Computer Music

This blog and my writing in general would probably be much stronger if I was less personal about it and acted more as a reporter but then why would I write this in the first place? I am not a reporter, I simply do this for fun.

I doubt anyone except my one "follower" has noticed, but my blogs are primarily published on Fridays, this is because it is my day off. In general there are about a hundred other things I should be doing besides blogging but this brings me joy. Some times I find stories I would like to share during the week and start the blog but am unable to finish until Friday but most of the time Fridays are the day that I can catch up on all the stories I wanted to check out.

Today's story has me feeling a bit like Alice chasing the rabbit down the hole. I originally started reading a story about Max Mathews in the New York Times, the first person to program a computer to play music in a "...replicable combination of hardware and software..". Somewhat ironically the first piece of computer music was actually composed by a colleague of his at Bell Labs named Newman Guttman.

The seventeen second piece is titled "the Silver Scale" and it absolutely fascinates me. I would love to compose or better yet commission a piece for organ based on this very short musical idea. I can't seem to find a decent audio or video clip of the piece on the interweb that I can embed in the blog, if anyone does upload or track a clip down please let me know so I can share it.

Mr. Mathews and Mr. Guttman were both working on a project to get computers to listen and speak (in English) which considering the time frame (1950's) seems very sci-fi. It is remarkable and cool that the first step they took down that direction were musical ones. Essentially, the first words of a computer were SUNG!

Bicycle Built for Two (also known as "Daisy Bell") by Harry Dacre

Perhaps history will find this a significant moment in the balance between computers and humans. I have no idea whether the work that these gentelemen did had any bearing on the current speech recognition that currently exists in our mobile technnology but it certainly must have had some impact. Perhaps it is an exaggeration or an overstatement but it certainly seems as though this was the birth of talking computers even if it took much longer to mature into a viable technology.

For those of us that are fans of science fiction and enjoy indulging the theories about a future in which computers/machines battle humans for control of the world, this would be a big step towards making that a reality. Of course this is played out in many books and movies with scenarios ranging in style from militaristic (Terminator series) to juvenile romance (Wall-e) or artsy (9) to special effects magic (Matrix).

The singing of "Daisy Bell" was enough of a landmark that Stanley Kubric had the villainous computer HAL sing it as he died. In some ways this is the sci-fi version of a typical scenario in opera in which a charecter is inflicted with some mortal wound and then proceeds to sing a five minute aria as they die. My personal favorite is "Dido's Lament" from Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas considered the first English Opera, sung here by Jeff Buckley

When I go back and listen to "Bicycle Built for Two" it now seems so eery in the context of those sci-fi scenarios. To me it just screams for treatment in an opera.

I think that the time has come to set 2001 a Space Odyssey for the operatic stage. Much of the staging could be rather simple and if the emphasis is put on the score then "special effects" could be minimal. The most haunting and perhaps appropriate introduction could be that of a computer singing the role of HAL. Technology exists now so that this need not be some recording but rather a pre-programed computer which responds to the movements and sounds of the actors, orchestra and conductor.

Now which pill do I need to take, is it the blue or the red, I can't remember...