6. How did technology over the years impact your music and creative process? Can you walk us through your albums and what the general process was like for each?
You'll find Barry's answer here. You do not want to miss this. Not only will you hear one of CalArts Buchla 200 systems in 1976, but you'll get some insight into the thought process behind the piece "Trinity".
"In exploring my compositions, I think it’s best to take a few works and deal with them one at a time. The first one I’ll consider is Trinity composed in 1976 using one of CalArts Buchla 200 systems. Beginning with Trinity, all of my pieces done using the Buchla 200 used the same basic patch" [pictured left]
"Originally broadcast on April 27, 2013, the London Resonance FM O.S.T. show with host Jonny Trunk is a fascinating discussion on the Barron's pioneering work in electronic music. This show is now available on SoundCloud. Featured guests on this program include myself and Peter McKerrow. This is a lively, entertaining, and informative discussion on the Barron's music, especially on the score for the film Forbidden Planet."
via Barry Schrader who has an interview on UNDAE Radio from Madrid. Embeds don't work for them, so click through below. Barry also received the 2014 Lifetime Achievement award from SEAMUS. Details below.
"From UNDAE Radio in Madrid comes this two-part broadcast on my music and compositional philosophy. Presented in Spanish and English, these programs are hosted by Antony Maubert, Hertz Volta, and Antonio Sánchez, and are a production of Campo de Interferencias, broadcast on Radio Circulo de Bellas Artes. Recorded live in the radio studio in Madrid, Part 1 was originally broadcast on March 10, 2014, and part 2 on March 17. Included in the broadcasts are several of my works. The podcasts for these shows can also be found here, as UNDÆ! Radio nº 46 and UNDÆ! Radio nº 47."
"I am very pleased to announce that I have been selected to receive the 2014 Lifetime Achievement Award from SEAMUS, The Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States. This award will be presented at the 2014 SEAMUS National Conference at Wesleyan University on Saturday, March 29. On the same evening, at the 8:00 concert in Crowell Hall, the final movement of The Barnum Museum (The Chamber of False Things) will be presented.
Speaking of The Barnum Museum, the CD has received several very positive reviews. Some of the more notable reviews available online can be found at Chain D.L.K., The Computer Music Journal, and Bop-N-Jazz."
Hi everyone! As you know Barry Schrader will be giving his farewell concert at CalArts on September 26. The following is the beginning of my interview with him. I opted to post the questions and answers as they come in. New QAs will get a new post so you do not miss them and they will be added to this post so we have one central post for the full interview. This should make it easier for all of us to consume in our busy lives, and it will allow you to send in any questions that may come to mind during the interview process. If you have anything you'd like to ask Barry, feel free to send it in to matrixsynth@gmail.com. This is a rare opportunity for us to get insight on a significant bit of synthesizer history, specifically with early Buchla systems, and I'd like to thank Barry for this opportunity. Thank you Barry!
"There are three Peter Grenaders. The first one is a renowned composer, whose works have secured wins at several festivals all over the world and whose artistic friends include some of the greatest names from the field of electronic music: Morton Subotnick, Steve Roach, Barry Schrader and many others. The second one is an instrument designer and Head of Plan B, a company producing modular analogue synthesizers. This Peter Grenader enjoys the immediate interaction between these machines and the performing musician, the way in which they allow a composer to have his instruments really do what he wants them to. Customers of his have included Nine Inch Nails and the Red Hot Chilli Peppers - again among many others. The third and final Peter Grenader is a former student at CalArts, now, retrospectively, probably considered the most important faculty of experimental media in the USA at the time. With stars like Harold Budd and John Cage working closely together with students, this was an exciting era of departure, of fresh beginnings and of discovering new technologies, timbres and tools. As a CD project and a string of new Plan B products are approaching, the first and second Peter Grenader are sure to make headlines soon. But until then, we're sitting down for a chat with the last one, talking about the "good old times" and life as a student at CalArts in the 70s."
"Hollywood, however, had already been utilizing instruments such as the theremin in movie scores for many years, and the first widespread American public exposure to the possibilities of the electronic medium occurred with the 1956 release of MGM's feature film Forbidden Planet. In addition to its elaborate space sets and advanced visual effects, Forbidden Planet featured an exclusively electronic musical score composed by Bebe Barron (b. 1927) and her husband Louis (1920-1989)....
Once they decided on the characters' moods and situations, the couple completed a series of electrical circuits which functioned electronically in ways analogous to the human nervous system. Decisions about the circuitry were strongly influenced by their studies of the science of cybernetics which proposes that certain natural laws of behavior are applicable to both animals and more complex modern machinary. The composers employed their noise-producing circuits to emulate such needed characterizations as serenity, anger, and love....
Bebe and Louis' success signaled the beginning of the effective use of electroacoustic music by the modern movie industry."
via Peter Grenader of Plan b:
"We have lost a bright little little light and a dear friend. Bebe Barron has passed. She has captivated us with her charm, her modesty and her enchanting smile and her memory will remain in our hearts, our art and our spiritforever."
It is with great sadness that I report the death of Bebe Barron on April 20, 2008 at the age of 82, of natural causes. Bebe was the last of the pioneering composers of classical studio electronic music. She was a close friend, an enthusiastic colleague, and a most gracious lady.
Bebe Barron was born Charlotte Wind in Minneapolis, on June 16, 1925. She received an MA in political science from the University of Minnesota, where she studied composition with Roque Cordero, and she also spent a year studying composition and ethnomusicology at the University of Mexico. In 1947 she moved to New York and, while working as a researcher for Time-Life, studied composition with Wallingford Reigger and Henry Cowell. That same year, she met and married Louis Barron (1920 - 1989). Shortly thereafter, the Barrons began their experiments with the recording and manipulation of sound material by means of a tape recorder that they received as a wedding gift. They created a private studio in New York and, in 1955, composed the first electronic music score for a commercial film, Forbidden Planet. In 1962 the Barrons moved to Los Angeles; they divorced in 1970. In 1973, Bebe married Leonard Neubauer, a screen writer. Bebe became the first Secretary of the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS) in 1985, and also served on the Board of Directors. In 1997 Bebe was presented the SEAMUS Award for the Barrons life work in the field of electro-acoustic music. She is survived by her husband, Leonard, and her son, Adam.
Bebe’s last public appearance was on January 12, 2008, at an event held at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, celebrating the work of her good friend, Anais Nin. Bebe was too ill to speak in public at this point, but she agreed to be interviewed for a video piece that was shown at the event. This is her final interview, and you can see it on YouTube.
Bebe’s final composition, Mixed Emotions (2000) was composed in the CREATE studios of the University of California at Santa Barbara. I'll be putting this work up on the Downloads 2 page of my website, along with some photos of Bebe and myself taken in 2005 at her home on the Photos page within the next week.
I first met Bebe Barron in the middle 1970s; I don't remember exactly when, but I think it was around 1975. I had asked Bebe and her former husband and composing partner Louis to attend a showing of Forbidden Planet that I had arranged as part of a class at CalArts. They agreed to do it, and I quickly became good friends with Bebe and we remained close over the years.
In writing about Bebe Barron, it's impossible not to focus on the pioneering work that she and Louis did in electronic music. They began their experiments in 1948, shortly after they were married. This early work was done using a tape recorder, preceding the work of Luening and Ussachevsky and the switch from disks to tape by Pierre Schaeffer and the GRM. But, to my knowledge, the Barrons' early experiments did not result in any completed works, a state of affairs not uncommon with early pioneers in the field. In 1949 they set up one of the earliest private electro-acoustic music studios and began their experiments with electronically generated sounds. They built their own circuits which they viewed as cybernetic organisms, having been influenced by Norbert Weiner's work on cybernetics. The circuits, built with vacuum tubes, would exhibit characteristic qualities of pitch, timbre, and rhythm, and had a sort of life cycle from their beginnings until they burned out.
The Barrons recorded the sounds from the amplification of these circuits and this formed the basis of their working library. They also employed tape manipulation techniques as part of their compositional procedures. The sound qualities of these various amplified tube circuits and the tape manipulations that they underwent formed the musical language that the Barrons created in their studio. Unlike some of the work being done elsewhere, the Barrons' music reveals long phrases, often stated in tape-delayed rhythms, with the stark finesse of the tube circuit timbres. They created a style that was uniquely their own yet married to the technology they were using.
The Barrons earliest finished work, Heavenly Menagerie (1951) does not seem to have survived in a complete form. But their score for Ian Hugo's film Bells of Atlantis (1952), based on a poem by Anais Nin, who appears on screen, does exist on the film sound track. This may be the earliest extant work of the Barrons and presages what was to come with Forbidden Planet, the music for which was composed in 1955, the film being released the
next year.
The music for Forbidden Planet is truly a landmark in electro-acoustic music. This was the first commercial film to use only electronic music, and the score for the movie displays an attitude towards film scoring that was different from anything that had happened before. In Forbidden Planet, while there are themes for characters and events in the film, as was traditional in the scoring of that day, the themes are composed and perceived as gestalts, rather than as melodies in traditional movie music. Even more important is the fact that the scoring of Forbidden Planet breaks down the traditional line between music and sound effects since the Barrons' electronic material is used for both. This not only creates a new type of unity in the film sound world, but also allows for a continuum between these two areas that the Barrons exploit in various ways. At some points it's actually impossible to say whether or not what you're hearing is music, sound effect, or both. In doing this, they foreshadowed by decades the now common role of the sound designer in modern film and video.
The Barrons composed many other works for tape, film, and the theater in the 1950s. Their studio became the home for John Cage's Project of Music for Magnetic Tape, and they assisted in the creation of Cage's first chance piece Williams Mix (1951-52), as well as works by other members of the group such as Earle Brown and Morton Feldman. As a studio for the creation of their own and other composers' works, the Barrons' studio served as a functioning center for electro-acoustic music at a time when there was no institutional support of the medium in the United States. It's curious, then, that, for many years, the Barrons, their studio, and their works were largely overlooked by composers and historians in the field. Fortunately, that injustice has since been corrected, and, in 1997, it was my great honor to present to Bebe and, posthumously, to Louis, the SEAMUS Lifetime Achievement Award. Bebe was involved with SEAMUS from the very beginning of the organization. She was one of the ten original members who responded to my organizational call and met at CalArts in November of 1984 to form the group, and she was SEAMUS's first secretary. There may have been a little strong-arming on my part to get her to be involved so actively, but Bebe was always ready to support the cause of electro-acoustic music in whatever way she could.
Bebe created a firm legacy in her music. If the importance of one's work is to be judged in any regard by it's influence, acceptance, longevity, and innovative qualities, then the score for Forbidden Planet is an enormous success. It remains the most widely known electro-acoustic music work on this planet. For me, Bebe Barron will always be the First Lady of electronic music." Update: BTW, if you have Netflix, you can watch Forbidden Planet online in IE here.
Another fascinating bit of synth history. Don't miss the UVI demos below. This is the first time the WaveFrame AudioFrame has been featured on the site. There was a controller for one featured here, and it was used by Barry Schrader and mentioned in my interview with him here and one previous post here.
This one was sent my way via swissdoc: "I just scanned my mega-sized German flyer from 1988/1989 of the WaveFrame Corporation AudioFrame. It is 600x600 dpi an weights in as about 32 megs. You can find it here [or check out the images of the complete pdf in this post - click each to zoom in].
It is similar to Fairlight or Synclavier and was kind of the first DAW. The system is still supported by http://www.waveframe.com
"Back in the 80's the WaveFrame Audioframe was the second generation of mega samplers, in line with the NED Synclavier and Fairlight CMI. A complete 48-voice system would sell for over $100,000, and at the time the feature set was worth it! The Audioframe was used by renowned artists like Peter Gabriel and Stevie Wonder and by leading sound designers and foley artists.
The UVI WaveFrame Sound Collection isn't a massive library dredged with tens of gigabytes of super high resolution wave files - conversely, it's a lean and mean library expertly crafted after the original, weighing in at just over 350 MB.
As you can hear in the demos, size isn't a factor for this library. The collection contains a multitude of very useful and organic sounds such as keyboards, guitars, basses, solo strings, string sections, upper brass, lower brass, brass sections, woodwinds, synths, pacific rim, percussion, drums, effects and test tones.
WaveFrame Sound Collection brings you an excellent library of bread and butter sounds that preserve the character and history of this milestone in music tech history."
via synthetic in the comments of this post: "Neil Diamond's "The Jazz Singer" was on cable a few days ago and the synth player was rockin' an ARP Quadra. I think I saw a String Ensemble in there too. The last concert scene, "Fahhh, we've been travelin' faaahhh..."
"In 2000, Curtis Roads, composer, director of the of the electronic music department at UCSB and ex-editor of The Computer Music Journal commissioned his friend Bebe Barron to compose a piece of music at UCSB's CREATE studios.
At first Bebe was hesitant to do this, but at the arguing of Barry Schrader, over a six week period with the technical assistance of composer Jane Brokman, Bebe did in fact compose what was to be her last body of work, aptly entitled 'Mixed Emotions'
Although digital, it has a remarkable analog quality to it, akin to the timbres we would expect from the Barrons. You can hear Bebe speaking about these similarities in a taped audio interview which is still accessible at npr.org (search Barron once on the site, you'll see the link).
Until recently Mixed Emotions was heard only by those who attended it's premier at UCSB and at the 2001 SCREAM Festival at CalArts. Earlier this year however, Leonard Newbauer (Bebe's husband) commissioned a gentleman by the name of Mario Salinas to tape and produce a video of her memorial. In it they included Mixed Emotions, which is accompanied by some really interesting video graphics. The presentation is great. Without hesitation I can say that Bebe would be very pleased.
After some discussion, I have received approval from Leonard to release the Mixed Emotions section of the memorial DVD to the internet. It will be officially premiered on Matrixsynth in the next few days and will take permanent residence on my You Tube space:
"The Yamaha DX100 owners manual contains a very interesting chart of its 'carefully chosen' frequency ratios, although there is barely any discussion about them at all or what they actually are or relate to..
These mysterious ratios also appear in the other 4, 6 & 8 operator Yamaha FM synthesizers/chips, such as the DX7, DX21, TX81Z, FB-01, DX11, FS1R, DEXED, you name it.. so the information here is relevant for any FM synthesizer capable of producing these ratios.
With a little deciphering using a tiny Python program it turns out this mysterious chart contains 4 groups of inharmonic ratios : √2, √3, π/4 and π. Included in this repo are =>
- spreadsheet in Open Office & PDF format deciphering and organising these ratios into a more coherent layout, plus an Addendum of complete tables computed up to 30x multiplication
- Python program to produce the Addendum tables. Edit & rerun this code to generate output for higher ratios, for example alter the multiplier variable to print out higher ratios for use with 6 & 8 operator synths.
- excerpt from the original DX100 owners manual showing these ratios obtained from here =>
Yamaha have been quite cunning, as you will see from the tables I've made decoding this mysterious chart. The inclusion of these 4 inharmonic ratio groups has been done in such a way that they contain exact multiples of themselves. This is incredibly useful when programming an FM sound using just sine waves, and as Yamaha hint they "produce extremely complex waveforms" for things like "sound effects including extremely realistic bells, explosions, etc."
Here is a simple example I tried poking around on my DX7ii:
Consider creating a sound containing inharmonic timbres, where you would like to have a complex wave modulating a simple sine wave carrier tracking the keyboard normally. This could easily be achieved with a 3 operator sine stack 3>2>1. For the carrier [operator 1] you could choose a ratio of 1.0. Then you could setup operator 2 at √2 = 1.41 creating an inharmonic ratio, and modulate it with operator 3 using √2 but at x 2 = 2.82. This would give you a 2:1 ratio for operators 3 & 2 respectively and create a nice complex modulating wave with minimal to no beating. You could further adjust either or both operator 2 & 3 ratios using √2 as the inharmonic ratio to keep it whole number [integer] based.. or move across to another inharmonic set for one or both and explore futher from there.
how to keep me going ==>
if u find this repo useful please think about supporting my work either thru my bandcamp page:
https://noyzelab.bandcamp.com/ or send a Paypal donation or otherwise get in touch via noyzelab [at] gmail [dot] com
thanks, dave"
Update: this reminded me of an interview I did with Barry Schrader in which he discusses his deep dive into FM synthesis after working with vintage Buchla systems. Scroll down to Triptych for an example and/or search for Yamaha for more.
