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David Wessel (1942–2014)

[Editor’s note: We thank Adrian Freed of the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) at the University of California, Berkeley, for writing this obituary and tribute to his colleague.]

Influential musician, scientist, organizer, teacher, mentor, and director David Wessel (see Figure 1) died suddenly on 13 October 2014. His pioneering, inspiring, and catalyzing work is propagated in three fields that he helped shape: music perception and cognition, musical computation, and musical acoustics. This brief biography focuses on his contributions to musical computation and acoustics, noting the publication elsewhere of tributes to his work in music perception and cognition (Devaney et al. 2014), and an autobiographical account (https://cycling74.com/2005/09/13/an-interview-with-david-wessel). His life will be remembered and celebrated on 22 March 2015 at the Berkeley City Club in Berkeley, California, USA.

David Wessel was born 6 October 1942 in Belleville, Illinois. He earned a BS in Mathematical Statistics in 1964 from the University of Illinois and a PhD in Mathematical and Theoretical Psychology from Stanford University in 1972. After briefly teaching at San Francisco State University, he joined the faculty of Michigan State University where, inspired by his friend and mentor, John Chowning, he integrated his passion and curiosity for music, his strong theoretical and practical grip on mathematical psychology, and a broad view of the potential of computation and engineering. An integrative, systems approach to musical computation was informed by a class he attended with a founder of cybernetics, Ross Ashby. Wessel’s first publications from this period concern auditory illusions and the perception of musical timbre, notably with Jean-Claude Risset (Wessel and Risset 1979; Risset and Wessel 1999). Characteristically, he manifested this work and its potential both in scholarly publication and in musical performance—a practice that informs his landmark paper, “Timbre Space as a Musical Control Structure” (Wessel 1979).

Figure 1.

David Wessel (1942–2014).

(Photo: Kathleen Karn, photographer, Department of Music, University of California, Berkeley.)

In 1974 David Wessel organized and hosted the first annual conference on musical computation, a model for future conferences in the field, such as the International Computer Music Conferences (ICMC) (1976–present) and Sound and Music Computing (SMC) (2004–present). He organized and hosted ICMC 1985 at l’Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in Paris and provided critical support to ICMC 1992 at San Jose State University in California. He was an active participant and presenter in such conferences throughout the years, most recently coauthoring three papers presented at the joint ICMC–SMC 2014 conference in Athens, Greece.

While on sabbatical leave in 1976, Wessel visited IRCAM, during which time he composed and realized his influential, landmark piece Antony, premiered at ICMC 1977 in San Diego, California. Subsequently used in film sound tracks and issued on LP and CD, it is still regularly played at tape music events. A recent notable arrangement was prepared by Arshia Cont for IRCAM’s spatial audio system as the opening, dedication piece to a concert program on 20 November 2014. Much of the significance of Antony is how clearly it demonstrates the computer’s value in realizing aesthetic ambitions articulated by John Cage, Gérard Grisey, and György Ligeti within a real-time performance context.

In 1979 Wessel joined IRCAM as Director of Pedagogy, the first of three directorship positions that have been vehicles of unusually strong productivity and influence. The second was as head of IRCAM’s small systems group, in 1986, and his final position was as Director of the University of California, Berkeley, CNMAT, in 1988.

The following passage is from the article “Musicians Play on Computer Power” (New Scientist, December 18, 1980, p. 783):

Wessel is concerned with putting music across to as wide an audience as possible. He suggests that, equipped with one of the pressure pads, people could perhaps re-orchestrate or dissect one of Beethoven’s symphonies, the better to understand its ideas. “Gramophone records promote too much passivity,” he claims. He cites another device—a joystick console—which can control the levels of each voice in a string...