About This Issue

In this issue’s interview, Trevor Wishart discusses his distinctive and multifaceted career as an independent composer of electroacoustic music. Referring to his compositional process as “slow improvisation,” he describes the three main phases of his approach to creating a piece: conception, sound processing, and structural formation. For Mr. Wishart, sonic transformation is central, and the voice is a paramount sound source. He explains that the voice’s timbral flexibility is unmatched by traditional instruments; this flexibility is displayed in his own vocal improvisational performances as well as his electroacoustic compositions. Mr. Wishart goes on to discuss some of the many techniques he has invented for sonic metamorphosis. He has long been a key figure in the Composers’ Desktop Project, an organization that has produced “a vast collection of non-real-time signal-processing software.” In addition to his activities in composition, performance, and software development, Mr.Wishart is also well known as a teacher and author. Following his widely read volumes, On Sonic Art and Audible Design, another book is in the offing. The interview concludes with a look to the future.

A half-century ago, Edgard Varèse composed his eight-minute Poème électronique in collaboration with the architect Le Corbusier for the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels. Combining recorded and electronic sounds, this seminal work of electroacoustic music was presented as part of a multimedia installation conceived specifically for the unusually shaped building (which was designed by Iannis Xenakis). Unfortunately, the Pavilion was demolished after the fair ended, stripping Varèse’s soundtrack of its multimedia context and its groundbreaking spatialization, in which sound was heard to travel along complex paths, thanks to the presence of some 400 loudspeakers. Vincenzo Lombardo and his co-authors have taken on the task of fully reconstructing the original three-dimensional multimedia experience through virtual-reality technology. Their article in this issue describes how they applied philological methodology in studying the extant sources about the Pavilion, which include documents, sketches, scale models, photos, films, a control “score,” and analog audio masters. The authors have implemented some virtual-reality versions of the Poème électronique as well as a simpler realization for the Web. Future concert performances of the Poème can be informed by this important research.

Christopher Ariza’s article takes us into the realm of fully automated composition. The author critically examines the frequently proffered notion of a musical Turing test. In the test that Alan Turing described, an interrogator tries to ascertain, through the written word alone, whether he or she is communicating with a human or with a computer. In Mr. Ariza’s view, the Turing test requires the medium of language and cannot be properly applied to music. The article includes a substantial survey and categorization of putative Turing tests (musical and otherwise) and their relatives. The author argues that it is more productive, in evaluating generative music software, to examine the design of the system and its user interface than to try to distinguish the system’s output from manually created music.

This issue includes two articles on musical applications of digital audio signal processing. The first, by William Sethares and his co-authors, continues a line of investigation that the authors have recently been presenting in Computer Music Journal and elsewhere. Here, spectrum analysis is used to ascertain the partials of a sound, which can then be mapped to new frequencies in a sonic transformation that minimizes “sensory dissonance” in a variety of tuning systems. Another use of the technique is for morphing between two timbres. The authors present their Max/MSP-based software: the Spectral Toolbox and the TransFormSynth application. The latter includes a unique user interface whose tuning slider and “tone diamond” facilitate real-time modifications of the tuning system together with corresponding changes in the spectrum.

The final article, by Jyri Pakarinen and David Yeh, concerns digital simulation of vacuum-tube amplifiers. In the last year, each of these two authors published another article in Computer Music Journal related to the electric guitar. Their current joint offering comprehensively surveys the literature, including numerous patents, on digital models of tube...