Experimental Music Studios Records

Collection of Paul Zonn

DR: “What is the place of humanity and intelligent information processing in this evolution? Is the collective mind and body of music an active component in this transformational scenario? How do we perceive music in which the language of composition evolves and emerges in the listening experience and is not known a priori? The mental state required to search for intelligence outside of ourselves-given that the nature of that intelligence is unknown – is both invigorating for the human spirit and indispensable for the health and survival of our species and that of our evolutionary successors. ” (p. 291)

AC: Questions are precious. The rest is daring. (And I wonder whether you were reading something at that time which might inspire such high-spirited claims. )

DR “The only thing absolutely universal about music, I believe, is that all cultures seem to have something to which they re- fer with an utterance in their language that we translate into the word " music. " Beyond this, music is one of the most wonderfully open and, consequently, abstract forms of activity known to human beings. It admits an enormous variety of definitions, presuppositions, cognitive models, uses and cultural meanings. It is nonsensical to approach music with fixed assumptions about given, innate conceptual models. Often, we may be required to traverse the farthest corners of human thought in constructing truly revealing musical experiences. ”

DR “Because music making can be one of the most unfettered forms of expression we know and because its evolution is so thoroughly enfolded within the processes shaping the uni- verse, music is an appropriate subject to be united with cos- mological, epistemological and scientific investigations of evolution. Musical expressions may result from volitional acts transmitting intended messages, or they may emerge seem- ingly involuntarily to articulate some of the global character- istics of our social and intellectual order. In my own music, the predominant, unifying metaphors are those of morpho- genesis and evolution. ”

“I hope to traverse some of that territory in this two-part article and to explore interdependencies among evolving musical languages, human evolution

Why re-mythologizing is worthwhile? Did you get it from Max Weber?

This way of thought expression is something I have no precise description for (but like absolutely. )

p. 292

Very democratizing. Add to it music-making as a birthright.

That’s funny. We’re able to retrieve from little to no information about what he was saying. And of course some ardent historicist / historian of philosophy would experience frustration with not citing an original source. (luckily I’m not so)

Brian Eno speaks of the same derivatives

It’s impressive how you’re floating through topics, agendas

How long you were working on this text? What are those books left behind the curtain? It’s quite mind-blowing, don’t you think so? The range of manifested ideas spans well beyond theorizing about propositional music.

Expectedly, there’s a kaleidoscope of questions/responses to it which I need to systemize a bit…

Р. 296

Prophesy?

What's the idea behind " Androgeny", and " Wild about the Lady"? Who provided male vocals for the album? (to me she's a bit of a mix of N. Sinatra and vocalist of the b52s - Roam)

" How much better" (Section VIII, Excerpt) -- almost started to cry. Epiphanic. Serenity. Trembling. If I would be imagining some music for heaven then it would fit. How it's humanly possible to create music as this. [Music of B. Eno makes me feel a similar way]

David Rosenboom & Donald Buchla - Collaboration in Performance - 2 - Plymouth Rock Section V

I. My question looking in this literature is primarily what I can do as a scholar what they didn't? Largely, what I can bring to this field of studies?

(in terms of speculations)

The very obvious gap is the Midwest which my whole dissertation will be about. But I wish to figure out some factors not related to space and geography. Some points that cause wonder in me is 1. why some innovations succeed to gain use and recognition why others do not. 2. Why do some ideas of new things materialize and others remain just some weird dreams. 3. Also, what's the recipe for creating and thriving as an interdisciplinary scholar, researcher, musician, engineer. 5. How collaborative environments form and how the idea of visionary spreads, replicates become meaningful for a larger circle of potential contributors and ultimately to those who will use it.

Some of these questions are existential and come from deep crises.

II. There are five main books I am going to deal with. They cover the time span from the mid-80s and late 2010s but most of the 2000s. All except one comes from academicians. And I hope that having at least one book on the list written by self-didacticist, users and practitioners will bring a bit of diversity. 3 of 5 books are canonical and present / get included in any thematic reading list. To name the authors, the books are...

Abernathy, D. (2015). The Prophet from Silicon Valley: The Complete Story of Sequential Circuits. AM Publishing.

Braun, H. 2002. Music and Technology in the Twentieth Century. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Diduck, R. (2018). Mad skills: MIDI and music technology in the twentieth century. Watkins Media Limited.

Holmes, T. (2012). Electronic and experimental music: technology, music, and culture. Routledge.

Pinch, T. J., & Trocco, F. (2004). Analog days. Harvard University Press.

III. Ultimately, the wider application of bits and chunks of wisdom that's hopefully present in this book is - the 594 paper (and publication)

- dissertation

- website

- perhaps more but that's something I will be negotiating

IV. Any questions?

meaningful crossover: from brainwaves to soundwaves, and vice versa.

an essay in the history of science and technologies

I. INTRODUCTION

Biofeedback began considered a musical tool in the late 1960s. The author (David Rosenboom) and his co-author (Alvin Lucier[1]) of a further considered book pioneered this direction. Musically, Rosenboom co-explored modulation of neural synchronization in subjects’ intentional regulating signals with attention and thought. In the text “On Being Invisible” (1972) he explains that biofeedback is somewhat a scientific paradigm-paradox. Being rooted in Western traditions, it contains “a trap embedded in the biofeedback experience which one must confront if he is to understand what is happening to the discipline” (Rosenboom, 1974, p. 82).

Brainwave music relies on the use of biosensors. Sensors placed in the scalp measure electrical activity within neurons of the brain. The use of stimuli and measurements to track activation of different brain regions allows neural oscillators to form coherent images out of different parameters of what’s visible (Johnson, 2015 p. 1). To register or measure biofeedback following non-invasive tools might be used: a. heart rate monitoring, b. body temperature measurement, c. galvanic skin response, d. EEG. Featured in all experiments, and the most effective of all, EEG allows the synchronous activity of groups of neurons to be shown.

1. Abernathy, D. (2015). The Prophet from Silicon Valley: The Complete Story of Sequential Circuits. AM Publishing.

2. Schwartz, E. (1975). Electronic Music: A Listener's Guide. Greenwood.

3. Diduck, R. (2018). Mad skills: MIDI and music technology in the twentieth century. Watkins Media Limited.

p. (5-8)

Foreword In this engaging cultural history of MIDI, Ryan Diduck contributes to the growing and lively body of research on music technologies. In so doing he extends the rich and important Canadian tradition of critical intellectual reflection on the history of media. But what kind of history of media technologies do we need and want? Today, many media theorists, in their attempts to hone the object of study, produce histories of media that are more and more pure and monothematic in their epistemic focus — and in this sense excessively homogeneous. Effectively, such theorists throw down the gauntlet to the rest of us, declaring: “Match us in our intense purity of focus! ” Diduck adroitly resists the challenge of Theory. If Friedrich Kittler is cited, so too is Genesis P. Orridge — and here is the break. For Diduck’s history of technology is of a different, heterogeneous kind, one that keeps working outwards. Should the history of music technologies abjure the celebration of linear histories of innovation — and these innovations as the works of Great Men? Should it be concerned with culture as more than mere “context, ” and with what this implies in terms of registering both the cultures of technology and the technologies of culture? Might such a history acknowledge politics — and if so, where are the politics, and of what kinds? Can it concern itself with the ways in which music technologies are immersed in social processes, while also tracing how they respond to and generate social change? Perhaps most tellingly, should a history of music technologies concern itself with music — not just with obvious questions about how particular technologies stimulate musical change, but with less obvious processes such as the ways in which music can portend technological development (think of the musical collages of Charles Ives as they portend the appearance of multitrack mixing and of the sampler)? Diduck responds, rightly, with a resounding “yes” to these anti-reductionist challenges: this is music-technological history with culture, politics, music, and the social written all the way through. To extract a compelling instance: Trump’s “Make America Great Again” finds its pre-echo, Diduck shows us, in the mid-nineteenth-century campaign to “Make America Musical” — a campaign in which musical instrument design was inflected by a rising commercially oriented patriotism. Here, gathering ideological movements to foster American national character, infused with the Protestant ethic and ideas of the “Melting Pot, ” were routed through music as the burgeoning pianomanufacturing industry responded to the search for instruments by which to cultivate hard work, individualism and equal opportunity. Pianos, Diduck notes, “were the ideal musical machine for the job. ” The history that emerges, then, is one that weaves between “cultures of claviocentrism, ” the industries and industrial bureaucracies that sprang up to support the triumph of the keyboard, and genealogies of musical automata and of the methods of synchronization on which they depended. This is a re-enlivening of Foucault’s genealogy through its transposition into music — via MIDI’s prehistories. The bi-directional nature of these historical processes — music technologies responding to cultural and social change, while they also engender social and cultural transformation — has become a foundational assumption of the best recent scholarship. Yet corners of the historical map have been left untouched, gathering cobwebs through neglect. One such corner, in particular, attracts the torchlight in Diduck’s account: the politics of the consumer music technology industry, and specifically the institutions charged with regulating the industry. For the MIDI story is a narrative about the ambiguity of these industry bodies, apparently guardians of the public interest yet also ruthless promoters of cartel-like tendencies, as they seek to create and lock down industry-wide technical standards. Through MIDI Diduck shows us the haphazard ways in which such a world-changing technological standard came to be established. As he insists, we should be interested in this history because it has affected the entire ecology of electronic music making since the 1980s. Indeed, how this standard came to be agreed upon, organized, and promoted explains a core layer of the connective infrastructure of music for the past three decades. It is a story with lessons for understanding the interlocking of corporate commercial interests and those millions of musicians who daily deploy MIDI, knowingly and unknowingly, in their musical endeavors. And this takes us to music and musicians today — to the current era in which digital technical skills, imbibed along with mother’s milk from infants’ play with screen interfaces, have become as prevalent as traditional musical literacies, posing urgent questions about the social distribution and the cognitive and aesthetic entailments of those digital skills, as well as the particular historical epistemologies and ontologies of music and sound that underpin them. Here we approach the paradoxes defining our musical times: on the one hand, MIDI has become a channel for the efflorescence of music’s production and performance, wedded to its commodification; on the other hand, MIDI has been one of the foremost actants encouraging a different future — evident in the flourishing of noncommodified and amateur music practices without limit. To stretch an analogy: if MIDI, at its worst, has come to represent the Silent Spring of music making — the strangle-hold of certain digital protocols, protocols that appear to keep the musical garden green and thriving while exacting devastating monocultural hidden costs by virtue of their very universalization and commercialization — then, after Mad Skills, we are equipped to move ahead by thinking differently, obliquely. The complaint invariably made about MIDI as a standard is that it is not flexible enough to meet musicians’ varied needs: it was made with a particular model of musical practice in mind. Rather than the commercial grip of MIDI, what would it mean for more of the plurality of musictechnological protocols that currently flourish to progress into standards, with the potential to embody alternative ontologies and epistemologies of music? Could a diversity of musicians be consulted from the early stages in this process, so that the needs of a wider musical base — not just Western popular music — are taken fully into account? As opposed to the blackboxing of MIDI, is it possible that in the future these competing and complementary standards could be made transparent and comprehensible, so that the relationship between standards, protocols, and musical affordances becomes more conceptually and musically open and pliable, allowing musico-democratic public debate to contribute to the evolving design of that critical relationship? Can we foresee a future in which a distributed socio-musical intelligence informs key elements of the design of our global music-tech infrastructure? But relatedly, as Mad Skills shows, we have to ask: where are the alternative institutions — publicly oriented, culturally-politically aware, musically responsive, non-profit organizations and design networks — required to nurture, invent, and support such a plural music-tech infrastructure? To work against the victory, the historical telos, of MIDI is to peel back the grip of existing mores and to combine efforts at the cutting edge of musical imagination, of technological design, of infrastructural politics, and of the intellection required to interlace these generative critical practices. This valuable book, by virtue of the kind of anti-reductionist history it exemplifies, contributes foundations on which to build these future interlaced practices. Georgina Born, September 2017

p. 10

The same approach as of Pinch+Trocco + critique of capitalism – with thoughtful reminiscents into the socio-political hist of the US

4. Holmes, T. (2012). Electronic and experimental music: technology, music, and culture. Routledge.

5. Pinch, T. J., & Trocco, F. (2004). Analog days. Harvard University Press.

Ircam, M. B. (1997). Electric Sound: The Past and Promise of Electronic Music by Joel Chadabe. Leonardo Music Journal, 7(1), 100-101.

Book Review: Pinch, T. J., & Trocco, F. (2004). Analog days. Harvard University Press.

If thinking of revolutionary electronic technologies of the second half of the 20th century you struggle to recall anything apart of the personal computer and mobile phones, for the purpose of self-education you may wish to learn of another invention that shapes our daily life. The “Analog days” of T. Pinch (b. 1952), sociologist and historian of science and technologies by trade, and F. Trocco, also sociologist, gives a thorough outlook on the development of synthesizer – the instrument that along with the electric guitar gave birth to what is supposed to be the contemporary music. [p. 6-7] Of course those two were not the first and the only electricity-driven music instruments. But, as the book shows, the major distinction between the engineered oddities and the instrument for artistic expression is brought by the commercial success. The latter, aside of the popularity and financial income, creates demand for the ongoing critique and refinement.

But let’s talk of the book itself and its authors for a paragraph or so. Coming in light in the early 2000s, when electronic music was not at the peak of its popularity, at least not to the degree it is now, the book seems to be one of then rare popular accounts of the EM history grounded in robust scholarly research. Not much later we will see the spread of the popular documentaries mediating theoretical and practical knowledge on the development of electronic music culture and technologies. Along with some pioneers featured in the book, T. Pinch will participate in the audio-visual narratives to follow.

The intimate commentary provided by Trevor Pinch in the preface aspires the deep sympathy within a person struggling to bridge science and art, the day job and a hobby, the duty and passion. In the 1970s, as a physics student at the Imperial College in London, he put his hand on the famous but not commercially successful VCS3 produced by the Electronic Music Society headed by the creative genius of Peter Zinovieff. The weird machine was one of the most important inventions that Britain gave to the world of electronic music. At the same time the machine was not much demanded for the actual performances. With the growth of the scholarly workload, Pinch put the synth aside until moving to the US. Joining Cornell University he almost inevitably learned of the creature brought by Robert Moog (1934-2005), the engineer whose surname became synonymous with the word ‘synthesizer’. By the mere fortune on the dawn of the 1970s, Pinch found himself nearby the place where the big turn in the history of music and technologies happened. [p. xi-xii]

Although the introduction to the Moog precluded the shift in the author’s life and research and certainly defined the main theme of the book, he cautions a reader from considering the single person – however great their contribution is – as the stand-alone trailblazer in a lack of whom no ‘magic’ would happen. Quite the opposite. Without synergy of different experiences, ideas exchange, critique, some risk, and some luck, hardly the breakthrough would happen. Not to say that the innovation was conceived and tested not in a single place by a single person. Actually different concepts and designs of synthesizers were conceived and brought to the world quite at the same time. The most well-known came out of minds and hands of Don Buchla (California, the US), Bob Moog (NY and North Carolina, the US), and Peter Zinovieff (London, the UK). For this reason authors, apart of Moogs, discuss different versions of the technically same thing, and elucidate what ‘schools’ stemmed from the contrasting approaches taken by each inventor.

Almost any great invention appears out of a certain coincidence of benign circumstances, being accompanied by the sense of wonder which compensates the inevitable struggle to create something qualitatively new. The first of several major claims made in the book deals exactly with the notion of ingenuity. Why Moog ultimately received the laurels of being the father of synth? [p. 8] With another major claim authors try to answer the question. Oftentimes, and in the particular case of synthesizer, it’s rather crucial need not to separate art from science, culture from technology bringing the alleged two-culture problem. Supposedly the use of technology in artistic practice allowed to development of today’s form and function of synthesizer. [p. 9-10]

The story of an engineer, and later a business owner, Robert Moog who fell in love with theremins but ultimately shifted to the production of sound synthesizers (and then turning back) opens the book. The concept of synthesizer in fact emerged not out of the Moog’s sole head. Rather, from the artistic intuition of the composer Herb Deutsch, which Moog translated to the language of engineering as the demand for the tool to move sounds’ pitches. Their successful collaboration resulted in the creation of

the “portable electronic studio” in the middle 1960s, composed out of different moduls and enabled by the voltage controller. [p. 23-28]

In a while, on the West Coast, Don Buchla (1937-2016), also an engineer but an artist as well was reached by two experimental musicians – R. Sender (b. 1934) and M. Subotnick (b. 1933) who looked for the new devices of artistic expression. The surrounding context, as well as personalities of its authors, made the Moog and Buchla Box the art-sci phenomena in their own right. The simple explanation of differences between the two comes as a claim that rationale and sociable Moog, more adaptable and responsive to his collaborators and later clients, paved the way to world recognition of his innovation. He listened to his customers, learned from them, and responded to these external impulses by reconfiguring the original concept and material embodiment. While more socially awkward and passion-driven Buchla was more interested in his own creative search which put him away from following conventions and responding to the demands of the outside world. [p. 35-54]

The most explicit difference between the two synthesizers comes exactly from this notion. Moog has the keyboard which makes it more familiar and generic, while Buchla’s envelope generators to a certain extent fall out of the tradition. Some artists, as Herb Deutsch (b. 1932), Wendy Carlos (b. 1939), and others – often labeled as the more ‘classy’ ones – appreciated the keyboard and largely benefited from it. While others, as Vladimir Ussachevsky (1911-1990), Suzanne Ciani (b. 1946) were repulsed by the ‘rudimentary’ feature and sought to break with the conventional ways of sounds extraction. The presence of the keyboard made Moog more suitable for the performance on scene because it showed the action happening under the performer's fingertips rather than merely exposing an act of turning knobs. Aside from the performative features, design determined the sort of sound one could extract – and in this case, again the the “rich, ” “fat, ” “juicy” tone of Moog won over the more unearthly sonic scape of Buchla.

However, success did not come to Moog the day after the invention of synthesizer. It took time and effort of those many who were interested in promoting electronic music and its non-human generator. The crucial duo in this story was comprised of Bernie Krause (b. 1938) and Paul Beaver (1925-1975) who brought together the East and West, commerce and counterculture presenting the exploratory potential of the instrument at the Monterey festival. [p. 114-118]

Somewhat magic mediums of sonic ideas, synthesizers brought the qualitatively new relationship between the performer and the music instrument. To many authors and to their auditory, personality traits and background were reflected in a way one plays and the kind of sound they extract. Genderedness of synthetic sound and almost partnership with the instrument was argued by Suzanne Ciani who sought to bring the women’s perspective, the femininity to the man-dominated scene of the early 1970s [p. 167-168]. Her standpoint appears to be somewhat supported and to a certain degree challenged by the story of Wendy Carlos. The transcendence of human traits and humane problems via interaction with the instrument empowered her transition and change of the gender identity. While claimed by Ciani, one of the New Age music pioneers, the compromise of artists as Wendy between the electronic sound and traditional composing allowed to make a binary distinction to purists (Carlos / Moog) and avant-gardists (Ciani / Buchla).

An attempt to cover in the book’s conclusion the following history of the EM (from the late 1980s to the 2000s), but also to outline some emerging problems in its scholarship, which made the book’s appearance up-to-date, proves exceptional awareness of authors of the bigger picture of technological and cultural developments. The history of Bob Moog’s analog synthesizer provides a great example of how ‘peer review’ and outer audit – in that case performed by customers, many of whom were very talented – allows to bring the invention to qualitatively another level. Authors reveal their inner resistance to labeling heroes of this book as engineers, musicians, salesmen – identities that transgressed then (and do now) as much as the identity of music machines. These categories are useful for the research, especially for the historical and sociological one represented by the book, but in reality, these ascribed identities are not constant, rather fluid – which practically appears to be liberating and enabling. As Pinch and Trocco outline, particularly in the area of cultural studies we see the looming shift in categories. The lack of proper descriptive language indicates the current crises [P. 312-324]. While providing critique for the conceptual apparatus, the authors urge us to seek for denotation of enlarging numbers of such ‘boundary shifters’ as Robert Moog, for those people who

mediate between the world of artists, scientists and engineers, and business owners, being responsive come up with genuine innovation.

Experimental Music Studios Records

Significant composers within the audio collection who the EMS include: Jon Appleton, James Beauchamp, Herbert Brun, Kenneth Gaburo, Lejaren Hiller, Ben Johnston, Paul Koonce, Salvatore Martirano, John Melby, Gordon Mumma, Harry Partch, and Scott Wyatt.

[Series 1: Studio Adminstrative Records, 1952-2016],

Box 1

Folder 8: Re: Herbert Brun, undated

Folder 9: From Herbert Brun, ca. 1965

Folder 10: Illiac II and CSX-1, 1964-1966

Folder 11: From Tom Siwe, 1964-1984

Box 2

Folder 20: SUNY Technical Report No. 10, October 1978

" Phrase Generation in Computer Music Composition, " by Lejaren Hiller for the National Science Foundation Project No. GK-14191, State University of New York at Buffalo.

Folder 21: " Electronic Sonata and Midnight Carnival, " Lejaren Hiller, 1976

" A report to the National Endowment for the Arts that also Constitutes the 'score' of the composition. " Completed at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Two bound copies.

Folder 22: " Computer Music Compositions of the US; a bibliography", Carol Melby, 1975

Compiled by Carol Melby; prepared for the Music Computation Conference II held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, November 7-9, 1975.

[Series 2: EMS Technical Reports, 1961-1974],

Box 2

Folder 1: EMS Technical Report No. 1, June 1961

" Electronic Music for Two One-Act Plays: Annotated Performance Scripts for 'Blue is the Antecedent of It' and 'Cuthbert Bound'", by LeJaren Hiller and John Cutler. Two copies

Folder 3: EMS Technical Report No. 4, June 1962

" Report on Contemporary Experimental Music", by Lejaren Hiller. Two copies, one bound.

Folder 10: EMS Technical Report No. 11, February 1966

" A Provisional List of Electronic Music Compositions, " by Sven Hostrup Hansell. Two copies, one bound.

Folder 14: EMS Technical Report No. 18, February 1968

" Music Composed with Computer - A Historical Survey, " by Lejaren Hiller

[Series 3: Audio and Audio Visual Recordings, ca. 1924-2015],

[1] “Music for Solo Performer” (1965) by Alvin Lucier is the first and the most influential example of EEG sonification (Johnson, 2015, p. 5).

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