opposition to music that is made directly by humans<\/em>.\u00a0 And why do it?\u00a0 The idea was to replace many highly paid orchestra musicians with one engineer running a machine.\u00a0 It was an attempt at automating human musicians.\u00a0 This explains why there has been so much emphasis on imitating the sounds of traditional instruments.\u00a0 It was not only to engage an audience with somewhat familiar sounds.\u00a0 It was hoped that musicians would be replaced by machines.<\/p>\nOf course we know that did not happen.\u00a0 The synthesizers weren’t good enough.\u00a0 Eventually, synthesizers became small and inexpensive enough for human musicians to use.\u00a0 And so the synthesizer, rather than replacing humans, became just another musical instrument.<\/p>\n
Two Schools<\/h3>\n
A simplified way of dividing the attitudes toward synthesizers is the following.\u00a0 The first view is that synthesizers are just tools, just new instruments for spicing up the sound of existing music production.\u00a0 A glorified electric organ, limited by the 12 note diatonic scale and well suited to orchestral, as well as pop music.\u00a0 From this school came Moog and Switched On Bach.<\/p>\n
The other school, as I am broadly defining it, thinks of the synthesizer as an entirely new instrument, capable of making music with much more tenuous relationships to traditional ideas of what constitutes music.\u00a0 Situated as it was, in an historical era where traditions were being questioned, the mid twentieth century was ripe for music departing from traditions.\u00a0 From this school came Buchla, Morton Subotnik, and works such as Until Spring.<\/p>\n
Impressed as I was by Switched on Bach, Until Spring simply captivated me.\u00a0 Here were compositions in sound unfettered by tradition and let free to be limited only by principles of composition structure.<\/p>\n
This is not to deny the many schools of thought that combine elements of both ideas for music creation.<\/p>\n
Electronic Sounds<\/h3>\n
The new title of this blog is Richard Brewster’s Electronic Sounds<\/em>.\u00a0 It used to be Richard Brewster’s Synthesizer.<\/em><\/p>\nI changed it because I am not synthesizing.\u00a0 The electronic sounds that I make are not synthetic imitations of any other instrument or sound.\u00a0 They are their own sounds.<\/p>\n
But it seems that I am indeed trying to replace a musician.\u00a0 Myself.\u00a0 The more serious of my efforts goes towards the notion of automatic music<\/em>.\u00a0 I’ve blogged about this (use the tag ‘automatic music’).\u00a0 It is not synthetic.\u00a0 The musician I’m trying to eliminate is the one who has created a modular music structure that is inadequate to completing the music on its own and thus calls on its own maker to ‘perform’ it.\u00a0 I’m searching for those structures that, once discovered, are fully capable of carrying on without further human intervention.\u00a0 Is it artificial intelligence?\u00a0 Absolutely not.\u00a0 It is simply a machine structure whose complexity might be somewhat understood by the one who made it.\u00a0 But which produces resulting sound of a complexity that the maker could not imagine.\u00a0 That is why I think I am discovering, rather than making.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve become disaffected by the way the word ‘synthesizer’ is used in connection with electronic music. The First Synthesizer It was the RCA Mark I. 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