About This Issue

As did our Summer 2016 issue, the present issue includes two articles related to new interfaces for musical performance. The first is an interview with composer and media artist Butch Rovan, one of whose specialties is designing, composing for, and performing with new interfaces. The composer explains that he has long had an interest in using interactive electronics in live performance. He describes various aspects of his approach to composing, including his notion of “obstinate interfaces”: systems that resist the performer in various ways. Among the alternative controllers he has designed, he discusses the GLOBE (a handheld, luminescent sphere), an augmented alto clarinet, and repurposed office equipment such as a typewriter and a pencil sharpener.

The article by Stefania Serafin and colleagues examines the implications that virtual reality (VR) technology has for musical interfaces. Virtual musical instruments, that is, ones emulated in software, have been around for decades, of course, but such instruments have rarely utilized the immersive, interactive visual environments of VR. This situation is likely to change rapidly with the recent introduction of low-cost VR goggles for consumers. (In fact, we are seeing evidence of such change as this issue goes into production.) The authors lay out nine guidelines for designers of VR interfaces for virtual instruments, and then they use those guidelines to evaluate eight examples of such interfaces found in the literature.

Regular readers of this journal know the work of Nick Collins in live coding and other areas of algorithmic composition (see CMJ 30:2, 36:3, and 38:1). In the current issue, Collins describes a recent project in style emulation. In contrast to many academic research efforts, the style in question falls within the realm of popular music—specifically, musical theater. Furthermore, the project’s development was driven not by ivory-tower requirements but by commercial needs: an actual production in London’s West End theater district, in the context of a television documentary. Collins explains how these exigencies necessitated compromises between purely algorithmic output and the craft of professional songwriters. His article also delineates techniques for the corpus-informed generation of chords, melodies, and ostinati, as well as for automated text-setting.

Algorithmic composition encompasses not only emulation of traditional styles but also creative directions in music (cf. CMJ 35:3). Departing from traditional style emulation permits a blurring between compositional algorithms and synthesis algorithms. Along these lines, the article by Paul Rhys describes his software for granular sound synthesis. The application uses fractals to generate clouds of sonic events. His article provides the underlying mathematical equations along with graphs, musical notation, and sound examples that all illustrate the equations’ outputs. Emphasis is placed on a graphical interface that simplifies exploration of the technique’s possibilities. The author argues that fractal granular synthesis results in a stronger sense of purpose, and therefore greater interest, across a range of time scales than does stochastic granular synthesis.

Leaving the terrain of musical practice, this issue’s final article investigates a question in music theory: the relative importance of two different measures of pitch distance. One is the distance between pitches arranged discretely in the Tonnetz, a network of perfect fifths and major and minor thirds (see, for example, the article by Bigo et al. in CMJ 39:3). The other measure, known as voice-leading distance, was methodically investigated in Dmitri Tymoczko’s book A Geometry of Music (reviewed in CMJ 36:1). In this second model, pitches are arranged in a continuous multidimensional space, each axis of which measures (in logarithmic frequency) the pitches of one musical voice of a polyphonic texture. The article by Cinar, Sain, and Principe in the present issue takes an unusual approach to this question: They use audio signal processing and machine learning to consider what relationships can be gleaned automatically from recordings of musical instrument tones played in isolation or in triads.

In the Reviews section, the first review examines a recently published, lengthy collection of essays by the late composer, theorist, and computer music pioneer James Tenney. Several of the book’s chapters document his early work in digital sound synthesis at Bell Laboratories: “Computer Music Experiences, 1961–1964,” “On the Physical...