MUSYS. Peter Grogono, United Kingdom, 1969

EMS was the London electronic music studio founded and run by Peter Zinovieff in 1965 to research and produce experimental electronic music. The studio was based around two DEC PDP8 minicomputers, purportedly the first privately owned computers in the world.

One of the DEC PDP8 mini-computers at EMS
One of the DEC PDP8 mini-computers at EMS

Digital signal processing was way beyond the capabilities of the 600,000 instructions-per-second, 12k RAM, DEC PDP8s; instead, Peter Grogono was tasked with developing a new musical composition and ‘sequencing’ language called MUSYS. MUSYS was designed to be an easy to use, ‘composer friendly’ and efficient (i.e. it could run within the limitations of the PDP8 and save all the data files to disk – rather than paper tape) programming language to make electronic music.  MUSYS, written in assembly language, allowed the PDP8s to control a bank of 64 filters which could be used either as resonant oscillators to output sine waves, or in reverse, to read and store frequency data from a sound source. This meant that MUSYS was a type of low resolution frequency sampler; it could ‘sample’ audio frequency data at 20 samples per second and then reproduce that sampled data back in ‘oscillator mode’. MUSYS was therefore a hybrid digital-analogue performance controller similar to Max Mathew’s GROOVE System (1970) and  Gabura & Ciamaga’s PIPER system (1965) and a precursor to more modern MIDI software applications.

“It all started in 1969, when I was working at Electronic Music Studios (EMS) in Putney, S.W. London, UK. I was asked to design a programming language with two constraints. The first constraint was that the language should be intelligible to the musicians who would use it for composing electronic music. The second constraint was that it had to run on a DEC PDP8/L with 4K 12-bit words of memory.”

The two PDP8’s were named after Zinovieff’s children Sofka (an older a PDP8/S) and Leo (a newer, faster a PDP8/L). Sofka was used as a sequencer that passed the time-events to the audio hardware (the 64 filter-oscillators,  six amplifiers, three digital/analog converters, three “integrators” (devices that generated voltages that varied linearly with time), twelve audio switches, six DC switches, and a 4-track Ampex tape-deck). Leo was used to compute the ‘score’ and pass on the data when requested by Sofka every millisecond or so;

“These devices could be controlled by a low-bandwidth data stream. For example, a single note could be specified by: pitch, waveform, amplitude, filtering, attack rate, sustain rate, and decay time. Some of these parameters, such as filtering, would often be constant during a musical phrase, and would be transmitted only once. Some notes might require more parameters, to specify a more complicated envelope, for instance. But, for most purposes, a hundred or so events per second, with a time precision of about 1 msec, is usually sufficient. (These requirements are somewhat similar to the MIDI interface which, of course, did not exist in 1970.)”

partita-for-unattended-computer-3

partita-for-unattended-computer-1

Previous to the development of MUSYS, the EMS PDP8s were used for the first ever unaccompanied performance of live computer music ‘Partita for Unattended Computer’ at Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, 1967. Notable compositions based on the MUSYS sytem include: ‘Medusa’ Harrison Birtwistle 1970, ‘Poems of Wallace Stevens’  Justin Connolly. 1970, ‘Tesserae 4’  Justin Connolly 1971, ‘Chronometer’  Harrison Birtwistle 1972, ‘Dreamtime’ David Rowland 1972, ‘Violin Concerto’  Hans Werner Henze 1972.

Audio Examples

Demonstrating the digital manipulation of a voice with the frequency sampler:

In the Beginning‘ PeterGrogono with Stan Van Der Beek 1972. “In 1972, Stan Van Der Beek visited EMS. Peter Zinovieff was away and, after listening to some of the things we could do, Stan left with brief instructions for a 15 minute piece that would “suggest the sounds of creation and end with the words ‘in the beginning was the word'”. All of the sounds in this piece are derived from these six words, heard at the end, manipulated by the EMS computer-controlled filter bank.”

Datafield‘ Peter Grogono 1970

Chimebars  Peter Grogono 1968

 MUSYS code examples

A composition consisting of a single note might look like this:

      #NOTE 56, 12, 15;
      $

The note has pitch 56 ( from an eight-octave chromatic scale with notes numbered from 0 to 63), loudness 12 (on a logarithmic scale from 0 to 15), and duration 15/100 = 0.15 seconds. The loudness value also determines the envelope of the note.

An example of a MUSYS  program that would play fifty random tone rows:

      50 (N = 0 X = 0
      1  M=12^  K=1  M-1 [ M (K = K*2) ]
         X & K[G1]
         X = X+K  N = N+1  #NOTE M, 15^, 10^>3;
         12 - N[G1]
      $

MUSYS evolved in 1978 into the MOUSE programming language; a small, efficient stack based interpreter.


Sources:

http://users.encs.concordia.ca/~grogono/Bio/ems.html

Peter Grogono.’MUSYS: Software for an Electronic Music Studio. Software – Practice and Experience’, vol. 3, pages 369-383, 1973.

http://www.retroprogramming.com/2012/08/mouse-language-for-microcomputers-by.html

The ‘Allen Computer Organ’, Ralph Deutsch – Allen Organ Co, USA, 1971

Allen Computer Organ of 1971
Allen 301-3 Digital Computer organ of 1971

The Allen Computer Organ was one of the first commercial digital instruments, developed by Rockwell International (US military technology company) and built by the Allen Organ Co in 1971. The organ used an early form of digital sampling allowing the user to chose pre-set voices or edit and store sounds using an IBM style punch-card system.

The Rockwell/Allen Computer Organ engineering  team with a prototype model.
The Rockwell/Allen Computer Organ engineering team with a prototype model.

The sound itself was generated from MOS (Metal Oxide Silicon) boards. Each MOS board contained 22 LSI (Large Scale Integration) circuit boards (miniaturised photo-etched silicon boards containing thousands of transistors – based on technology developed by Rockwell International for the NASA space missions of the early 70’s) giving a total of 48,000 transistors; unheard of power for the 1970’s.

Publicity photograph demonstrating  the punch-car reader
Publicity photograph demonstrating the punch-car reader
Allen Organ voice data punch cards
Allen Organ voice data punch cards
Allen Computer Organ
Allen Computer Organ


Sources

http://www.allenorgan.com/

https://picasaweb.google.com/106647927905455601813/Allen301BDigitalComputerOrgan

http://www.nightbloomingjazzmen.com/Ralph_Deutsch_Digital_Organ.html

http://www.leagle.com/decision/19731480363FSupp1117_11306

‘GROOVE Systems’, Max Mathews & Richard Moore, USA 1970

Max Mathews with the GROOVE system
Max Mathews with the GROOVE system

“GROOVE is a hybrid system that interposes a digital computer between a human composer-performer and an electronic sound synthesizer. All of the manual actions of the human being are monitored by the computer and stored in its disk memory ”

Max Mathews and Richard Moore 1 Joel Chadabe, Electric Sound: The Past and Promise of Electronic Music, Prentice Hall, 1997.p158

In 1967 the composer and musician Richard Moore began a collaboration with Max Mathews at Bell Labs exploring performance and  expression in computer music in a ‘musician-friendly’ environment. The result of this was a digital-analogue hybrid system called GROOVE  (Generated Realtime Operations On Voltage-controlled Equipment) in which a musician played an external analogue synthesiser and a computer monitored and stored the performer’s manipulations of the interface; playing notes, turning knobs and so-on. 2Joel Chadabe, Electric Sound: The Past and Promise of Electronic Music, Prentice Hall, 1997.p158The objective being to build a real-time musical performance tool by concentrating the computers limited power, using it to store musical parameters of an external device rather than generating the sound itself :

“Computer performance of music was born in 1957 when an IBM 704 in NYC played a 17 second composition on the Music I program which I wrote. The timbres and notes were not inspiring, but the technical breakthrough is still reverberating. Music I led me to Music II through V.  A host of others wrote Music 10, Music 360, Music 15, Csound and Cmix. Many exciting pieces are now performed digitally. The IBM 704 and its siblings were strictly studio machines–they were far too slow to synthesize music in real-time. Chowning’s FM algorithms and the advent of fast, inexpensive, digital chips made real-time possible, and equally important, made it affordable.”  3Max Mathews. “Horizons in Computer Music,” March 8-9, 1997, Indiana University.

Richard Moore with the Groove System
Richard Moore with the Groove System

The system, written in assembler, only ran on the Honeywell DDP224 computer that Bell had acquired specifically for sound research. The addition of a disk storage device meant that it was also possible to create libraries of programming routines so that users could create their own customised logic patterns for automation or composition. GROOVE allowed users to continually adjust and ‘mix’ different actions in real time, review sections or an entire piece and then re-run the composition from stored data. Music by Bach and Bartok were performed with the GROOVE at the first demonstration at a conference on Music and Technology in Stockholm organized by UNESCO  in 1970. Among the participants also several leading figures in electronic music such as Pierre Schaffer and Jean-Claude Risset.

“Starting with the Groove program in 1970, my interests have focused on live performance and what a computer can do to aid a performer. I made a controller, the radio-baton, plus a program, the conductor program, to provide new ways for interpreting and performing traditional scores. In addition to contemporary composers, these proved attractive to soloists as a way of playing orchestral accompaniments. Singers often prefer to play their own accompaniments. Recently I have added improvisational options which make it easy to write compositional algorithms. These can involve precomposed sequences, random functions, and live performance gestures. The algorithms are written in the C language. We have taught a course in this area to Stanford undergraduates for two years. To our happy surprise, the students liked learning and using C. Primarily I believe it gives them a feeling of complete power to command the computer to do anything it is capable of doing.” 4 Max Mathews. “Horizons in Computer Music,” March 8-9, 1997, Indiana University.

The GROOVE System at the Bell Laboratories circa 1970
The GROOVE System at the Bell Laboratories circa 1970

The GROOVE system consisted of:

  • 14 DAC control lines scanned every 100th/second ( twelve 8-bit and two 12-bit)
  • An ADC coupled to a multiplexer for the conversion of seven voltage signal: four generated by the same knobs and three generated by 3-dimensional movement of a joystick controller;
  • Two speakers for audio sound output;
  • A special keyboard to interface with the knobs to generate On/Off signals
  • A teletype keyboard for data input
  • A CDC-9432 disk storage;
  • A tape recorder for data backup

Antecedents to the GROOVE included similar projects such as PIPER, developed by James Gabura and Gustav Ciamaga at the University of Toronto, and a system proposed but never completed by Lejaren Hiller and James Beauchamp at the University of Illinois . GROOVE was however, the first widely used computer music system that allowed composers and performers the ability to work in real-time. The GROOVE project ended in 1980 due to both the high cost of the system – some $20,000, and also  to advances in affordable computing power that allowed synthesisers and performance systems to work together flawlessly. 5 F. Richard Moore, Elements of Computer Music, PTR Prentice Hall, 1990.


References

  • 1
    Joel Chadabe, Electric Sound: The Past and Promise of Electronic Music, Prentice Hall, 1997.p158
  • 2
    Joel Chadabe, Electric Sound: The Past and Promise of Electronic Music, Prentice Hall, 1997.p158
  • 3
    Max Mathews. “Horizons in Computer Music,” March 8-9, 1997, Indiana University.
  • 4
    Max Mathews. “Horizons in Computer Music,” March 8-9, 1997, Indiana University.
  • 5
    F. Richard Moore, Elements of Computer Music, PTR Prentice Hall, 1990.

‘MUSIC N’, Max Vernon Mathews, USA, 1957

Max Mathews was a pioneering, central figure in computer music. After studying engineering at California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1954 Mathews went on to develop ‘Music 1’ at Bell Labs; the first of the ‘Music’ family of computer audio programmes and the first widely used program for audio synthesis and composition. Mathews spent the rest of his career developing the ‘Music N’ series of programs and became a key figure in digital audio, synthesis, interaction and performance. ‘Music N’ was the first time a computer had been used to investigate audio synthesis ( Computers had been used to generate sound and music with the CSIR M1 and Ferranti Mk1 as early as 1951, but more as a by-product of machine testing rather than for specific musical objectives) and set the blueprint for computer audio synthesis that remains in use to this day in programmes like CSound, MaxMSP and SuperCollider and graphical modular programmes like Reaktor.

IBM 704 System
IBM 704 System . Image: The IBM 704 and 709 Systems
1http://www.computer-history.info/Page4.dir/pages/IBM.704.dir

“Computer performance of music was born in 1957 when an IBM 704 in NYC played a 17 second composition on the Music I program which I wrote. The timbres and notes were not inspiring, but the technical breakthrough is still reverberating. Music I led me to Music II through V. A host of others wrote Music 10, Music 360, Music 15, Csound and Cmix. Many exciting pieces are now performed digitally. The IBM 704 and its siblings were strictly studio machines – they were far too slow to synthesize music in real-time. Chowning’s FM algorithms and the advent of fast, inexpensive, digital chips made real-time possible, and equally important, made it affordable.” 2Max Mathews, (1997), Horizons in Computer Music, March 8–9, Indiana University.

MUSIC I 1957

Music 1 was written in Assembler/machine code to make the most of the technical limitations of the IBM704 computer. The audio output was a simple monophonic triangle wave tone with no attack or decay control. It was only possible to set the parameters of amplitude, frequency and duration of each sound. The output was stored on magnetic tape and then converted by a DAC to make it audible (Bell Laboratories, in those years, were the only ones in the United States, to have a DAC; a 12-Bit valve technology converter, developed by EPSCO), Mathews says;

In fact, we are the only ones in the world at the time who had the right kind of a digital-to-analog converter hooked up to a digital tape transport that would play a computer tape. So we had a monopoly, if you will, on this process“.3An Interview with Max Mathews. Tae Hong Park. Music Department, Tulane University. https://tinyurl.com/ypfdw2xb

In 1957 Mathews and his colleague Newman Guttman created a synthesised 17 second piece using Music I, titled ‘The Silver Scale’ ( often credited as being the first proper piece of  computer generated music) and a one minute piece later in the same year called ‘Pitch Variations’ both of which were released on an anthology called ‘Music From Mathematics’ edited by Bell Labs in 1962.

Max Mathews and an IBM mainframe at Bell Laboratories. (Courtesy Max Mathews.)
Max Mathews and an IBM mainframe at Bell Laboratories. (Courtesy Max Mathews.)
4image: ‘An Interview with Max Mathews’. Tae Hong Park. Music Department, Tulane University. https://tinyurl.com/ypfdw2xb

MUSIC II 1958

Was an updated more versatile and functional version of Music I . Music II  still used assembler but for the transistor (rather than valve) based, much faster IBM 7094 series. Music II had four-voice polyphony and a was capable of generating sixteen wave shapes via the introduction of a wavetable oscillator.

MUSIC III 1960

“MUSIC 3 was my big breakthrough, because it was what was called a block diagram compiler, so that we could have little blocks of code that could do various things. One was a generalized oscillator … other blocks were filters, and mixers, and noise generators.”
5Max Mathews, (2011), ‘Max Mathews (1926–2011)’, Interview with Geeta Dayal, Frieze Magazine.09 MAY 2011. https://www.frieze.com/article/max-mathews-1926-E2-80-932011

The introduction of Unit Generators (UG) in MUSIC III was an evolutionary leap in music computing proved by the fact that almost all current programmes use the UG concept in some form or other. A Unit generator is essentially a pre-built discreet function within the program; oscillators, filters, envelope shapers and so-on, allowing the composer to flexibly connect multiple UGs together to generate a specific sound. A separate ‘score’ stage was added where sounds could be arranged in a musical chronological fashion. Each event was assigned to an instrument, and consisted of a series of values for the unit generators’ various parameters (frequency, amplitude, duration, cutoff frequency, etc). Each unit generator and each note event was entered onto a separate punch-card, which while still complex and archaic by today’s standards, was the first time a computer program used a paradigm familiar to composers.

“The crucial thing here is that I didn’t try to define the timbre and the instrument. I just gave the musician a tool bag of what I call unit generators, and he could connect them together to make instruments, that would make beautiful music timbres. I also had a way of writing a musical score in a computer file, so that you could, say, play a note at a given pitch at a given moment of time, and make it last for two and a half seconds, and you could make another note and generate rhythm patterns. This sort of caught on, and a whole bunch of the programmes in the United States were developed from that. Princeton had a programme called Music 4B, that was developed from my MUSIC 4 programme. And (theMIT professor) Barry Vercoe came to Princeton. At that time, IBM changed computers from the old 1794 to the IBM 360 computers, so Barry rewrote the MUSIC programme for the 360, which was no small job in those days. You had to write it in machine language.”
6Max Mathews, (2011), ‘Max Mathews (1926–2011)’, Interview with Geeta Dayal, Frieze Magazine.09 MAY 2011. https://www.frieze.com/article/max-mathews-1926-E2-80-932011

Max Mathews with Joan Miller. (Courtesy Max Mathews.)
Max Mathews with Joan Miller co-author of Music V. (Courtesy Max Mathews.)
7image: ‘An Interview with Max Mathews’. Tae Hong Park. Music Department, Tulane University. https://tinyurl.com/ypfdw2xb

MUSIC IV

MUSIC IV was the result of the collaboration between Max Mathews and  Joan Miller completed in 1963 and was a more complete version of the MUSIC III system using a modified macro enabled version of the assembler language. These programming changes meant that MUSIC IV would only run on the Bell Labs IBM 7094.

“Music IV was simply a response to a change in the language and the computer. It Had some technical advantages from a computer programming standpoint. It made heavy use of a macro assembly program Which Existed at the time.”
Max Mathews 1980. 8Curtis Roads, ‘Interview with Max Mathews’, Computer Music Journal, Vol. 4, 1980.

MUSIC IVB, IVBF and IVF

Due to the lack of portability of the MUSIC IV system other versions were created independently of Mathews and the Bell labs team, namely MUSIC IVB at Princeton and MUSIC IVBF at the Argonne Labs. These versions were built using FORTRAN rather than assembler language.

MUSIC V

MUSIC V was probably the most popular of the MUSIC N series from Bell Labs. Similar to MUSIC IVB/F versions, Mathews abandoned assembler and built MUSIC V in the FORTRAN language specifically for the IBM 360 series computers. This meant that the programme was faster, more stable and  could run on any IBM 360 machines outside of  Bell Laboratories. The data entry procedure was simplified, both in Orchestra and in Score section. One of the most interesting news features was the definition of new modules that allow you to import analogue sounds into Music V. Mathews persuaded Bell Labs not to copyright the software meaning that MUSIC V was probably one of the first open-source programmes, ensuring it’s adoption and longevity leading directly to today’s CSound.

“… The last programme I wrote, MUSIC 5, came out in 1967. That was my last programme, because I wrote it in FORTRAN. FORTRAN is still alive today, it’s still in very good health, so you can recompile it for the new generation of computers. Vercoe wrote it for the 360, and then when the 360 computers died, he rewrote another programme called MUSIC 11 for the PDP-11, and when that died he got smart, and he wrote a programme in the C language called CSound. That again is a compiler language and it’s still a living language; in fact, it’s the dominant language today. So he didn’t have to write any more programmes.”
9Max Mathews, (2011), ‘Max Mathews (1926–2011)’, Interview with Geeta Dayal, Frieze Magazine.09 MAY 2011. https://www.frieze.com/article/max-mathews-1926-E2-80-932011

MUSIC V marked the end of Mathews involvement in MUSIC N series but established it as the parent for all future music programmes. Because of his experience with the real-time limitations of computer music, Mathews became interested in developing ideas for performance based computer music such as the GROOVE system (with Richard Moore in 1970) system in and The ‘Radio Baton’ (with Tom Oberheim in 1985 ).

YEAR VERSION PLACE AUTHOR
1957 Music I Bell Labs (New York) Max Mathews
1958 Music II Bell Labs (New York) Max Mathews
1960 Music III Bell Labs (New York) Max Mathews
1963 Music IV Bell Labs (New York) Max Mathews, Joan Miller
1963 Music IVB Princeton University Hubert Howe, Godfrey Winham
1965 Music IVF Argonne Laboratories (Chicago) Arthur Roberts
1966 Music IVBF Princeton University Hubert Howe, Godfrey Winham
1966 Music 6 Stanford University Dave Poole
1968 Music V Bell Labs (New York) Max Mathews
1969 Music 360 Princeton University Barry Vercoe
1969 Music 10  Stanford University John Chowning, James Moorer
1970 Music 7 Queen’s College (New York) Hubert Howe, Godfrey Winham
1973 Music 11 M.I.T. Barry Vercoe
1977 Mus10 Stanford University Leland Smith, John Tovar
1980 Cmusic University of California Richard Moore
1984 Cmix Princeton University Paul Lansky
1985 Music 4C University of Illinois James Beauchamp, Scott Aurenz
1986 Csound M.I.T. Barry Vercoe


References

  • 1
    http://www.computer-history.info/Page4.dir/pages/IBM.704.dir
  • 2
    Max Mathews, (1997), Horizons in Computer Music, March 8–9, Indiana University.
  • 3
    An Interview with Max Mathews. Tae Hong Park. Music Department, Tulane University. https://tinyurl.com/ypfdw2xb
  • 4
    image: ‘An Interview with Max Mathews’. Tae Hong Park. Music Department, Tulane University. https://tinyurl.com/ypfdw2xb
  • 5
    Max Mathews, (2011), ‘Max Mathews (1926–2011)’, Interview with Geeta Dayal, Frieze Magazine.09 MAY 2011. https://www.frieze.com/article/max-mathews-1926-E2-80-932011
  • 6
    Max Mathews, (2011), ‘Max Mathews (1926–2011)’, Interview with Geeta Dayal, Frieze Magazine.09 MAY 2011. https://www.frieze.com/article/max-mathews-1926-E2-80-932011
  • 7
    image: ‘An Interview with Max Mathews’. Tae Hong Park. Music Department, Tulane University. https://tinyurl.com/ypfdw2xb
  • 8
    Curtis Roads, ‘Interview with Max Mathews’, Computer Music Journal, Vol. 4, 1980.
  • 9
    Max Mathews, (2011), ‘Max Mathews (1926–2011)’, Interview with Geeta Dayal, Frieze Magazine.09 MAY 2011. https://www.frieze.com/article/max-mathews-1926-E2-80-932011

Further Reading:

http://www.musicainformatica.org