26077289 the synthesis perception and specification of musical time milton babbitt

8/3/2019 26077289 the Synthesis Perception and Specification of Musical Time Milton Babbitt

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The Synthesis, Perception, and Specification of Musical Time

Author(s): Milton BabbittSource: Journal of the International Folk Music Council, Vol. 16 (1964), pp. 92-95Published by: International Council for Traditional MusicStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/835091

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Ways and Means of Tone Production in Art and Folk Musicand their Resulting Notational Problems

THE SYNTHESIS, PERCEPTION, AND SPECIFICATION OFMUSICAL TIMEMILTON BABBITT

(The Electronic MusicCenter of Columbia and Princeton Universities, U.S.A.)THE various notational means of signifying and conveying the composer's decisionsand specificationsto the various media for the electronic productionof musical soundare probably temporary both in their exact nature and variety. But this should notbe construed as a basis for concludingthat these notational practices are, therefore,ofconsequence only to the historian of the ephemeral,or to the operatorsand designersof such media. The characteristics of these notations and, indeed, the very fact oftheir probable ephemerality embody implications of far more than mere "historical"interest, implications which extend significantly beyond the nature of the currentmeans and even the structures of the particularmedia.These notations, unlike current conventional musical notation, are "machinelanguages,"usable with and applicableto only a specifictype of machine, or to one inwhich it is contained as a discrete sub-machine. They are instructions to an artifactonly of a specific internal construction, with a particularinput mechanism related inthis single manner to the internal structure. Although the expression "machinelanguage" is a product of the computer era, its designation is not, certainly not inmusic. Tablature notations, for instance, are machine languages, incorrect ormeaninglessas notations for musical instruments other than those forwhich they wereconstructed. They can be extended in their application only after having beenrecorded into a general symbolic notation from which the performermust translateagain into the machine languageof his particularinstrument. ConventionalWesternnotation is just such a symbolic language, and the first rudimentary techniqueacquiredby a performer s that of an assembler or translator,recodingthis notation-usually mentally-into machine language: fingerings, lip pressures, hand positions,etc. That there is as yet no general symbolic notation for music composed forelectronic media is not simply, nor is it primarily, evidence of the inadequacy andinappropriatenessof conventional notation for such needs and purposes, but ratherof the profound change which these media have effected in the location of the boun-daries of music: from those limits imposed by the physical structure of conventionalmusical instruments and the physiological structure of the human vocal and muscularsystems to not only the relatively limitless capacities of the electronic media but alsoto the far morecomplexly constrainedand less well comprehended imits of the humanperceptual and conceptual auditory capacities. Therefore, our current machinelanguages are sufficient but not necessary, for they include an infinity of acousticalpossibilities which are of no auditory significance. The electronic medium, perforce,provides regulableand measurablecontrol of frequency, intensity and duration-andtherefore, of envelope, spectrum, and mode of succession. This, in an adequate

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TONE PRODUCTION IN ART AND FOLK MUSIC

notation, would requiremeans of signifying a continuous infinity of values in each ofthese dimensions, but realistic musical needs apparently are satisfied by a discreet,finite collection of values.Thus the creation of an adequate and efficient symbolic notation depends uponthe acquisition of knowledge of aural perception. Until very recently we knew onlyhow little we knew in this area. How difficult our tasks might be could be inferredfrom what we did know of the complicated many-one relations between the acousticaldomainsand what wereassumedto be their correlatedauditorydomains, andfromtheintricate extent to which each auditory dimension is dependent upon more than oneacoustical dimension.The solution of the apparently innocent problem of musical notation thus carriesone to the central problems of musical perception, and onto the same path as thatupon which the composer finds himself when he becomes aware that the responsibleuse of the electronicmedium involves him, formally and informally, in acoustical andpsycho-acoustical research. He must specify his compositional decisions with anaccuracy and completeness that have been unnecessary and impossible in the pastand he must discover the answers to questions that have never been posed before andwhich never could have been answeredbefore. These questions can now be answeredwith the aid of electronic media and must be answered if these media are to beemployed to the full of their singular capacities.The notation used in composing works for, and realizing works on, the RCAElectronic Sound Synthesizer eventually must take the form of input specificationsmost simply and completely described as vector representations: orderedquintuples(at least) of positive integers, with each element of the quintuple representing per-ceptually separable components of the musical event, and the values of the integersdesignating commands to the data stored in the form of electronic configurations.These integral values, in binary representation, are punched as holes in the input-control paper tape. These holes are in turn sensed by brushes, which then energizethe relays that switch this designated succession of commands in their electronicrealizations. The five minimal dimensions are: frequency (the total audio frequencycontinuum is available); octave (the total frequency class of which the frequency is arepresentative is available; thus, frequencyand octave serve to specify what normallyis termed "frequency");envelope (a range of temporal values for growth and decayfrom "electronic instantaneity" to those easily specified as intensities); intensity;and spectrum (usually obtained by the resonation and attenuation of frequencybandsof an incoming "saw-tooth" or "white noise" signal, that is, the specifications of anelectronically constructed "formant" to be imposed upon such initial signals).Mostimportantly, time values-values of duration orprotensity-are not includedin this set of specifications, for unlike time notation for a computer-generatedsound,they are not represented digitally, but in analogue, as distances along the paper roll.Although a temporal specification for the total event can be adjoined to the vector,increasing its dimensionality to six, the meaning of this value is fundamentallydifferent from that of the others in the representation, for its meaning necessarily isthat of an intervallically-scaled measurement; for example-and this is only ordinalrather than intervallic-a smaller number in this category must represent a shorterduration, assumingthat the input speed remains fixed. The values in the other fivedimensions either cannot or need not have such denotations. They are nominallyscaled, "arbitrarily"chosen and related, and convey no information, even within thismachine language, without a description of the associated internal configurationswhich the numbers, for the moment, name and select. The temporal value not only

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has no such dependenceon an internal configuration,but is never employed or appliedin binary form. This decision on the part of the designers of the Synthesizer bothreflects a wish to provide the most completely flexible, "over-efficient" mode ofspecifications in the temporal domain and correspondsto the composer'srealizationthat it is in the specificationand regulation of this domain that the electronicmediumpossesses and promisesits most strategic, unique, and extensive musical contribution.For the first time the temporal in all its compositional manifestations-speed andflexibility of pitch; loudness and timbral succession; durational, timbral, registralanddynamic rhythm, etc.-can be analysed and synthesized to any perceptually realisticdegree of accuracy.The taped examples that follow, therefore, are synthesizer-created instances ofcritically time-dependent musical phenomena. They are not intended as "sciencespectaculars"but, on the contrary, as the most apparently modest, brief, and simpleingredients of musical composition, which incorporate nevertheless profoundlydifficult and conceptually new problems. These examples will serve to test theextension into the electronic domain of those invariants which have providedthe basisfor the formational and transformational principles of past and present musicalsystems, the extension into the musical domain of the hypotheses of the psychologyof perception,and also those tenative generalizationsof similitude and hierarchizationwhich already have been proposed for phenomena producible only by electronicmeans.

The examples presented included instances of: (I) Identical specifications offrequencywhich, for differentspectra and onlyfor durations of less than one-tenthof a second,producewhat areidentified as different,yet individually unambiguous,pitches. This provides an unprecedentedcase of one-many relations between thefrequency and pitch domains and of the variance of pitch with regardto duration.The "threshold"durationalvalues at which such frequencyspecificationsproducepitch identity (equivalently, it appears,the "normal"frequency-pitch correlations)appearto be a non-trivial function of the characteristicsof respective spectra andthe absolute value of the frequency. (2) The threshold of identification offrequencysuccession as demonstrated in the presentation of a succession in whicheach of the components is of the same duration and loudness, at a speed at whichonly about half of the componentscan be identified. (Each component'sdurationis about one-thirty-secondof a second.) The speed is then reducedin a number ofstages. This is comparable with tachistoscope tests in visual perception toprovide a reasonable criterion of "simplicity." These speed tests indicate theimportance of pitch extrema in the perception of succession. (3) The effect ofquantitative time factors on the identification of qualitative temporal relations.Certainsuccessions,identical in every respectexcept in the orderof the components,are perceived as totally identical, whereasothers arenot so perceived. Similarityof interval succession appears to be the basis of such misidentification. (4) Theincrease of the threshold duration for the identification of succession as theregistral span is increased. (5) The greater accuracy of durational judgementswhen the durations are associated with "specific" pitches rather than with"indefinite," percussion instrument-like pitches. (6) The dubious status ofcertain "time-order errors"of classical psychophysics, when presented in musicalterms to trained musicians; this includes both protensity judgements andloudnessjudgements as a function of the time interval between the phenomena to becompared. (7) The apparent alteration of timbral characteristics resulting from

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TONE PRODUCTION IN ART AND FOLK MUSICONE PRODUCTION IN ART AND FOLK MUSIC

an alteration of the temporal relations between component timbres in an "en-semble": this result appears to depend on, for example, the coincidence of peaksbetween trills. (8) The "misidentification"of timbral families, and the inabilityto identify components in a complex as a result of the precise synchronization ofattacks of the component frequencies. (9) The dependence of frequency dis-criminationon the duration of the presentedfrequencies. (io) The dependenceofdurational identification on timbral characteristics.Even such modest, if novel, attempts to determine the correspondencebetweeninput specification and perceived outputs in time-dependent phenomena serve, atleast, to indicate the critically limited nature of ourknowledgein this field. The mereidentification of durational equality appears to pose considerable problems for theauditor and, therefore, even greater problems for him who would understand theprocesses of temporal perception.I hope I have been able to convey something of the character of and the musicaloccasion for this new and necessary compositionalresearchand, by implication, of itshighly interdisciplinary character. I regret the impossibility of discussing thoseinvestigations of larger scale temporal considerations, particularly with regard tofigural after-effects and memorative determinants. I trust it is apparent thatjust as the machine translation of languageshas necessitated and produceda far moresatisfactory and efficient analysis of the structure of "natural" languages, so thenecessity of precise and complete communication with electronic sound-producersmotivates the reanalysis of the sound event and musical structure, providing us withinformation as to the nature of all music, non-electronic as well as electronic.

AN EXT'ENSION OF TONE-ROW TECHNIQUES THROUGHELECTRONIC PITCH CONTROL

MYRON SCHAEFFER(Electronic MusicStudio, University of Toronto, Canada.)

IN January of this year, on the occasion of the first electronic music concert held atthe University of Toronto, I composeda work for voice and electronic sounds in whichdifferent tunings provided the basis of three different octave species. Whereas thevoice part was based on the diatonic tempered scale, the two accompanying partswere each in a different system of tuning. One part was based on a scale of twelvetones in which there was a difference of 63 cents between the successive steps; thesecond part employed tones separated by 172 cents. The results were sufficientlyencouragingto attempt a generalizationand organization of a comprehensivesystemof tuning for further experimentation.The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to some aspects of this tuningmethod. It is offeredas a suggestionto electronic music composerswho areinterestedin tone-row techniques as one direction in which experimental music might grow.One important difference between traditional and electronic music is related tointonation itself. Traditionalinstrumentsarelimited to the productionoftoneswithina predeterminedpitch system and are bound by this system. Relatively slight devi-ations of pitch can be achieved at the will of the performer,but the repetition of any

an alteration of the temporal relations between component timbres in an "en-semble": this result appears to depend on, for example, the coincidence of peaksbetween trills. (8) The "misidentification"of timbral families, and the inabilityto identify components in a complex as a result of the precise synchronization ofattacks of the component frequencies. (9) The dependence of frequency dis-criminationon the duration of the presentedfrequencies. (io) The dependenceofdurational identification on timbral characteristics.Even such modest, if novel, attempts to determine the correspondencebetweeninput specification and perceived outputs in time-dependent phenomena serve, atleast, to indicate the critically limited nature of ourknowledgein this field. The mereidentification of durational equality appears to pose considerable problems for theauditor and, therefore, even greater problems for him who would understand theprocesses of temporal perception.I hope I have been able to convey something of the character of and the musicaloccasion for this new and necessary compositionalresearchand, by implication, of itshighly interdisciplinary character. I regret the impossibility of discussing thoseinvestigations of larger scale temporal considerations, particularly with regard tofigural after-effects and memorative determinants. I trust it is apparent thatjust as the machine translation of languageshas necessitated and produceda far moresatisfactory and efficient analysis of the structure of "natural" languages, so thenecessity of precise and complete communication with electronic sound-producersmotivates the reanalysis of the sound event and musical structure, providing us withinformation as to the nature of all music, non-electronic as well as electronic.

AN EXT'ENSION OF TONE-ROW TECHNIQUES THROUGHELECTRONIC PITCH CONTROL

MYRON SCHAEFFER(Electronic MusicStudio, University of Toronto, Canada.)

IN January of this year, on the occasion of the first electronic music concert held atthe University of Toronto, I composeda work for voice and electronic sounds in whichdifferent tunings provided the basis of three different octave species. Whereas thevoice part was based on the diatonic tempered scale, the two accompanying partswere each in a different system of tuning. One part was based on a scale of twelvetones in which there was a difference of 63 cents between the successive steps; thesecond part employed tones separated by 172 cents. The results were sufficientlyencouragingto attempt a generalizationand organization of a comprehensivesystemof tuning for further experimentation.The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to some aspects of this tuningmethod. It is offeredas a suggestionto electronic music composerswho areinterestedin tone-row techniques as one direction in which experimental music might grow.One important difference between traditional and electronic music is related tointonation itself. Traditionalinstrumentsarelimited to the productionoftoneswithina predeterminedpitch system and are bound by this system. Relatively slight devi-ations of pitch can be achieved at the will of the performer,but the repetition of any

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26077289 the synthesis perception and specification of musical time milton babbitt

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