If musical data processing is essential us so much today, it is that it gradually created tools which are radically modifying the manner of thinking the pskovmusic.ru. However, its history is short. It merges with the development of numerical technologies: computers, initially, accompanied by creation by the languages symbolic intended for the programming, then with a whole troop of inventions in numerical technology. Enough early in its history, data processing will be shown sufficiently ripe to accommodate concerns of all kinds, energy of accountancy to scientific research, while passing naturally by what interests us, artistic creation.
And it is undoubtedly there that it is necessary to distinguish what arises from data processing itself, and what belongs rather to the broader world of numerical technology. The music amply draws from these two fields its new resources. However, since the field of the sound is converted today into audio numerical, the distinction is essential. Musical data processing is born from the meeting of the musical concerns and the environment resulting from numerical technologies and the specificity of the computer, on the one hand, and of the scientific fields which clarify its research topics. If the musical composition appears there in good place, practically all the other activities of the music are found there. And musical research partly covers the ground cleared by data processing, acoustics, the treatment of the signal, even cognitive psychology: thus musical data processing is at the center of several musical, scientific and technical fields.
But it is the recourse to the specific contributions of the data processing which characterizes its step. New conceptual tools are unceasingly provided by the artificial intelligence, which are concretized by languages such as Lisp or Prolog. They are put at once at the musicologist assistance or abstracting service to the composition. Research in systems real time and on the interfaces interactive makes it possible to conceive new connections between the instrumentalist and the electronic universe.
Great stages of musical data processing
With the origin of musical data processing, one finds two types of activities, independent one of the other. If these activities prudent today, it is in another manner that the original vision which caused their birth could enable to foresee. These two types of activities are: the musical composition, and production of the sound. In both cases, the manufacture of the desired result is ensured by the computer. These two types of activities are appreciably contemporary. The first serious tests of musical composition per computer go back to 1956: it is on this date that Lejaren Hiller calculated a partition using rules encodes in the form of algorithms on the computer Illiac I of the university of Illinois. It is about Illiac Suite for String Quartet, whose three movements are carried out this year by the string quartet WQXR. In a famous structure, published in 1959 and which supports the title of “Experimental Music-Composition with year Electronic Computer”, Lejaren Hiller explains in detail the procedures that it applied to the Illiac computer in order to produce the partition of his string quartet.
To locate this period, it is as into 1956 as John McCarthy forged the term of artificial intelligence. One year later, max Mathews, researcher at the laboratories of the Bell Telephone, in the New Jersey, a first numerical programmer of synthesis of the sound for the computer IBM 704 writes. Known today under the name of Music I, it is the first of a great family of acoustic compilers; a psychologist, Newman Guttman, generates first a one 15 seconds duration study, In the Silver Scale. It is as into 1957 as the four movements of the Continuation Illiac for String Quartet of Lejaren Hiller are published; the same year is born the primitive version from the famous language of FORTRAN program (FORmula TRANslator). Let us note that during the creation of the work of Hiller by the string quartet WQXR, it is max Mathews which organized a recording, which gave place, thereafter, with the publication of this recording in a disc carried out in 1960 by the Bell Laboratories, and entitled Music from Mathematics: even if the ways traced by these two inventors are independent, it is not known as that they did not cross…
From these two almost contemporary events, the development will continue, gradually, in the traced directions: the composition and production of the sound. We will see low the courses of them. But a third way is not long in appearing: it is born from the same observation that had made Hiller: the computer is above all, at that time, a formidable calculating machine. Moreover, the English term of selected computer indicated, before the appearance of these machines, the employees charged to operate calculations. But at the same time, with a bit of fear, one spoke readily at the time of electronic brains. An artist could not approach the computer not without a certain emotion, which explains without any doubt the attraction sometimes terrifying that data processing will exert on the artists of the following decades. But they are two scientists who are at the origin of these experiments: Hiller practiced chemistry, while Mathews was an already famous researcher. It is undoubtedly what explains remarkable methodologies that they reflect in place, each one on their side, and with completely independent aims.
