Music technology to synthesize basic pop melodies
What makes a music performance both unique and faithful to an original score? Undoubtedly locking the groove and allowing a sort of flexibility in the details. Because it must take all details into account, a music performance is based on flexibility. It is for instance the case in minimalist music, which is a type of sonic production that offers performers the opportunity to grow up with the music, make it their own and take it over, in one word, the possibility to interpret it in a freer way way. That process is easier today than it was some decades ago, because every performer has computer mixing tools at home or has a friend who can mix or arrange pieces of music at home. Synthesizers have become popular too. They are often introduced in the context of basic synthesis techniques and can be considered as musical interfaces resulting from the combination, the design and the integration of different modules which existed before.
The first synthesizers were not modular: it was not really possible to switch from one type of sound to another, for example on the very first models of Moog synthesizers. What did music synthesis technologies try to do, from the beginning? It was directed towards the synthesis of basic pop tunes, using essentially Markov chains: the machine would create simple melodies by analyzing basic pieces of music, before resynthesizing them. In that context, technologies were developed: oscillators and filters. The basic oscillator was originally a tuning fork put in motion and picked up electromagnetically. The resulting signal was divided into different octaves, these octaves being transformed into a square wave creating a rich tone, which would be filtered in order to produce derivative timbres of all the timbres the instrument could make.
Reshaping sounds and creating new ones
Over the decades, synthesizers became more and more sophisticated. They included a sort of piano roll where elements like frequency, timbre, octave, duration and volume were indicated. Outside, the user could fix them. These synthesizers were not designed for performance, but as machines used to compose in a simple way. Their surrogates began to offer more complexity. For example, the Mark I, designed by the Radio Corporation of America during the 1950s, included 12 oscillators that would generate the 12 elementary tones of a musical scale. Mark I could reshape these 12 basic sounds and reshape them into other ones, imitating certain sorts of traditional musical instruments and creating brand new ones. However, Mark I could not imitate the human voice.
Let us notice that synthesizers, like traditional music instruments, may create serial music, which is based on the twelve tone technique. In that method, none of the 12 notes of the chromatic scale is privileged, each semi-tone of the musical scale is played. Examples of the 12 tone technique may be found for instance in pieces of music like ‘Sehr langsam’ and ‘Rash, aber leicht’, written by Arnold Schönberg (Op. 19). Musically speaking, in fact, in the last piece, for example, musical notes have a different sound color, yet they all have the same impact. For Schönberg, who had previously written vast, dense pieces, it was about expressing emotions in a less complicated way, in a manner more similar to the one found in the human heart itself, a heart where many contradictory feelings are quickly scrolling, most of them being of equal importance.