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  • Stria:Lines to Its Reconstruction
  • John Chowning

There is a story that goes with the next four articles about Stria and the forthcoming Computer Music Journal DVD. It is not simply a set of articles and a new recording with striking visualizations. It is a story of four researchers and how they rehabilitated a piece of music given a program with some missing code and missing data, two different sound recordings, and my memory (aided by fading notes and drawings) of what I had done more than 30 years ago—then their carefully analyzing my not-very-clean code written in an old language, linking the code to my musical intentions, explaining the music-theoretical underpinnings, tracking down the versions and discrepancies, understanding how it was assembled in the days of very limited disk storage for sound files, confirming my intentions through contemporaneous notes of long-forgotten unpublished analyses, reconstructing the code for the composition and synthesis in modern languages, preserving my original programming errors that had an audible consequence, carefully analyzing the existing recordings and inferring what I must have done so they could faithfully recreate a critical lost version of the program and its data—and finally, creating Stria anew.

The four authors, Matteo Meneghini (a computer scientist/musician), Laura Zattra (a musicologist/philologist), Olivier Baudouin (a composer/researcher), and Kevin Dahan (a composer/theorist), all had independent interests and motivations. At different times, each asked me for information about Stria, which I provided as completely as I could. They pushed hard, as the electronic mails, documents, and finally sound files moved from them to me and back. Excepting Laura and Matteo, the four were unknown to one another.

Over the years, I had received a few inquiries regarding Stria—some casual and some specific. Among the latter were those from Toby Mountain, Roberto Doati, and Giovanni De Poli, all of whose early work enriched this current effort. Then, in December 2002, I received an electronic mail that reflected a wholly different level of interest. Matteo Meneghini, then a graduate student in electronics and computer science, asked detailed questions about Stria and the program I had written to compose it. At various times, I had provided copies of the program when asked, and he had gotten hold of one. His questions were pointed, about my use of recursion and about the availability of the program's input data and any other documentation that would aid him in analyzing the program. His project was being guided by Giovanni De Poli, professor of computer science and director of Centro di Sonologia Computazionale at the University of Padua, with whom I had been at IRCAM at various times in the past and who therefore knew of my work, as I knew of his.

I sent Matteo all the information that I had, but there were several important gaps that we did not know about at the time. I had left the original, complete set of documents, programs, and input/output data files with the IRCAM library following the first performance of Stria in 1977. They have since been lost. Although finishing his PhD was his priority, Matteo found the time to examine with care the program that I had written and to translate it into comprehensible forms. It was an early publication of his work (Meneghini 2003) that served as the indispensable reference for the article about Stria in the series Portraits Polychromes (Bossis 2005).

Some months later, I received an electronic mail from Laura Zattra, a PhD musicologist also at the University of Padua, who was by this time working alongside Matteo. Laura wanted to know why the Wergo recording of Stria (Chowning 1988) did not correspond in length to the description presented in Computer Music Synthesis, Composition, and Performance (Dodge and Jerse 1985) and why the four-channel tape I had given to the composer Roberto Doati exhibited some differences, not only in content, [End Page 23] but also in length, from both the Dodge and Jerse description and the available CD recording. The process of examining the versions of Stria involved her careful tracing of its history—including my process of assembling the work from the seven digital...

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