Current Employer:. About Me:. File Attachment:. Turenas - The Realization of a Dream. We began by discussing the early days of electronic music and some of the systems that were used for developing it. Photo: J Mercado. We started using it in , and finally shut it down when Apple developed their Unix system based on the Motorola processor.
The way in which digital music was created at that time was a far cry from the modern world. Once those files were written, the music — four channels of audio with integrated reverberation — could be produced in real time and recorded to analogue tape. The Box then became available to the next user in the queue. Running it as an assignable device like a computer printer avoided the problems that would have occurred if we had run it in a studio in which one user could tie it up for hours on end.
I asked him whether there was any truth in the common belief that the technical limitations of the original system had contributed in some way to the character of the music, or whether the new recordings were superior. So we have to manage aspects of the modern technology so that the listener still hears what the composer intended. This helped to propel the Next into the mainstream of the computer music world for a while. I asked whether he felt that the constraints of the early hardware and software had aided or inhibited creativity.
There was a noticeable difference in the way people worked back then. The idea of careful calculation in composition has now become much less important because the cost of a mistake is negligible, whereas the cost of synthesis on a big time-shared computer, and therefore the cost of a mistake, could be enormous.
So the amount of care one applied to the building of ideas was very much greater in the past, and there was probably something lost when we moved to real-time computation. It was a very rich experience for me. Hearing this, I suggested to Chowning that his image as a technologist might be at odds with how he sees himself as a musician and composer. I love working on a piece. The fact that the result was music made it a deeply passionate endeavour. I was working on spatialisation, so I needed sounds that would localise, sounds that had some form of dynamism so that they could be distinguished from the reverberant field.
Pitch-modulation seemed to be the most salient feature of the sound that would allow me to do that, so experimenting with vibrato was an obvious thing to do, and I just kept going until I realised that I was no longer hearing changes in the time domain, but rather I was hearing changes in the frequency domain. The DX-7's success and influence aside, Chowning also left his mark as a composer of computer music; his most notable works included 's Sabelithe , 's Turenas , 's Stria , and 's Phone.
AllMusic relies heavily on JavaScript. Please enable JavaScript in your browser to use the site fully. Blues Classical Country. Electronic Folk International. Jazz Latin New Age. Aggressive Bittersweet Druggy. Energetic Happy Hypnotic. More at All Music: John Chowning. Audio Engineering Society: Composing for Loudspeaker. Credit: Curtis Roads.
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