How Did Computer Music Journal Come to Exist?

[Editor's note: To celebrate the 30th year of Computer Music Journal's publication, we invited the founder and original Editor, John Snell, to contribute this article about the Journal's origins.]

It was already clear in the 1970s that digital electronics and software offered the potential to transcend limitations of acoustic instruments and traditional scores. Yet early musical exploration with computers revealed the need for a better understanding of the fundamentals. Unfortunately, to gain such knowledge presented formidable challenges: comprehending psychoacoustics, the physics of acoustic instruments and reverberation, and the mathematics of digital signal processing; exploring the ergonomics of human interfaces (for performance with real-time expression); integrating the microscopic level of detail into musical composition; and designing efficiently structured software and computer architecture for real-time control and performance of multiple synchronized channels of sound. To investigate all these areas, composers had to digest graduate-level books, journals, and conference proceedings, each addressed to specialists in a particular discipline.

Seed

This journal was born from the sharing of multidisciplinary research and ideas in the early artificial intelligence (AI) laboratories and computer science departments of Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), and other universities, as well as in research centers like Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) and Bell Laboratories in the early to mid 1970s. The benefits of this sort of open, cooperative approach can be recognized in the more familiar growth of GNU and related software (e.g., Linux) over many years.

With a philosophy like that expressed in the book Pay It Forward (Hyde 1999) and the corresponding film (Leder 2000), I founded and edited Computer Music Journal because I wanted to share the kind of multidisciplinary approach to music I had explored as a student (with support from the National Science Foundation). During my formal education (before the advent of personal computers, digital music instruments, and compact discs) there were no degree programs in computer music. Yet many of us with access to computers realized their musical potential. I appreciated the intelligent professors I was able to study with at Carnegie-Mellon University's electrical engineering program, as well as in music theory and composition, computer science, physics, audio/video, calculus, advanced mathematics, and the physiology and psychology of perception. Work experience in the engineering lab of CMU's Computer Science Department was valuable for learning the practical application of theory to the development of state-of-the-art research projects (e.g., crossbar connected multiprocessor, converters, and a graphics display processor).

Through composition classes at the neighboring University of Pittsburgh, I was able to take advantage of the opportunity to compose electronic music and musique concrète in a studio set up by Morton Subotnick. This analog studio was originally equipped with a combination of insightful signal-processing and -generation modules designed by Don Buchla, and later with synthesizers from the companies ARP and EMS. With support from Angel Jordan (whose help was invaluable) and Raj Reddy, I was able to explore computer music using mainframe and minicomputers at CMU. Later I was grateful to study digital signal processing at Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) and to use its digital audio equipment for research and for creating computer music. Private lessons in composition and theory (especially with William Allaudin Mathieu), as well as classes and workshops in raga (with Pandit Pran Nath), African music (with Hamza El Din and others), and Balkan, Arabic, and Balinese music helped broaden my understanding of music.

Figure 1.

Cover of the first issue of Computer Music Journal (1977).

I was also influenced by other nonwestern practices that may be related to thinking "out of the box" (releasing conditioned limits of tradition or convention). Vipassana (Goldstein 1976, Goldstein and Kornfield 1977), Zen (Suzuki 1970), and related forms of meditation focus concentration, allowing one to simply experience reality without preconceptions. They open perception and help one let go of bias, supporting the practice of scientific observation with clarity of mind. I have found that these practices...