Son[i]a #212
John Chowning
As a man of many, interconnected facets, John Chowning has played a leading role in several chapters of the history of electronic music. As a composer, his is one of the few essential names in any overview of computer music made in the United States in the early seventies.
In 1964, with the help of Max Mathews (from the legendary Bell Labs, where computer music was virtually born) and David Poole from Stanford University, Chowning began using Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence laboratory for his experiments.
Years later, in 1974, he founded the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford, which remains one of the key centres in music technology research anywhere in the world. Lastly, in his role as developer, Chowning is the inventor of FM synthesis: the technique that revolutionized the world of synthesizers and the sound of electronic music in the eighties.
SON[I]A talks to John Chowning and charts a historical overview of the different branches of his artistic career, focusing on his interest in the human voice, the creation of new sonorities, and being a pioneer in a discipline at a time when using computers to generate music was a leap into the void between creative eccentricity and scientific adventure.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Peter Zinovieff that we were unable to include the first time around.
Elektronmusikstudion (EMS)
In 1953, after attending the first Swedish Radio and Fylkingen Society electronic music concert with Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer, Swedish artist Öyvind Fahlström wrote a manifesto for concrete poetry. More than a decade later, the Swedish Radio broadcasted his pioneer radio piece “Fåglar I Sverige (Birds in Sweden)”. In the decades that followed, the complexity and broad spectrum of productions coming out of the Elektronmusikstudion (EMS), founded by Karl Birger in 1964, made it a hub for artists. But while the text-sound scene was in and out of the Sound Workshop, Knut Wiggen, the first director of the EMS, channelled his energy into the futuristic dream of creating a world-class computer music studio for experts and scholars.
Peter Zinovieff
Peter Zinovieff talks about how he assembled the world's first personal computer, his time at EMS and the team that accompanied him, about the listening room, academia, and the tribulations of paper-tape; about engineering, experimentation and how not to keep a sound archive; about Unit Delta Plus, how to run a synthesiser off a windmill, and how to kindly ask a computer to make us a beautiful composition.
Arthur Sauer about Wave Field Synthesis
Arthur Sauer, co-founder of The Game of Life, the world's only mobile Wave Field Synthesis system, talks about immersive sound, spatial electronic music, and other applications of Wave Field Synthesis.
Once Upon a Time in CA
A spaghetti western about experimental music on the West Coast in the 1980s.