The world of electronic music is a vast, complicated, and ever-expanding study. In the pop world, most producers are simply concerned with making sounds that best fit current market standards. For others, however, the study of electronics in music has a much deeper and more profound series of explorations: how do we use electronic instruments to produce sounds that we cannot achieve in the acoustic world? More generally, students of electronic music may ask themselves what the purpose of electronic music even ought to be. In this essay, I intend to make clear the most effective uses of electronics in music (on merely a level of tone, sound, and texture). In addition, I wish to tackle the question of what the most proper implementation of electronics in music is, and what the ultimate goals of such implementations ought to be.

It would be absolutely foolish to not begin with one of the godfathers of electronic music: For the past two years of my life, I have been deeply studying the synthesis techniques of the late Karlheinz Stockhausen - particularly his involvement throughout the 1950s. While most of his techniques would be considered anachronistic and vintage for today's standards, it undoubtedly had a major impact on the way that we perceive the role of electronics in music, in addition to the exposing the infinite world of possibilities that electronics contain.
The particular aspect of Stockhausen's works that so intensely fascinated me was his concept of forming vowel sounds with electronic oscillation. More exactly, his technique involved the combination of multiple sine wave oscillators in order to achieve sounds that echoed the vowels contained in human languages, such as 'ae', 'ee', 'oh', 'oo', and 'ah'. Stockhausen recognized that one of the most inherent beauties in music are uncovered by sounds that emulate human speech and vocal traits.

Not only has this recognition carried greatly into the future of modern electronic composition; it was also a point of interest of many past composers, including Harry Partch. He was a notorious experimenter with alternative musical intonations and scales, but his most famous invention was the 43-tone-per-octave scale that he built so many of his instruments around. Partch mathematically calculated the scale around the harmonic traits of the human voice. The result is a sound which may startle most listeners (as we are conditioned to hear music in a certain way early in our lives) but after a while, a true inner beauty unfolds - the beauty of a much more complex and humanistic approach to tone and texture. There is little doubt, through both musical and evolutionary research, that the human voice is what has modeled the methods of human music over time.
Stockhausen was so amazingly ahead of his time for this exact reason: he was the first composer to deliver touches of human beauty (the same beauty espoused by Partch) to a deeply cold and calculated world. He was the first to enable electronic music to characterize the inner-most beauty held in the best performances of acoustic music.

So have electronic musicians been able to progress past this point of discovery? Unfortunately, not as much as one would expect. Yes, Iannis Xenakis was instrumental in defining new possibilities in electronics by composing "sounds” instead of "notes", and the minimalist movement has been helpful in using qualities such as phasing and modulation in certain pieces, but with respect to the actual textural and sound possibilities of electronics, not much improvement has been made. The problem stems from how we as humans conceive of textural possibilities as related to our vocal traits. If the point of electronic music is to express possibilities not found in the world of acoustic music, then it would be logically necessary to transcend the limitations of the human condition. No longer should electronic musicians concern themselves over the issues of creating more organic timbres, nor should they be trying to retrofit electronics into the mold of the boring, aging, and progressively-useless trends of western 12-tone musicality. Instead, the future of electronics should be vested in exploring ways to supersede the limitations of the human condition, which has defined all of the music we've made since the beginning of time.

How does one go about rising above human nature? One simply has to understand the conditions that limit our creativity. The thought pattern differences between humans and computers are vast, as demonstrated by Dr. Daniel Levitin; human brains are able to perform many tasks at once, since there is no “central processing” location where all calculations and decisions are sent, whereas computers process calculations one at a time - albeit, rather quickly, which gives the false facade of multi-tasking. When humans use computers to make music, therefore, it would make sense that in order to best utilize the tool, humans ought to combine their inherent ability to multi-task and be creative with the computer's ability to calculate amazingly complex algorithms. The theoretical result would be, in a way, super-human: the combined forces of opposite frames of mind – the resultant of largely enhancing the potentials of the human condition. This point should then bring up the question of why most electronic music seems so human, instead of “super-human.”

We have, for the longest time, understood music to be the organization of notes in time. This means that traits found in music centralize around pitch, rhythm, dynamics, timbre, and texture. These concepts, however, are mainly defined through our inability to understand sound until it actually hits our eardrums. The sound world is theoretically infinite, which means that the overwhelming majority of possibilities that exist in the sound world are entirely foreign to us, even considering that we can only hear from around 20Hz-20kHz. In order to achieve a higher level of musical communication - above that which the human brain is conditioned to - musicians, composers, engineers, and theorists will need to begin to examine super-human musical contexts. I won't for an instant entertain the thought of knowing the ways to go about these ambitions, nor do I understand the exact qualities that would define super-human musics. I merely wish to uncover and expose these thoughts in order to perhaps influence a move away from the unambitious uses of electronic music that are so typically espoused. I foresee a future in electronic music free of keyboard-driven synthesizers - which do nothing but limit our tonal possibilities and appease to the little-minded desires of uninterested piano players; guitar effect pedals - which are much more effective as marketing devices than they are at giving users control over their sound; and digital niche products such as the KAOSS Pad - which market towards unintuitive users that wish to merely achieve the "sound of the day", and which completely avoid any possibility of the user learning what is happening beneath the surface. But this future can only become a reality when we as electronic musicians break free of the stranglehold the conventions of music have on the absolute freedom that the electronic world can potentially offer. Absolute freedom doesn't come from potentiometers, which limit the possibilities of the user 100 percent, nor does it come from any other type of physical controlling or sensing device. The physical realm is too limiting to condition the endless possibilities of electronic music.

So how does one escape the stranglehold the physical realm maintains on electronic musicians? The answer lies within lightweight, versatile computer music languages like SuperCollider, CSound, and ChucK. These languages, as many advanced electronic musicians know, intend for the user to build their own interface from the ground up; thus removes the inevitable potential of software/hardware not doing EXACTLY what you want. Just as importantly, it weeds out imitators from true visionaries, as the user needs to know exactly what he/she wants in order to create it. The pre-programmed presets and plugins meant for specific (and corny) operations are intended for learning purposes only in most cases, although most artists popular for their uses of electronics in their compositions (ranging from Daft Punk to Radiohead) produce their sounds lazily using such applications, and they can thus be replicated by pretty much any standard computer music enthusiast.

More often than not, my views on electronic music composition/performance are called pompous, arrogant, or close-minded. I fail to see the logic behind this assertion. After all, if we were to extend the contexts of software like Reason, or hardware like the KAOSS Pad, to the acoustic instrumental world, the results would be truly shocking. Imagine a guitar player that could only arpeggiate simple chords if a machine or foot pedal did it for him, or a violinist that could only play trills by means of an external device. Would anybody not question these musicians' abilities, both in terms of talent and vision? Now ponder this: what if said musicians didn't even understand what these devices were actually doing to enhance their sound? This would be a pretty close approximation of the average user's understanding of electronic music creation. If we all can recognize the computer as a legitimate platform for composition and improvisation, then we must also treat its use on the same level as that of other respectable instruments; whether the instrument be a viola, a flute, a sitar, or an Asus laptop, the same rules of understanding your instrument, its techniques, and its theories, should apply.

If/when the dull, overused, and illegitimately simplistic devices of electronic music are phased out, the real visionary creation processes can begin. These processes must come to fruition by, first and foremost, opening up the electronic music creation world to the average listener. In order to legitimize electronics in music, the standards for electronics need to be raised to the same standard as all other instruments. This means that, during live performances, electronic performers ought to display their processes to the audience. Live coders should display their coding on a screen for the entire audience to see. Algorithmic composers should similarly project their processes in real-time; just as new musical qualities take effect during a performance, the coding differentials should be displayed as well. Undoubtedly, part of the art of a performance is in the musician's interaction with the music, and the instrument(s) making the music. In other words, it is not just the violinist's bowing of a violin that makes a performance great – much of the hidden beauty comes from actually being able to see the violinist bowing the violin in real time. This same quality should be applied to live performance in the electronic domain as well. I, therefore, commend musicians ranging from DJ Tiesto to Alva Noto for bravely displaying their coding processes for the world to see. This is an instrumental first step in revolutionizing the electronic music domain.

Not only does opening up the performances of electronic music legitimize its potential as an art form, but it also helps expand and liven its community. The act of opening up the coding/processes of electronic music indeed aligns itself closely with the principles championed by the open source community. Other musical elements have become aligned with these same principles, which can be demonstrated through institutions as basic and simplistic as tab and lyric collections, as well as through groups as specific and jargon-filled as the ripe community of music production/engineering websites. Developing a community based on strong user interaction is vital for an art form to succeed. Presently, many such communities exist by means of message boards and mailing lists, but they are mostly limited to certain practices/techniques/applications. Opening up the performance aspects of electronic music will lead to opening up the creation aspects as well.

Once the audience, the performers, and the performances, are all communicating on equal wavelengths – where each entity's unique qualities begin to strongly influence the other groups' – the electronic music world will begin to see revolutionary changes, which can only be defined by qualities which no electronic composer has been able to even comprehend yet. But, more importantly, this can only happen after the electronic music world wakes up from its uncreative slumber, and begins to utilize electronics in music as more than a runt approach. We as electronic musicians must take the process of creativity much more seriously, and we must not allow our art to fall to the tendencies and characteristics held by the acoustic music world – a world which has a much different set of variables and contexts. In the acoustic world, these tendencies are quite acceptable and truly necessary, but in the context of electronic music, these same conditions are miraculously limiting, and will claim the absolute inability to produce worthwhile progress – if we aren't careful.

Andrew Grathwohl

www.gwohlproductions.com

Suggested Reading:

This Is Your Brain on Music – Dr. Daniel Levitin

Generative Music – Brian Eno

Introduction For A Call For Silence – Nicolas Collins

Rethinking the Computer Music Language: SuperCollider – James McCartney

Live Coding in Laptop Performance – Collins/McLean/Rohrhuber/Ward

Musicophilia – Dr. Oliver Sacks