Free Web Hosting Provider - Web Hosting - E-commerce - High Speed Internet - Free Web Page

From: mclaren Subject: musically, we're still living in the 1920s -- You all live in the 1920s. Not only do you live there, you work in the 1920s, you play in the 1920s, you go home to the 1920s, you sleep in the 1920s and you wake up in the 1920s. For all practical purposes, all of you are living in the Jazz Age and you have never left that decade. Permit me to explain: A study of modern history makes it unmistakably clear that the 1920s was THE crucial decade for the modern world. During the 1920s, the Bauhaus style of modern architecture arose--all those hideous rectilinear glass filing cabinets for people that now typify every large city in the world. Well, those monstrous coldly inhuman skyscrapers first appeared in New York in the 1920s, courtesy of the Bauhaus School of architecture. Like it or not, if you were dropped off by a spaceship in any large city on the planet, you would see pretty much the same thing when you looked around: a skyline of 1920s-style glass-box skyscrapers. Also during the 1920s, quantum theory arose--and every one of you reads this sentence courtesy of quantum theory. Specially, you are able to read this sentence because of CMOS microchips, whose aconymn stands for "complementary metal oxide semiconductor." This is another way of saying that the conducting parts of the transistors inside your computer are coated with a layer of insulating silicon dioxide which paradoxically both reduces power consumption and speeds up the operation of the transistor. This sounds insane, of course, because it essentially is: the idea that electrons could tunnel through the insulating silicon dioxide layer that covers a transistor is bizarre lunacy--"tunneling" means that an electron disappears from point A and reappears at point B on the other side of an insulator *without* traversing the space in between. This is obviously insane, and no rational person would believe such abject lunacy...yet quantum theory tells us that it happens...electrons CAN and DO "tunnel" through an insulator. Even more bizarre and even more wildly insane, quantum theory informs us that electrons which "tunnel" travel *faster* than electrons which must crawl through a standard conductive wire in the usual way. Thus, the CMOS chips that make your computer work could not be built without an understanding of quantum theory; and your computers operate as fast as they do, and use as little power as they do, precisely *because* of that 1920s-vintage quantum theory. And so the internet, the world wide web, the global infosphere, and the digital information revolution changing the way we work and communicate and learn...all these are possible ONLY because of the 1920s quantum theory. Again, modernist music with its rejection of tonality and its adoration of irregular rhythms and intense mathematical complexity, began in the 1920s. Schoenberg's atonal serialism was invented during the 1920s (many of S's key opus numbers coincide with the last 2 digits of the years during this crucial period in the 1920s), and Varese's percussive/timbre compositions first debuted during the 1920s. (Particularly Arcana, from 1925.) ŠModern music clearly begins during the decade of the 1920s and the basic assumptions which energized it have remained unchallenged until very recently. Likewise modern art and modern literature, all born in the 1920s and remaining largely unchanged today. (Modern art in America strictly speakng dates from just before the Armory Show in the late teens; modern art in Europe began slightly earlier. The horrendous recent Whitney Biennial debacle serves only to reconfirm the complete intellectual and aesthetic bankruptcy of most "official" New York modern art, even at the same time a cruise through the vritual art galleries proliferating on the internet serves to cofnirm the incredible vitality and idiosyncrasy of the non-New-York-centered non-academic non-"official" art world.) During the 1920s the assembly line (invented in 1914 by Henry Ford) caught on and spread like wildfire throughout the American economy. During the same decade electrification exponentiated, with electrical lighting and dynamo power for factories replacing gas lamps and industrial steam power respectively. The entire modern American economy is a minor elaboration of these developments, with the recent addition of networked computers--another side effect of 1920s-era quantum theory. The 1920s gave us those twin political demons, fascism and communism, in their most virulent incarnations--namely, the Russian communist state of Lenin (actually a military dictatorship which used a secular political theory as a state religion to justify its barbarities) and the German and Italian fascist states of Hitler and Mussolini, respectively (actually a pair of military dictatorships which used another secular political theory as a state religion to justify THEIR barbarities). Last but far from least, the 1920s was the decade that made America a car culture. Prior to the 1920s, the horse ruled: after the 1920s, the open highway was king and the motorcar reigned throughout North America, and soon the world. -- Let us for a moment assume that my thesis is correct and that the decade of the 1920s defines the modern world as we know it, freezing it in place artistically and economically and culturally. This being the case, it behooves us to ask: what next? In particular, what next musically? Because it's becoming clear, at the end of the 20th century, that most of the innovations of the 1920s are now wearing out their welcome. It took 75 years, but finally, in the late 1990s, we're witnessing the collapse. Most of the paradigms born in the 1920s are going kaput, and this generates ever-growing tectonic cultural and industrial and social upheavals throughout the world. It started slowly, back in 1988, with the fall of the Berlin Wall (that big bad ole 1920s boogey man, Marxism-Leninism came a-topplin' down all on its lonesome) but the waves of change have amplified into tsunamis during the last 10 years. Modern architecture seems finally to be waking from of its long Bauhaus narcolepsy, probably due to a raft of new materials technologies--carbon fiber composites, metal ceramics, aerogel and others. These new mateirals permit young architects Što design organic curvilinear buildings in strange new shapes. And the new shapes look and feel very different from the rectilinear glass boxes forced on the skyscraper designer of the 1920s-1970s by the tensile and compressional strength of steel girders and reinforced concrete. Even diehard modernists like Philip Johnson have abandoned that old Bauhaus style, though the formula hasn't yet entirely died out. The latest wave of new buildings of the 1980s and 1990s by young architects point toward a more asymmetrical, more organic-looking, less cubist and anal-retentive architectural "look." Quite anti-modernist. Likewise, the global march of information technology is now making obsolete a lot of the paradigms of old 1920s rustbelt industry, whose ultimate paragon was the Ford Motor Company River Rouge plant. That River Rouge factory provided the supreme example of massive vertical integration combined with economy of scale: the factory started with an open pit iron mine at one end and turned out new Model Ts at the other end. Stalin modelled his Soviet industrial policy after the River Rouge plant, and workers from other countries came to view it with awe, as though it was some kind of Martian artifact from a superior civilization. But global infotechnology flourishes best with exactly the opposite paradigm. Instead of massive vertical integration, diversity helps an info-industry grow fastest; massive economies of scale are not only unnecessary but self- destructive on the world wide web, since the cost of publication is pretty close to zero. People want a cornucopia of piths and gists on the web, not one or two gargantuan monolithic Ministry of Truth-style encycopledias of everything from only one point of view. Thus the River Rouge/3 TV network/Big 3 automobile company paradigm is now vanishing like the triceratops. Multimedia and computers are transforming modern art. Many on-line galleries now exist which could not exist in the physical world, since they contain too many works of art to be crammed into any realistic physical gallery space. And last, but not least, we are now witnessing the collapse and disintegration of old 1920s modes of discourse about music and the old 1920s modernist theories of music. This last is the development of most significance to the members of this tuning forum, whose collective work represents a new paradigm. There's no question that by the 1980s everyone had begun to realize that modernism in music was exhausted. It had simply run out of steam. Further elaborations of "hexachords" and "source sets" and "pitch class matrix" mathematics was obviously fruitless, since that mode of discourse has grown sterile. Any language begins to die when it becomes separated from the real world... And in the Šreal world, young composers have increasingly abandoned the 12-tone equal tempered scale, and all the atonal serialist pitch-class-matrix set theory involving alternatives to 12-tonality has now grown irrelevant as composers progressively move outside the 12 equal pitches. To date, not a single composer other than Ben Johnston in a few early pieces has attempted to duplicate the elaborate apparatus of pitch-class matrix atonal serial theory outside the 12 tone equal tempered system. There are not, for example, any article on pitch-class matrix atonal methods to be found in 1/1: The Journal of the Just Intonation Network. To my knowledge none of the articles about microtonality in The Musical Quarterly or Perspectives of New Music have focused on elaborating "source sets" or "all-interval sets" or "primary hexachords" in just intonation or non-12 equal temperaments. It is a simple fact that microtonality uses an entirely different musical language than 12-tone atonal serial modernism. The language of microtonal theory involves terms like "ratio space" and "symmetry groups" and "space-filling lattices" and "combination product sets" and "melodic vs. harmonic bias" and "commas." This is clearly NOT the language of 1920s-vintage atonal serialism as elaborated by Stockhausen and Boulez and Babbitt. Clearly, in microtonal music theory we are witnessing the growth of an entirely different way of talking about and thinking of music. In short, the move toward abandoning 12-tonality has focused on abandoning 12 rather than abandoning tonality. This is exactly the reverse of the past 75 years, during which every possible way was explored to abandon tonality even while the 12 Sacred Tones were maintained fetishistically, in the manner of a deviant worshipping his eternally static and forever immutable collection of women's shoes. This abandonment of 12 rather than tonality renders irrelevant most of the lingo from 1920-1980 music theory, since tonality is no longer nearly as much of an issue as is (dare I say it?) 12. Much of the modernist music-theory language centers around elaborate subtleties designed to extend the resources of a limited number of pitches: pitch class matrices, various transformations and projections of source sets, etc. are all intended to increase the composer's pitch resources by forcing a small number of pitches through an ever more elaborate number of conceptual transformations. But this kind of procedure became unnecessary once break through the limit of 12 pitches. If 31 or 41 or 47 or 119 pitches are available in a microtonal system, we need no longer agonize over various complex transformations and projections of source sets, since the source set is now plenty large enough to generate vast numbers of xenharmonic chords and an enormous variety of microtonal melodies. A moment's study shows that the number of basic triads in a microtonal system is proportional to the square of the number of recognizable thirds, while the number of 7th chords is proportional the the cube of the number of recognizable thirds, and the number of 9th chords is proportional to the fourth power, with the number of 11th chords proportional to the 5th power, etc. Thus, in a system like 31 tone equal temperament with Š5 recognizable thirds, there are 25 basic triads rather than the four available in 12 (in 12 we have major, minor, dminished and augmented); and in 31 there are full 125 types of 7th chords, 625 types of 9th chords, 3125 different microtonal 11th chords, 15625 13th chords, and so on. And as for just intonation? Once we move out into just intonation we have by definition broken through into a musical system with a potentially infinite number of pitches. This again renders moot the issue of how to increase the resources of a limited set of pitches, since all just pitch arrays can be extended indefinitely. In short, once we leave the prison cell of 12-tone equal temperament behind, all the 1920-1980 music theory strategies for enlarging that prison cell become irrelevant. Faced with such a geometrically increasing explosion of microtonal chords when we move outside 12 (particularly in prime-numbered equal temperaments beyond 12 and any just intonaation system, even Wilson CPSs), the cumbersome baggage of "source sets" and "projections" and "transformations" becomes unnecessary. The microtonal composer has plenty of musical resources at hi/r fingertips: no exotic theory is required to expand them. And so, by 1986--the touchstone year when, for the first time, the first affordable commercial digital synthesizer was introduced with full retunability built in (Yamaha's TX81Z)--the ability of a composer to explore new tunings was limited ONLY by hi/r capacity to conceptually deal with them. If you could grok a tuning well enough to generate worthwhile music in it, THAT (post-1986) was the ONLY issue in whether to use that tuning. This remains true today. Issues of instrument-building and money (prior to 1986, vast obstacles) became, post-1986, utterly irrelevant. Even after 1986, many composers felt most comfortable with 12 equal pitches to the octave, since that was what they were used to and mostly that is what's still taught in the universities. However, this too is changing. The current generation of composers and theorists who teach in university music department grew up in a world where technology did not permit non-12 scales to be explored without vast travail. This has colored their thinking. But the current generation of university music departments are now looking for composers versed in "ethnic" music as well as 12-TET western theory. ("Ethnic" music is a code word for "microtonal" music; see "Transethnicism As a result, it won't be long before the current crop of 12-TET-only musical academics will be replaced by composers who have grown up in world where any tuning can be easily and quickly explored on a synthesizer, and in which most of the music heard is recorded rather than perfomed live in person. More and more, as young composers buy a synth and find out that they can twist a knob and get 19 equal tones to the octave, or slendro, or pelog, or just intonation (all possible with a tweak of the knob of the E-Mu Proteus synths), increasingly these young composers ask themselves: Why not? Hey... Why not give non-12 a whirl? Microtonality is like Mount Everest...young composers are attracted to it because, technologically, it's there. It's at their fingertips. It's simple. It's easy. Why not give it a try? Thus, the technology is encouraging composers to explore strange and unexpected new musical realms, just as materials technology encourages architects like Robert Venturi to build something other than Bauhaus glass boxes, and contemporary artists to do something other than smear physical paint on a physical canvas which will then be hung on a physical wall in a physical gallery space. ŠAs a result we stand at a remarkably interesting cusp of musical history. The old 1920-1980 tonality/atonality paradigms are breaking down...but as yet no single ideology has appeared to replace them. It's entirely possible that from now on, no one single Approved Official Way of making music will dominate. This was not so throughout the jazz age, nor up to 1986. Remember: during the 1920s, despite all the supposed change in "modern" music, one constant remained rock-solid: the 12-tone equal tempered scale--for technological and financial reasons. Too, there's the fact that the 1920s distinguished itself as the Age of the Dictator: the supreme era of one-to-many communications, with propaganda trucks and leaflets blaring only ONE point of view to millions of faceless peons. But now, in the 1990s, we enter a period of many-to-many communications: no one single voice dominates on this tuning forum, no one single point of view can crush all the others by sheer repetition or sheer volume. (Despite attempts by the Greg Taylors and Daniel J. Wolfs of the world to do exactly that.) Alas for these would-be musical Mussolinis, the internet isn't a radio station where one stentorian generalissimo proclaims THE WILL OF THE STATE; the internet is a huge Athenian dialogue, rich with the sussurrus of millions of differing voices and points of view (a fact which enrages no end those like Daniel J. Wolf, who have repeatedly begged John Chalmers to censor my posts.) Yes, music changed radically in 1986, with the advent of affordable microtonal digital synthesizers. And with this change comes a concommitant transformation in the concert hall...itself a one-to-many paradigm, the modern concert hall being modelled after radio... one single elevated individual whose voice is amplified until it drowns out all others. This model of music-making differed radically from that of the Baroque (for example), when the audience was made up of a handful of perfomers--each family being an ensemble which heard the music they enjoyed by making it. With internet technology now allowing performers to jam with one other on synthesizers in real time while on different continents, it's clear that the old 1920s paradigms of the concert hall and the orchestra dolled up in expnsive duds...well, that's pretty much dead. We're headed back to a far more humane and far less Naziistic paradigm of music-making, much closer to the intimate Baroque ensemble than the Lincoln-Center-style musical "event" (a monolithic monumental spectacle distinctly more reminiscent of the National Socialist torchlight rallies in Nuremberg than the kind of intimate chamber concerts Bach put on with his own family.) You can see the rapidity of the change in the concert hall paradigm by taking a look at the AFMM, Johnny Reinahrd's so-called "American" Festival of Microtonal Music (it's actually the East Coast Festival Šof European Microtonal Music, but let's not quibble about details). Back in 1992, when I visited Johnny in New York, the AFMM mostly played music in divisions of the whole- tone (24/oct, 36/oct, 48/oct, 72/oct, etc.) with some just intonation. Synthesizers were pretty much unheard of, except for Mayumi Reinhard's compositions. By and large, this was a technological limitation. Divisions of the whole-tone accorded best with traditional acoustic instruments because this was the kind of music which required the least warping and twisting of traditional performance practices on 19th century European instruments: a perfomer trained to play in the 12-TET scale can most easily "hear" and reproduce divisions like 24-TET (because it uses exactly 1/2 of the standard semitone), 36-TET (because it uses exactly 1/3 of the standard semitone), etc., for simple practical reasons. Fast forward to 1997, five years later: The range of tunings played today by the AFMM has expanded enormously...mainly due to synthesizers, which now appear in probably upwards of a third of all AFMM concerts. Without much fanfare, synthesizers and electronic instruments are slowly but surely taking over the AFMM concerts...and with good reason. Many tunings prove insuperably difficult for performers to "hear" and play on conventional European 19th century instruments. (26-TET, 35-TET, 39-TET, 14-TET, 20-TET, divisions of the Gudermannian, the free-free metal bar scale, ad infinitum...NONE of these are at all easy to "hear." And that's the kiss of death for an acoustic performer who has to *imagine* a pitch before s/he can reproduce it.) While most acoustic instruments must be lipped or tweaked with alternate fingerings or unusual breath pressures or embrouchures to get reliable pitches outside of 12-TET, synthesizers can be instantly and effortlessly tuned to ANY arbitrary tuning, no matter how complex. Just press a button. Voila! There's the new tuning, at your fingertips. Moreover, the range of timbres available from synthesizers is vastly wider than what's available from conventional 19th century European instruments... For the most part, 'celli and violins and French horns are limited to the harmonic series (well, almost--no acoustic instrument is entirely harmonic, and most European instruments produce timbres whose overtones differ *significantly* from those of the harmonic series). Sustained inharmonic timbres? You must use a synthesizer--nothing else will do. Extremely rapid yet pitch-accurate grupetti? Again, you pretty much have to use a synthesizer® (Tubulongs wilě alsď do¬ buô theiň timbreó arĺ INharmonic.) Exotic chords in extravagant tunings like the vibrational modes of a metal bar? Again, you musô use a synthesizer. The end result of this tectonic upheaval in music technology will be the disappearancĺ oć thĺ traditional concert hall. Already, so-called "serious" concert halls iî biç cities Šface increasingly large deficits: and increasingly, the general public refuses to shell out of hundreds of millions of dollars iî public monies to universities whose costs constantly rise year after year 4 or 5 times faster than inflation, yet which graduate students with ever lower and lower levels of basic skills. (Most modern concert halls associated with concerts of "new music" are adjunct to a university. Thus¬ aó publiă supporô foň universitieó dwindles, thĺ unviversity-affiliateä concerô halló suffer.) To put it bluntly, with the incomes of 80% of the population droppinç iî reaě terís and most college graduates unable to find decent jobs (except as waiters and busboys and cab drivers, if you consider those 'decent jobs'), the public has lost interest in shovelinç moneů into "elite" concert halls of "elite" universities where "elite" modernist cacophonies are presented to tiny "elite" audiences of like-minded modernist academics. This, because all but the top 20 or 30 "name brand" colleges are now experiencing huge and exponentially worsening financial crises. Iî á posô lonç ago¬ Bill Schottseaedt mentioned that this ain'ô true of Stanford, and since Stanford's one of the "name brand˘ colleges he's probably right. For now. The real question, though¬ is whether Stanford and the rest of the "elite" institutionó can insulate themselves completely and totally from the rest of society. Is this really possible? I mean, think about it: if music programs *everywhere* in America, in every K-12 school and every high school, suffer savage cutbacks...won't this inevitably have an effect on the quality of musicians who apply to Stanford? Won't it degrade the quality of musicians who matriculate from Stanfordż Can Stanforä (oň anů otheň college© makĺ uđ iî ´ shorô yearó foň 1˛ yearó oć prioň deficienô musicaě education? Thió ió á seriouó question. Nď matteň ho÷ brillianô anä gifteä thĺ chef¬ iô stilě takes 15 minutes tď boiě water® Can a university exist entirely as a state unto itself, like a castle with the drawbridge pulled up? Can the elite universities iî Americá successfully ignore in perpetuity the fact that the rest of Americaî society is becoming Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome? Can elite institutions reallů succeeä in duplicating ALĚ the functions of all the lower levels of education, with hostó oć remedial reading and writing and arithmetic courses already common¬ anä now becoming more so, tď thĺ point wherĺ remediaě courseó threaten to takĺ over the entire institution? Can elite universities really continue to chargĺ a hundred thousand dollars and up to matriculate kids who can't read English properlů and can't write a coherent sentence and can't figure out a bus schedule? "At least 40 million Americans can be grouped under the heading 'functionally illiterate.' (..) [But] the number of people impaired by a lack of literary intelligence Šprobably comes nearer to 200 million. The evidence for the higher estimate shows up in...the poorly written examination papers pronounced summa cum laude at the country's leading universities. Three years ago at Yale I taught a course of English composition and found only four of twelve students in the class capable of writing a well-arranged paragraph--not because they weren't intelligent but because they never had acquireä the habit of reading. (..) Familiar with a vast archive of visual images, they easily could recall scenes and fragments of scenes from Star Wars, Melrose Place, Late Night with David Letterman, Pulp Fiction, Masterpiece Theatre, and Twin Peaks, but books were grim tasks instead of pleasant diversions, foreign objects, unfamiliar and vaguely ominous, meant to be studied as if they were cancer cells multiplying under the lens of a microscope or a jigsaw puzzle constructed from the bones of triceratops." [Lapham, Lewis, "The Spanish Armadillo," Harper's Magazine, April 1997, pg. 8] Maybe Bill Schottstaedt is right. Maybe these elite institutions can survive the systematic degradation of basic skills in this country as funds for K-12 education are savagely cut to pay the hospital bills of geezers. Who knows? Perhaps, armed with a degree from Harvard or Yale, the fresh-minted elitĺ graduate need not write coherently...and since there's little likelihood that a Harvard grad will ever take the bus, what does it matter if s/he can actuallů read a bus schedule? Perhaps. Perhapó thĺ musiă studentó matriculateä bů Harvarä anä Yale wilě, in 4 shorts years, overcomĺ thĺ enormouó lacunaĺ iî thĺir education causeä bů thĺ hugĺ cutbackó iî K-1˛ musiă educatioî throughout America. Perhaps. But I have my doubts. With states and counties and cities reeling from waves of factory shutdowns and downsizinç and progressive erosion of the tax basĺ causeä bů propertů tař revolts, arts programs are *always* the first to go--and we're seeing this throughout the entire educational hierarchy. Not only in colleges but in local communities¬ iî gradĺ schools¬ iî kindergartenó which woulä havĺ haä pianoó anä phonographó 10 years ago buô todaů havĺ onlů TÖ seôs blarinç "Sesamĺ Street." At the elementary and K-12 level, music programs are being ruthlessly cut...usually to zero. This means that music making and music education in the future is going to take place increasingly outside the expensive high-prestige concert halls which have traditionally provided a home for modernist ensembles. To put it bluntly, there isn't enougč money nowadays® We're living in a nation of rapidly aging boomers. This vast generational cohort demandó a rising stock market and a secure medical-indutrial complex, and everything else can go hang. Thus there's no money any more for the kinds of arts programs which once funded "new music" concerts. In a society increasingly dominated by geriatric Yuppies, there will very soon be no money for *anything* but hospital beds and the stock market. (Fact: if per capita expenditures on the Šelderly continue unchanged, by 2014 people over age 65 will take up 105% of the U.S. budget...just with medicare and social security! Obviously this cannot happen, therefore obviously every other program in the U.S. government will be cut progressively as we approach 2014.) Since actual live music-making is a fantastically labor-intensive operation, it's clear that what's happened to every other sector of our economy will soon occur (and is in fact occurring right now) in music: namely, the amount of skilled labor in musical concerts is being ruthlessly and progressively reduced. "The computer, the long-distance telephone call, the CD--not to speak of food and clothes--are part of an economic pattern that tends to drive costs down. There are now efficiences that can be integrated into the orchestra, making it cheaper to put on concerts. As years go by, the same concert of the same standard repertoire is and seems relatively more expensive vis-a-vis other things we buy and support philanthropically. That dynamic has been inexorable since 1945." [Botstein, Leon, "The Future of the Orchestra," Musical Quarterly, Summer 1996, Vol. 80, No. 2, pg. 189] This means that concerts over the Internet are the likely future of music: the CD and its successors (if any--DVD will probably NOT take over from the audio CD anytime soon) will be the way virtually all new music is heard. (This latter is already true, despite weird and hallucinogenic claims to the contrary by Paul Erlich. Apparently Erlich lives in a parallel universe where live orchestras provide the music at every movie theater, as they have not done since the 1920s. Apparently Erlich lives in somĺ exotiă alternate reality wherein a live string section produces Muzak in the corner of the supermarket. Apparently Erlich has never heard of loudspeakers, or encountered the sounds they produce in shopping malls, in the movies, on TV, in the dentist's office...just about everywhere. Bizarre comments likĺ Erlich's claim that "most of the music we hear is NOT recorded" help explain why friends of mine keep asking whether Erlich was drunk or on drugs when he made those posts. I tell 'em, "No, he's just a Harvard graduate." "Oh," my friends reply, "well, that explains it.") Along with doleful consequences like the decline of virtuoso skills (as acoustic instruments grow ever rarer and live acoustic concerts become ever less financially and artistically important to new music), there are salutary consequences of the collapse and decline of music education from kindergarten up to K-12 and beyond. Free from the strictureó 19th century European acoustic instruments, new composers will find themselves ready, willing and able to explore unimagined new universes of harmony and melody far outside the 12-tone equal tempered scale. Various acoustic-instrument festishists will at this point predictably take issue with the claim that live acoustic performances will wither away and all but vanish from human ken. True, there will probably always be some tiny ultra-exclusive super-high-priced market for live acoustic concerts, just as there is still a tiny market for scrimshaw, Shaker furniture and refurbished antique typewriters, but this market will be largely a nostalgia trip akin to the never-ending "Beatlemania" concerts featuring look-alike/ sound-alikes of John, Paul, George and Ringo. No one mistakes a Beatlemania concert for a real concert of new music, just as within 15 or 20 years no one Šwill mistake a concert of live acoustic music for a real concert of new music. Against this claim that "acoustic concerts will always be popular," permit me to adduce some technologies on the horizon, soon to become overwhelmingly important to music. First, there's physical modelling synthesis. At present this technology is in its infancy, but it's already impressive. Prior to the late 1990s, digital synthesis generally meant cold metallic timbres and denatured inhuman sounds: FM and additive synthesis (except when used with every trick in the book by supreme masters like John Chowning, William Schottstaedt, Jean Claude Risset, et al.) tended to produce cold and ugly sounds without warmth or life® Onlů vasô amountó oć programminç and mathematicaě anä acousticaě knowledgĺ permitteä these composeró tď generatĺ FÍ soundó witč reaě warmth anä vibrancy. By and large, up to the 1990s, that was what you got from digital synthesizers. Colä deaä sounds® Like it or lump it. But Julius Smith's physical modelling synthesis (Chris Chafe and Xavier Rodet and Perry Cook made vital contributions, too, and let's not forget the great grandaddies of the technology, Sera and Hiller in 1970) is a WHOLE differnet ball game, chilluns. Physical modelling synthesis sounds warms and organic. These timbres, though digitally generated, have life and grunge. They squirm in your hands like real sounds. They're interesting and lively; a whole different world from the usual cold dead bleeps and bloops typical of badly-programmed DX7s or K5s® (Alas¬ thĺ DX· embodied an extremelů stripped-dowî subseô oć Chowning'ó original ricč FÍ algorithm® You can't just punch any modulation index into the DX7, for example: you only get a very limited range of choices. Likewise, the toplogy of the carriers and modulators is limited to a very simplistic set of configurations.) Physical modelling right now is in its infancy, anä even more radical synthesis methods lurk around the corner, promising even more tantalizing and more voluptuous timbres. As computing power has increased (remembeň thaô digitaě synthó arĺ basicallů nothinç mroĺ thaî special-purposĺ dedicateä computers), it seems likely that we've crossed a threshold beyond which lively and warm and seductive digitaě timbres become the rule rather than the exception. So from now on, my guess is that sensuouó warí electronic sounds will become increasingly common in synthesized music. The computing power needed for physical modelling was vast, and we still need a lot more, but for the first time it's clear that those chips are no longer 20 or 40 years away, as they were back in 1970 when Sera and Hiller first explored physical modelling synthesis. Today they're 5, maybe 7 years away. So what we're looking at here is, digital synthesizers becoming radically more "live" and "warm" and "organic" sounding in the next few years. The 1980s and early 1990s were really the Stone Age of digital synthesis; it isn't fair to judge digital synthesizers by the squawks and bloops you could get from a DX7. Á betteň examplĺ woulä bĺ FÍ and additivĺ synthesió oć thĺ greaô masteň computeň composers: thĺ timbreó oć "Songes˘ bů Jeaî Claudĺ Risset¬ thĺ timbres Šoć "Turenas˘ bů Johî Chowning¬ thĺ timbreó oć "Colonů V" bů Williaí Schottsteadt¬ thĺ timbreó oć "Solaň Ellipse˘ by Barrů Truax. Timbreó fullů uđ tď thĺ extremelů higč standardó oć these greaô computeň composeró wilě sooî will be coming from ordinarů commerciaě synthesizeró in the next few years (they already are from the Yamahá VL series of synths), and these new warm organic sounding synths will give acoustiă instruments a real run for their money in terms of timbral nuance and subtlely and grace and sensuosness of sound. The other new technology that's just around the corner is deconvolution. This is another technology that's been known theoretically for almost 30 years. Back in 1970 Manfred Schroeder analyzed the reverberant acoustic characteristics of various concert halls around the world and turned their impulse responses into digital information. Then he played back a recording of music made in an anechoic chamber using some elaborate digital equipment which convolved the transfer function of the impulse responses of various concert halls with the dry acoustic signal of the string quartet. At the flick of a switch he was able to change from one concert hall to another, producing transformations in the sound "so dramatic that they can scarcely be expressed in words." [See Schroeder, M., "Number Theory in Science, Communications, and Acousticó," 1984, Spring-Verlag--É thinë that's thĺ title® Mighô bĺ mistaken. Date's definitely 1985 and it's definitely a Springer-Verlag book] Well, deconvolution technology will soon be applied to loudspeakers in real time for general-purpose full-bandwidth speakeň correctioî and this will have a revolutionary impact on how we hear recorded sound. (The technology is already used for "3-dimensional" sound in computer games, but this isn't really 3-D sound yet and as a result the impact has been trivial. You ain't seen NOTHIN' yet, kiddies.) Some explanation is in order here: One of the biggest problems with listening to recorded sound through stereo speakers is "the hole in the wall" effect® To put it bluntly, it don't sound like you're hearin' a real performer. It sounds like you're listening to two stereo speakers in your living room, and if yoő position yourself juuuuuuuuusô right¬ you can hear the "sweet spot" between the speakers, whicč produces the illusion of á holĺ iî thĺ walě througč which somĺ performeró arĺ playing. The reason for this "hole in the wall" effect is that the actual "presence" of the performers as detected by your ears in a live concert is encoded in phase and amplitude information in the signal that's been distorteä bů the electrical response of the microphones used in the recording, bů the recording console used, bů the mixer used in the recording, bů the digital recorder which recorded the signal, and so on. Thus, if you listen to a stereo recording of a flute player, it never quite sounds as though you're listening to a live flute player in front of you...no matter how costly your stereo speakers or amplifiers or CD player. The phase information has been scrambled both by the recording apparatus and by the loudspeakers which reproduce the sound. Even with the very finest loudspeakers and CD players, yoő stilě geô (aô best© thaô unrealistic bizarre "holĺ iî thĺ wall˘ effect when listening to a recording. Each piece of electronic equipment in the recording and reproduction chain--and most of all, the speakers themselves!--leave an imprint on the original musical signal, warping it slightly, until the phase & amplitude of the original musical signal has been so transformed that Šit no longer sounds like a live performer standing in front of you, but rather a hole in the wall playing a *recording* of a live performer. (Loudspeakers do the most damage, because elementary physics tells us that a sound wave diffracts if it encounters an object about the same dimensions as its wavelength. But loudspeakers are forced to generate sound waves with large wavelengths through tiny little 12 inch and 15 inch speakers, thus insuring massive diffraction and internal distortion. To make matters worse, the original spherical 3-D expanding sound wave must be squeezed through an approximately 2-D tiny little speaker, even further scrambling the original phase and amplitude information in the recording. And worst of all, microphones are tiny little acoustic Cylcops which detect only and entirely that tiny portion of the 3-D spherical sound wave coming from the instrument that happens to impact on a tiny little approximately 2-D microphone diaphragm. No wonder loudspeakers sound nothing like a live performance!) But very soon this will change. Deconvolution technology will allow us to measure the transfer function generated by a pair of loudspeakers--in other words, all the ways in which those 2 loudspeakers warp and change the musical signal so that they introduce a characteristic distortion typical of loudspeakers rather than the original sound wave... And once the loudspeaker transfer function has been measured and digitally recorded, it can then be deconvolved from the sound chain. "Deconvolution" amounts to nothing more than multiplying the signal in real time by the exact inverse of the transfer function of the loudspeakers (or, for that matter, the exact inverse of ANY transfer function of ANY sound generating device). This sounds complex, but the net result is simple: effectively, the loudspeakers will be turned into perfect point sound sources. They will be "subtracted out" from the audio chain, and the sound that reaches the listener will be the original signal as though it had never been diffracted or distorted by travelling through the loudspeakers. The problem? Deconvolution demands fantastic amounts of computation. Many, many hundreds of millions (if not billions) of floating point calculations per second of stereo sound... for each transfer function oć each piece of audiď equipment iî thĺ audiď chain. But we are very close to getting this kind of computational power cheap enough to put it inside every pair of loudspeakers, and this is going to be an incredible breakthrough in sound reproduction. In effect, every pair of loudspeakers will become a perfect point source of 3-D sound, completely compensating for and subtracting out the reflections of the room in which you listen, the distortionó introduceä bů thĺ loudspeakeró themselveó and probably eventually the amplifier and CD player through which you play the sound, and even the microphones through which the music was original recorded. (Within 20 years audio equipment manufacturers will probably go berserk computing the transfer function of every piece of audio gear out there, from mikes to mixers to DAT recorders to amps, and you'll be able to download appropriate deconvolution functions for each piece of equipment in the audio channel off the internet into the deconvolutioî chip in your audiď system--foň a fee. In fact, an artificial intelligence network which automaticallů figures out which equipment was used in each of youň recordings and combines all the different transfeň functions for you will probably soon become á standard part of the digital audio chain, jusô as standard as loudspeakers now are.) So within the next few years, not only will digital synth sounds be getting a whole lot more vivid and warm and organic, but for the second time in their 70-year history loudspeakers will make a giant technological leap (the first time was Thiele's speaker equations Šin 1960) whicč will pretty much erase the acoustic difference between a seat in a concert hall and a seat at home between two loudspeakers in your living room. In short, for the first time we are moving beyond the 1920s in sound recording and reproduction. Now, those of you with a lively imagination have already foreseen the next step in deconvolution technology: if you can deconvolve a pair of loudspeakers from the audio chain, why not use the technology in real time real musical performances to deconvolve the whingeing nasal quality of the voice of a mediocre singer and turn the sound of her voice into the magnificent vocal tones of, say, Kiri Te Kanawa? Completely possible. In fact, we can go farther--deconvolution could theoretically subtract out the mediocre-sounding qualities of a poor violin performance and multiply in the gorgeous timbral qualities and timbral nuances of a Itzhak Perelman! Thus, deconvolution technology eventually promises to make every performer a virtuoso with a golden tone...the ultimate case of "fix it in the mix." Yeô anotheň reasoî whů thĺ erá oć thĺ virtuosď is over. Given these new technologies around the corner, along with retunability in digital synthesizers, there's little question that the whole 19th century live acoustic big-bucks one-to-many torchlight-Nuremberg- rally-spectacle concert hall paradigm of music making is toast...finis, no mas. Stick a fork in it, kiddies, it's done. God, I love the 90s! --mclaren