fig. 4). This
system uses voltage-controlled analog modules for the
audio signal chains, and a small digital computer to
generate and process the slow moving control and timing
signals in real time. The musician has a variety of control
interfaces at his disposal: keyboards, joysticks, rotary
knobs, and a CRT readout that graphically displays as
many as fourteen control signal contours. A disc file stores
the programs for complete pieces of music. A system of
this type goes far beyond the composing and editing
capabilities of conventional voltage-controlled synthesiz-
ers. It even has the potential for bypassing the multitrack
recorder in the composition process.
THE STATE OF THE SYNTHESIZER ART
The digital synthesizer recently designed and con-
structed by Hal Alles of Bell Labs is representative of the
current state of the art in electronic music hardware. Alles'
instrument includes a) a digital audio signal synthezier, b)
a variety of manual controllers, c) a small controlling
computer, d) a data entry terminal, and e) two floppy disc
drives for data storage. The digital audio synthesizer in
effect contains 64 high accuracy oscillators, 32 filters, 32
amplifiers, 256 envelope generators, and similar numbers
of supporting functions. The manual controllers include
two five-octave touch sensitive keyboards, 72 slide levers,
and four 3-axis joysticks. The data entry terminal contains
a full alphanumeric keyboard and a CRT display. And the
on-board computer is capable of coordinating the control
of the entire instrument in real time. The instrument is
self-contained (except for power source) and occupies
some 12cubic feet of space. It is capable of producing and
_
Fip_,4. The GROOVE system at Bell Labs.
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storing music of a level of complexity approaching that of
a smallorchestra,
WHAT ABOUT THE FUTURE?
Developments in the electronic music medium come
about when musical needs and emerging technology are
combined with a touch of imagination and foresight,
Imagination often involves the utilization of ideas that
were previously discarded. In future decades, the
influence of personal computing will be the major techni-
cai force shaping electronic music. Already digitally-
programmable synthesizer components are being sold to
computer hobbyists. Focus will shift from sound produc-
tion to sound control. Even in present day commercial
synthesizers, the audio circuitry is eclipsed in size and
complexity by the control circuitry. As the complexity of
control means increases even further, the information
content of the sounds themselves, as well as the music into
which they are assembled, will also increase.
I do not believe that brain wave control will become a
significant factor in electronic music in the next decade or
two, despite the appeal that the idea has for many
musicians. Human hands happen to be extremely efficient
manipulators. A virtuoso pianist transmits as much as
several hundred bits per second of a pitch, timing, and
dynamics information to his instrument. Electronic in-
strument control interfaces designed to fully exploit the
capabilities of a musican's hands will .undoubtedly
supplant the simple keyboards and controls of today's
OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 1977, VOLUME 25, NUMBER 10/11
ELECTRONIC MUSIC
synthesizers. An example is an experimental touch-
sensitive keyboard currently being developed at the In-
diana University School of Music. Each key on this
keyboard is touch-sensitive in three dimensions. Accusa-
tions that the requirement of lengthy practice on such a
keyboard enslaves the musician are countered by asser-
tions that musical content increases in proportion :to the
amount of control that a musician exercises.
Finally, the exotic, technological mystique surrounding
the electronic music medium will wither away. as the
whole electronic involvement continues to infiltrate our
daily lives. As more and more musicians explore elec-
tronic music with open minds and ears, our preoccupation
with the electronic music medium .itself will give way to
an increased awareness of the musicians and their music.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
[1] Thomas L. Rhea, "The Evolution of Electronic
Musical Instruments in the United States" PhD Disserta-
tion, George Peabody College, Nashville, Tennessee,
(1972).
[2] Herbert A. Deutsch, Synthesis, Alfred Publishing
Co., New York (1976).
[3] Elliott Schwartz, Electronic Music, A Listeners
Guide, Praeger Publishers, New York (1973).
[4] Max V. Mathews, The Technology of Computer
Music, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. (1969).
[5] Hubert S. Howe, Jr., Electronic Music Synthesis,
W.W. Norton, New York (1975).
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