In Chapter 4 of Artful Design, Ge revisited the beginning of computer music, and explored what is truly unique about programming and how it can be applied to make interesting music. The guiding principle throughout this chapter, in my opinion, is the observation, or perhaps belief, phrased in Principle 4.5 (p. 181):
Design things with a computer that would not be possible without.
Previous chapters have touched on some of the unique powers of programming, namely the ability to make copies and form organic systems out of individual elements. This is illustrated in a sample piece called “the THX deep note” were shown to be composed in ChucK, to show how to use programming to spawn many noises and control their pitch through chaos to convergence to make a system where noise gradually come together to form a coherent sound. I really like this demo because it shows the fine-grained process of coordinating how many different pitches go from randomness to a target value over time, which is probably too complicated for any analog machines to produce. Computer music is like the molecular gastronomy of cooking science – new aesthetics are offered by this extra fine-grained level of control.
The other power of programming that strikes me is its ability to sample any sound and transform it into an instrument. Chapter 4 also introduces Paul Lansky’s music and his view of ‘personal music filter’ which is about how we can reinterpret everyday noises around us as music, to create art out of the mundane. Now, this concept would stay in the imaginary space if not for the computer’s ability to sample and transform any sound segment we like. Thanks to the tools and techniques we have, we can now hear out Lansky’s personal music filter in Table’s Clear, a song where he rearranges tableware percussions sounds into what is a new form of music.
Indeed, like Ge mentioned, computer music and sound design demonstrate that new tools give rise to new aesthetics. I took the time to listen to the other song in Lansky’s Homebrew album called ‘Now and Then’, and was even more awestruck then when I was listening to Table’s Clear! (Perhaps the latter’s concept has been more widely adopted now, but anyways in comparison this ‘Now and Then’ track feels something more experimental and unsettling to me). In it, Lansky transforms samples of a female voice narrating the common phrases in storytelling denoting time (‘once upon a time’, ‘now at last’, ‘again and again’, etc. ), and puts them under a new light : they are stacked, reverb-ed, pitched, accelerated, accompanied with chords that react to each syllable, and manipulated in a thousand other ways, to the point where they transcend from mundane sound segment into symbols or even instruments. They form a strange design loop (chapter 3) in that they take the form of sounds segments that elapsed through time in the song, but their lyrical contents also point to the very passage of time. Thanks to computer programming, speech samples are elevated into the realm of magical enchantments – It’s like I’m carried away in a time travel experience in this new medium, totally mindblown and at a loss of words. A new aesthetic experience came into being for me at that moment, and that was truly beautiful.