Even before little-known engineer Dr. Robert Moog developed the first portable synthesiser in the 1960s, another technological breakthrough was being made. Les Paul, who lent his name to the legendary Gibson guitars, was to become one of the first people to grasp the multi-track recording set-up. After signing for Capitol Records in 1947, Les Paul had a purpose-build recording studio installed in the garage of his Los Angeles bungalow. Before long, artists were queuing at the new star’s door to use his recording facilities.
Les Paul’s process of recording was to ‘bounce’ recordings backwards and forwards between two acetate disc recorders. Each time, Paul would record a fresh sound onto the disc. This process would be repeated as many times as Paul considered necessary. Until 1949, Paul had only seen a tape recorder. He had never actually used one. When he was working for legend Bing Crosby, his luck changed. Crosby showed Paul one of the first 300 Series tape recorders made by Ampex. It was while playing around with the 300 Series that Paul discovered the possibility of multi-track recording. By adding a fourth tape head to the 300 Series, Paul could make the dream of multi-track recording a reality. By spacing the heads on the machine, Paul was able to produce tape delay, an effect that was created entirely in the recording process using echo chambers until purpose-built effects processors arrived in the 1970s.
Some time later, the electronic age gained another forerunner in the form of electrical engineer and later synthesiser manufacturer Dr. Robert Moog. In the late 1960s and 70s, producing the modular Moog synthesiser, Moog shot to fame in 1968 with Wendy (then Walter) Carlos’ first album Switched On Bach, which was recorded entirely using Moog’s synthesisers. In the years that followed, Moog created his own company – R.A. Moog Inc. – working on his own products with a peak workforce of 45 and backlogs of 250,000 orders. Soon, however, the ever-changing tastes of the music industry and the increasing competition from other companies took hold and Moog found himself with no backlog at all and in excess of $250,000 of debt. Moog’s current company - Big Briar Inc. - still sells the custom Theremin kits that started Moog on his way to synthesiser superstardom.
The Theory of the Synthesiser
The theory of the synthesiser has its roots firmly buried in the physics of sound waves and how they can be manipulated. Synthesisers manipulate timbre by applying envelopes and various voltage-controlled oscillators. Timbre refers to the characteristics that make up a sound. Each instrument has its own timbre, i.e. its own sound characteristic. If you play the same note on a bass guitar and a cello, the sounds will be different. The overall note will be the same, but the parts that make up the sound will be different. The four simple waveforms and their sounds are shown and explained in Figure 1.
Envelopes (profiles of sound attack, sustain, delay and decay) can be applied to a sound wave. Envelopes modify the amplitude (the amount of air particles that are disturbed by sound waves at a given instant) of the sound. If a ‘piano’ envelope is applied to a sound wave, the wave will slowly decrease in amplitude until there is no sound left. An ‘organ’ envelope will have no fading at all (i.e. the sound wave will start and finish suddenly). Envelopes can be applied to any type of wave, and exist only in theory.
Most synthesisers work on the principle of voltage control. The Voltage-Controlled Oscillator (or VCO) produces a pitch that is proportional to the voltage supplied to it. Most synthesiser manufacturers have settled on a ‘one volt per octave’ scale, where the voltage through the oscillator needs to be raised by one volt in order for the sound produced to rise by one octave. On some synthesisers, the VCO carries a waveform selector, but the Voltage-Controlled Filter (VCF) usually does this job. After the sound is created by the VCO, it is sent to the VCF. The VCF gives the sound character. For example, resonance (the ‘ringing’ sound of the note) can be applied and manipulated. In a synthesiser, the most common type of filter is a low-pass filter. This blocks low-frequency sounds depending on it’s setting on the synthesiser’s control panel.
As explained above, the envelope of the sound wave can also be set. On most synthesisers, this is done using the combination of Attack, Decay, Sustain and Release envelope controls. The Attack control sets the time taken for the sound wave to reach its maximum amplitude. The Decay is the rate that the note ‘falls back’, having reached its peak. The sound then continues to fall back until it reaches the level set by the Sustain control. The Release control sets the rate that the note falls back to its original position.
The final stage in the synthesiser is the Voltage-Controlled Amplifier (VCA). This simply increases the amplitude of the sound in proportion to the voltage applied to it. The VCA is usually a circuit inside the synthesiser with no physical controls, but some units give a ‘gain’ control. This is used to change the voltage that is fed into the VCA circuit, therefore giving control over the amplitude (volume) of the overall sound.
The use of the synthesiser can be seen in many popular tracks, as well as some of the most ‘experimental’ artists, such as Jean Michel Jarre, whose album Oxygene is a prime example of multi-layered synthesiser tracks. Jarre recorded the album using only synthesisers. No ‘real’ instruments were used, and yet the album offers some astoundingly life-like representations of stringed and brass instruments.
Other Changes due to Electronic Technology
A multitude of changes have occurred through the continued use of technology. Recently, the instrument manufacturer Gibson, famous for top-quality guitars, has announced the Gibson Digital Guitar, named the ‘Magic’. This is a genuine Gibson guitar, with a variety of output options. First is the standard ¼“ guitar jack, second is a ‘MaGIC’ socket. This is a standard Ethernet connector, which incorporates superior sound quality in both directions (both to and from the guitar). Also, the use of the digital pick-ups feeding the MaGIC socket eliminates background ‘fuzz’ which guitarists have had to accept in the past. These pickups also transform each string into a single channel, therefore allowing separate equalisation, panning and effects processing for each string.
Other astounding changes in technology can be seen in the use of mp3 players and the computer revolution discussed later. Also worthy of mention is the use of electronic technology to restore and improve older records, both on vinyl and cassette tape by using digital techniques and computer software. Today’s modern generations tend to take the CD player for granted. Only as recently as the early 1990s, CDs were just emerging as the preferred medium for recorded music. Today, we can buy CDs as we would buy a loaf of bread or a carton of milk. The expansion of the music industry to incorporate a wider audience has been immense. The main catalyst for these advances however, has come in the form of the computer.
Early Commercial Applications of the Computer within Music
Computers have been used in mainstream music since the mid-1970s, both as recording platforms and as music-making tools. The use of computers as music programming tools has mainly evolved from music processors such as the Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument (CMI) and alphaSyntauri systems. Apple computers have long since been the main platform for music programming, from the Apple IIe, released in the early 1980s, to the gMac supercomputers of the 21st century.
The popularity of the home computer can be shown by these figures: by the end of 1981, home computers were in 500,000 homes across the United States. By the end of 1982, this figure had risen to 1.5 million. Many hardware manufacturers sensed the potential for new ‘bolt-on’ (similar to today’s Plug’n’Play standard) music circuits that would increase the music-making capacity of the new machines. At the same time, new computer programs were being written to cater for the non-technical musician, as to create music, you had to have at least some basic knowledge of a computer programming language. Programs such as Passport Designs’ Soundchaser were rapidly gaining popularity and headway was being made for the bigger and better hardware and software to come in the 1990s.
On the other side of the computer revolution was the recording environment. Computer-aided recording was a breakthrough in music technology. Some years before the computer-controlled mixing desks, microprocessors were being used for creating digital effects such as modulation and echo.
With the introduction of computerised recording desks in the mid-1970s, production engineers could avoid the ugly situation of un-finished mixes being pronounced as finished to get the job done. Two tracks of the tape had to be left clear to store the computer’s data, but that was a comparatively small forfeit considering that the sound engineer could then fine-tune the equalisation (EQ) and playback levels of each individual track, before mixing the song down to a stereo pair (one track for the left channel and one track for the right).
Within two years of the first computer-controlled recording desks arriving on the scene in 1975, their popularity was such that many of the top label’s studios owned one, as well as some lesser studios. One of the first such desks to be installed in Britain was in London’s Advision Recording Studio. Before long, recording time at Advision has become almost unobtainable. By 1979, only four years after the introduction of computers in the recording studio, fully digital recording was being carried out. The advantages of using a digital recorder rather than analogue tape are immense. With a digital recording, the electronic information is converted into numerical data, which can then be precisely re-converted to electrical data for playback. The recording is still stored on physical tape, but not as electrical information, but as digital data, in the same way that old mainframe computers used to store data on large tape reels. The use of digital data virtually eliminates the minor imperfections in sound quality caused by dirty tape.
The Application of Music Programming
Throughout the past fifteen years, enormous developments have been made in not only computers for musical use, but in computer-related technology in general. In 1996, the Pentium 133MHz (mega-hertz) processor was among the newest processors commercially available. Now, almost a decade later, processors of more than twenty times the power are being produced. Today, 3.0GHz processors (giga-hertz – 1GHz is equivalent to 1,000MHz) are the norm, and the boundaries are being continually moved back, as more and more systems are deemed ‘obsolete’ and the technological race is showing no signs of a slow-down.
The lightning-fast advances in computer technology have also transformed modern music programming. One of the best-known music editing programs, Steinberg’s Cubase software has been on the market since the early Atari and Apple Macintosh computer systems were available in the early ‘90s. At the time of Cubase’s release (1989), its only use was for MIDI sequencing. MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is the general standard that keyboards, synthesisers and computers use to communicate data. A musical keyboard (as opposed to a computer keyboard) can be plugged into a computer, and the notes that are played can be exactly recorded and reproduced, and therefore separate tracks can be layered on top of each other. Cubase allows this to be done with no prior programming knowledge, a far cry from the platforms of the 1980s. For the modern generation of music programmers, MIDI is still a powerful tool in sequencing, but the power of audio looping is gaining momentum. Pre-packaged sample kits containing thousands upon thousands of ‘real’ sounds that can be imported into a computer program such as Cubase and repeatedly used and re-used to the composer’s satisfaction.
In the late 1990s, the move was being made from ‘digital tape’ recording, as discussed earlier, to entirely digital recording, where the digital data of a recording is stored on the hard drive of a computer. More powerful computer processors meant greater recording capabilities, and with the search for more power progressing further year on year, it wasn’t long before nearly every recording studio was using an entirely digital line-up of equipment. In the 21st century, around a staggering 90 to 95% of recording studios worldwide are entirely digital, utilising digital effects, compression units and some studios have even traded in the analogue mixing desk in favour of a far superior piece of computer software. I still prefer the ‘hands-on’ feel that an analogue mixing desk gives, although I do realise that the onslaught of computerisation, there have to be sacrifices. In order for us to travel quicker, we pollute the atmosphere, in the same way that as a sound engineer, to increase the control we have over the quality of a recording, we may have to brush aside personal preferences as a sacrifice to increased sound quality.
Music notation has also been touched by the long arm of technology. Computer programs like Sibelius now give huge potential for any would-be composer. Back in the times of Mozart and Beethoven, musical manuscripts had to be hand-written for every member of the orchestra. Now, a score can be produced for one piece of music and then be copied for as many musicians as need be.
The Digital Revolution
As I have already touched upon, the digital revolution has changed the face of music production and recording. Recently, the guitar manufacturer Gibson has released the Magic guitar, which can be used as a digital recording instrument, recording the sound of each string on a separate track for true multi-track editing. As many as 72 tracks of continuous audio can now be held and played back, as well as mixed down, edited and equalised. The recording studio is becoming almost completely reliant on computers. In some of the world’s top recording studios, a piece of computer software is used to automatically correct performer’s voices if they stray off-key or sing a wrong note. Also gone are the days where instrumental and vocal parts have to be recorded in a single take. If a player is satisfied with the take at one point, and then goes back and changes their mind, the sound engineer can just ‘snip’ out the offending section and re-record it.
The move from analogue tape to digital hard drive recording has been a gradual one, with digital audio within Cubase being made available in the mid-1990s, and a host of other programs began supporting the future of music creation, namely Emagic Logic and Cakewalk. The size of hard drives has also risen astronomically in the same period of time. At the dawn of the computer age, 10MB (megabytes – one MB equals roughly one million bytes – i.e. one million characters of unformatted plain text) was the size of hard drives that were on sale, often costing as much as the computer they were connected to. For comparison, this amount of data can now be stored on a device which is the size of a pen. By 1996, 1 or 2GB (gigabytes – one GB equals roughly one thousand megabytes and so contains about one billion characters of pain text) hard drives were being offered with new computers. Now, computers with upwards of 100GB of storage are being sold in the mainstream computer market. The increase in hard drive sizes has ironically come at a time when music files are decreasing in size. The standard Microsoft Wave (.wav) is debatably the largest of the formats, and then comes the Windows Media Audio (.wma) format, which is supported by the majority of new mp3 players. The smallest and increasingly becoming the most common, MPEG-Layer3 – better known as ‘mp3’ - consumes around 500KB (0.5MB) per minute. Mp3 technology also allows music to be recorded at a considerably higher quality (between four and five times higher than conventional wav files) and still retains the lower disk space. This in mind, mp3-dedicated music players have arrived on the mainstream commercial market, with the CD player losing popularity to the smaller, lighter devices, which can store more than 10 CDs in an increasingly small design.
Having seen a working analogue tape reel recorder in action, I can certainly say great technological gaps have been bridged, and the recording quality of music overall has definitely increased since the introduction of computers into the recording studio. The introduction of electronic technology has also made music more accessible to the general public. In the 18th and 19th century, music was seen as a socially exclusive form of entertainment in the form of opera and classical performance. Now, however, music is becoming increasingly available with the mp3 player (as discussed earlier) becoming more popular and with the explosion of the online music industry.
My Conclusion
My personal musical beliefs lie firmly embedded in live music. Having grown up listening to rock bands, such as Queen, I feel very strongly about bands that claim to be ‘live’. As I have shown, computer technology has not only revolutionised the way we listen to music, but also the way we live. With CDs outselling vinyl records for the first time in 1988 and becoming the preferred format for recorded music in the early 1990s, a whole new era of record sales began. Now, with the introduction of mp3 players and audio jukeboxes, music is downsizing again. Not in volume, but in physical size. The days of your music collection taking up half your bookcase are well and truly over.
As far as studio production goes, there have been colossal leaps in the ease that music can be recorded, edited and produced. Not, I might add, all worthwhile in my opinion. For example, I have previously mentioned a piece of computer software that can automatically correct the slightest deviation from a ‘true’ vocal note. In my honest – if rather brutal – view, so-called artists who use this method of recording do not deserve to be in the music industry at all. I am also against the use of computers as the only source of backing music for a solo vocalist. I am in favour of the 1970s and 80s trend of computer generated disco and dance music (most of which would be near impossible to play on ‘normal’ instruments). However, I am against the use of computers to create a synthetic band for pop artists to record vocals over. The heavy metal behemoth Iron Maiden, with a career from the 1970s through to the 21st century - out-spanning most current pop artists - boycotted the British chart TV show Top Of The Pops when it was revealed that they would not be playing live. It went against their musical beliefs, and it is these beliefs that I also share.
Music piracy has also jumped considerably in the last decade. The Internet is now used as a market for illegal music trafficking, although tighter laws now mean that it is less likely to happen than in past years, but the danger is there all the same. More than anything, music piracy deprives the artist and songwriters valuable royalties in record sales (most artists get only five to ten percent of any record sold in their name – whereas songwriters receive around 20 percent).
On the other hand, however, the computer has made plenty of worthwhile improvements to the way music is produced and enjoyed. While the size of music players and recording studios continues to decrease, the use of computer equipment has minimised the effort that is needed to record a live band or even a whole symphony orchestra. The use of synthesisers in the mid to late 20th century added a new dimension to popular music, and the introduction of hard disk recording in the 1990s opened up new possibilities for sound engineers and session musicians alike.
So, has the computer degraded today’s live music? My answer would be yes, as most popular music is no longer played by live musicians, but pre-recorded by use of synthetic computer programs that imitate the use of a real instrument. While this can be an effective way of reducing production costs by not having to hire session musicians and expensive equipment, isn’t it worth the extra cost to go that little bit further and keep a sense of humanity within the music? It can be argued that using a keyboard can recreate the sound of an entire orchestra, but at least a human is pressing the keys. For me, the German band Kraftwerk’s stage image of robots embodies what all live performances will look like in a generation’s time if the current state of music automation continues at its current rate.
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Craig Watson – To What Extent has Electronic Technology Impacted on 20th and 21st Century Music? Page
