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  • The CARL System:Premises, History, and Fate
  • Gareth Loy

"We are spinning about ourselves like a cocoon the expressive structure of a new musical medium that is revolutionizing the ways in which music is made, and even thought about. We have a duty to ourselves to envision these new instruments with a will to their perfection. We must no longer be satisfied with merely cobbling things together from available technology if the result compromises musical expression."

—(Loy 1982a)

Premises

Great technological leaps sometimes arise unexpectedly from the confluence of previously unrelated technologies. Mechanical, chemical, and electrical technologies were all necessary for the creation of the gasoline engine. Each technology had to reach a minimum threshold of sophistication separately before their combination could effect the global transformation of transit and distribution we witnessed in the 20th century.

The same analysis can be applied to computer music. I once heard a rhetorical question posed by John Chowning that I believe best summarizes the premise of this field. What would happen if we combined the most general-purpose information-processing system the world has ever known—the digital computer—with the most general-purpose sound reproducing system the world has ever known—the loudspeaker?

It took three elements to create computer music: computer hardware, audio gear such as microphones and loudspeakers, and software. All of these technologies had to achieve a minimum threshold of sophistication before computer music could come into being. The first use of computers for symbolic music representation came in the work of Lejaren Hiller and colleagues (1959, 1966), but the confluence of all three technologies for computer music occurred first in the work of Max Mathews at Bell Telephone Laboratories (1969). The creation and distribution of music has been radically transformed from that time as a consequence.

These examples suggest that specific technologies arise from a matrix. The core of the matrix constitutes the basic technological elements out of which other technologies emerge and crystallize. For example, the controls presented to the driver of an automobile constitute a crystallized technology: every car now supplies roughly the same primary controls in the same orientation. However, at its core, automotive technology remains essentially fluid as engineers adapt it experimentally to novel applications.

Similarly, such technologies as the compact disc, the digital synthesizer, MIDI, and MP3 compression crystallized out of the research conducted over the past 20 years or so in computer music research laboratories. They are powerful but crystallized applications of the still-fluid core of our field: computers, software, and sound reproduction. For many users, the crystallized form of the technology suffices, but this is not enough for some whose imaginations will not let them rest.

The Good News

The ever-widening availability of digital computers has made their application to music one of the most exciting and challenging issues in music today. Computers can be used to record, reproduce, analyze, synthesize, and transform music in ways that are unprecedented in power and scope. More than that, they can serve the conceptualization of both musical ideas and ideas about music, fueling the experimentalism that is near the core of the musical genius of our times. In an era where technical innovation and artistic achievement are so inextricably bound together, computer technology enlarges the boundaries of the possible.

In skilled hands, computers are capable of rendering deep ideas about music composition, performance, [End Page 52] analysis, pedagogy, theory, psychoacoustics, musical acoustics, and so on. We live in a new era of musical thinking in which the previously rigid and parochial boundaries of music have been burst asunder. The discipline of music is returning to its place as a lively arena for intellectual cross-fertilization among a wide range of other disciplines, harkening back to the quadrivium of late antiquity.

The development of the pipe organ in the Renaissance and the Baroque period consolidated a simulacrum of the musical resources of an entire orchestra into a single musician's hands (and feet). So today, computer technology delivers power into our hands that supersedes and redefines the notion of musical instrument into a means not just of sound production—not just of music representation—but of music envisioning.

The Bad News

How indeed...

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