It’s easy to let the phrase “computer music” evoke an image of cold, mechanical sounds generated by computer programs. The School of Music’s Computer Music concert Wednesday proved that computer music can be just the opposite: a complement to human expression.
Many of the pieces performed were played by instruments that were enhanced by computers. Rather than replace a human element, the computer served as an extension of the instrument.
“For example, there’s a piece for marimba and digital delay, which is actually a computer, which has a computer program called MaxMSP,” said Reginald Bain, Professor of Composition and Theory and Director of USC’s Experiment Music Studio, xMUSE. “[MaxMSP] takes the signal in from the marimba, and then applies a delay and some processing to it, and then it takes the signal right back out of the computer, so the audience can hear it, to create multiple copies of the marimba.”
Using technology to make music is really no different from the use of instruments in the first place. Computers simply take away the need to build a completely new machine each time a new type of sound is required.
“The whole idea is that it’s a kind of hyper-virtuosity,” Bain said. “The computer is an augmentation of a human being’s expression. So it’s the way we either manipulate the hardware or write the software so that it responds to us in a creative way.”
Different media included traditional instruments such as the bassoon and the flute, as well as more vague apparatuses like “electronic soundscape” and “electronic media.”
The concert included a piece by student composer Mason Youngblood, a fourth-year student in the Honors College whose electronic music-related pastimes also include working at WUSC. Youngblood’s piece was titled “Freight Tremor,” and was for electronic media.
“At this concert, we partner with the recording arts program, and they give us one of their most talented students to be the live sound reinforcement engineer, so it kind of serves as a project for them,” Bain said. “If you can imagine, you’ve got microphones, you’ve got computers, you have live performers; in some cases they’re even hooked together, so there are a lot of technical concerns that you wouldn’t normally have, so it’s really a chance for students to experience lots of realms of technology.”
On one hand, this was still a concert like any other, with performers and instruments. On the other, it was an extraordinary chance to see talented musicians given superhuman abilities for exactly one performance. Either way, the concert brought attention to what is surely one of the most fascinating topics being explored at USC: computer music.