Friday, April 26, 2019

James Tenney Encounters Computers: 1961–1966

My last report on the essays of music theorist and composer James Tenney, compiled by the University of Illinois Press in the book From Scratch: Writings in Music Theory, concerned his pursuit of, in his words, “A Phenomenology of Twentieth-Century Musical Materials.” That quotation comes from the title of his Master’s thesis at the University of Illinois, which he completed in 1961. The University of Illinois also provided him with his first serious encounter with digital computers and the technical skill of programming those devices. The three essays that follow his Master’s thesis in From Scratch document his experiences in working with computers and the impact of those experiences on this thinking about music and “musical materials.” The titles of those essays are “Computer Music Experiences, 1961–1964” (completed in 1964), “On the Physical Correlates of Timbre (1965), and “Excerpts from ‘An Experimental Investigation of Timbre—the Violin’” (1966). (The excerpted document was a grant proposal.)

Once again, I appeal to the reader to allow me to put these dates in a personal context. My freshman year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) began in September of 1963. My very first elective during that first semester was a course on computer programming, almost all of which was focused on working with machine code. I hated it. Programs had to be given as input to the computer as decks of punched cards, and the slightest error meant that the deck would be ejected without yielding any results. Since we were allowed only four attempts for each assignment, the pressure was maddening; and I came away with little more than the ability to decipher the “Principles of Operations” manual for an IBM computer.

Fortunately, that was enough to get me a summer job at the University of Pennsylvania. Initially, I was simply assisting a graduate student with data entry for a long program written in a long-forgotten programming language (IPL-V). After I had been there for about a week, another graduate student asked me to help him with writing the code for the system he was developing as part of his thesis research. Free of the constraint of getting everything right within four attempts, it did not take me long to get into a comfortable groove of implementing useful code.

That same graduate student then told me that I could use the computer for any other project that interested me. I told him that, having been instructed in the rules of counterpoint, I was curious to see if those rules could be translated into software. He encouraged me to go ahead with the idea and directed me to the book Experimental music: composition with an electronic computer by Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson. (Hiller had founded the Experimental Music Studios at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign by the time Tenney was beginning to work on this thesis.) Thus, I made my first steps down the rabbit hole in the summer of 1964.

This was a good time to be at MIT. The Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) had first been demonstrated in 1961; and it provided ways to program a computer through a keyboard (basically a repurposed teletype, some models of which could both read and write punched paper tape). It also supported a programming language called LISP (LISt Processor) that allowed you to type in programs as symbolic expressions and run them from the keyboard. There were also computers with interactive systems to support writing long programs (text editors) and testing them in “debugging” environments. By the time I had reached my senior year, I was enjoying the facilities available at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, whose Director, Marvin Minsky, supervised my senior thesis work around developing software for playing music.

That last paragraph is important, because Tenney does not seem to have had the luxury of working with such interactive systems for writing, testing, and running computer programs. Wherever he was based, he had to live in a world of “batch processing,” which seriously impeded the whole nature of research as an ongoing process of the interaction of ideas and their implementation. The present-day reader of the essays Tenney wrote between 1964 and 1966 will probably be inclined to ask, “Why didn’t he just …?” The answer is, “Because he worked in an environment that would not support his doing that sort of thing!”

Each of those three essays presents an admirable account of finely disciplined hypothesis-and-test thinking. Unfortunately, that discipline was seriously impeded by work habits that had to be developed to accommodate computer systems that had not been designed for “user interaction.” The most significant consequence of those work habits was a need to limit the hypotheses one could pose on the basis of which ones could be realistically tested. As a result, when Tenney sought to investigate timbre, he tended to focus on data consisting of individual tones, whose analog recording could then be transformed into digital data. His working environment was simply not up to “capturing” an actual performance of music as digital data; and, as a result, his hypotheses never tried to address the dynamic interactive relationship between an instrument’s timbre and what the player of that instrument is actually doing.

In other words we have come a very long way since Tenney wrote those essays. Indeed, the distance is so long that it is unclear that there is much value in these texts. The one thing that interested me was that his account of his work at Bell Labs probably had some connection to a piece by Princeton composer James K. Randall entitled “Lyric Variations for Violin and Computer.” As I recall, Randall wrote an article for Perspectives of New Music in which he chronicled the tortuous path he had to follow to get the computer at Bell Labs to make even the slightest peep of a sound. My guess is that this was a serious cri de cœur; but, to his benefit, he managed to maintain a sense of humor in documenting his experiences. Tenney was a much more serious writer; and, considering what he had to endure, I wish he had cultivated a better sense of humor.

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