MP3, ProTools, Ableton and digital music itself can all be traced back to one crazy engineer. That year, he taught his computer to sing and helped Stanley Kubrick (Stanley Kubrick, director of the science fiction film "2001: A Space Odyssey") scare the world. Terry Matthew reviewed the birth of digital music for us. The original title is: The Man Who Made His Computer Sing: Max Mathews & the Invention of Digital Music "The word "computer" often appears in early electronic devices such as Kraftwerk (Power Station) The work of musical artists and the early techno music of Detroit—these are the cultural artifacts that were at the forefront of the microcomputer revolution, the objects of admiration, praise, covet, and sometimes fear as computers now dominate our lives. , even our bodies and complex moral systems that have lasted for thousands of years are being changed by its existence. Music hardly mentions machines, but the latter actually play an indispensable role in music production. Ubiquity will be followed by invisibility: Computer music has become like electricity, industrial pollution, and WiFi, and you only notice it when it's not there. Even the term "computer music" feels old-school. —Especially since everything is computer music these days and the rare new music that is not composed with computer assistance is likely to be processed, remastered, and distributed by one person, mostly himself. Played. Unlike the acoustic instruments you hear played live, everything is now “computer music.” The next step in ubiquity is to turn a blind eye: computer music has become something like electricity, industrial pollution, and WiFi, and you You only notice when you don't, but things can easily go in different directions. Take a look at the ANS synthesizer, where research began to diverge in fascinating ways after the technical exchange between the East and the West. The product. The ANS was an astonishingly innovative device that used not a typewriter as an interface, but glass plates and photovoltaic cells through which light would be sent to an amplifier. Max Mathews was one of the first to see beyond the limits of Cold War technology. , one of the people who can see the future, he said, ""One day, when a plumber comes home from work, instead of watching TV, he turns on his home computer and uses it to compose music. "Hundreds of thousands or even millions of people using computers to compose music may sound exaggerated, but it was actually a prophecy. Max Mathews shared this vision not 10 years ago, but in 1965, when there was no A plumber with a home computer or the ability to use a computer to make ""techno banger"". Max Mathews was one of the first people to see beyond the limitations of Cold War technology and see the future. He said, " One day, a plumber came home from get off work and instead of watching television, he turned on his home computer and used it to compose music. "One day in 1957, Max Mathews made his computer sing. He was not the first person to accomplish this feat, but it was to electronic music what the Holy Trinity (mankind's first nuclear test) was to nuclear weapons. This is the Gregorian Era, the beginning of all timelines. Mathews was probably born to be a scholar. He grew up in rural Nebraska, where his parents were instructors at a teaching college and he was exposed to radio. Technology; he subsequently earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from CalTech and a PhD from MIT in 1954. A year later, he was employed at Bell Labs, which was known as the "idea factory" before the advent of Silicon Valley. It is a self-contained (and wholly owned) Silicon Valley, and Bell employees have won nine Nobel Prizes over the years, including cosmic background radiation (the echo of the Big Bang), UNIX, and transistors. Discover.

Bell Labs was owned by AT&T, so their first priority had to be related to the telephone system, studying the electronic transmission of signals and human speech (one of Bell Labs' early inventions about 20 years before Mathews got there). One includes Vocoder). Mathews works in acoustics and behavioral research, developing techniques to input sounds into computers and then output them. He later recalled: ""It was obvious that once we could get sound from a computer, we could write programs to play music on the computer. I'm very interested in this. The computer is an instrument with no limitations; any audible sound can be produced in this way. Besides, I also like music. I've been playing the violin for a long time..." MUSIC I, written by Max Mathews, was not the first software to play music, but it was the first to synthesize sounds on a computer and play them back at the user's leisure. Early experiments in computer music produced tunes that had to be rewritten repeatedly after being played once. It was not easy to get computers to do this in 1957. The first computer music machines were not suitable for use on a desktop or even in a house. Neither fit. The IBM 704 was a huge mainframe, but it was too slow to process music in real time. The machine's first performance lasted only a few seconds, but the computer playback took a full hour. So Mathews transferred the output to tape to speed up processing. Mathews recalled 40 years later: "Playing music on a computer was born in 1957, when an IBM 704 in New York played a 17-second tune using the Music I program I wrote. The music wasn't great, but its technical breakthroughs still resonate. The computer's debut was a tune called "The Silver Scale." You can still hear a series of beeps and beeps similar to the one you first heard at Bell Labs. The sound was out of tune. Mathews had no illusions about the artistic achievements they made. "It sounded terrible," he said. His mentor, John R. Pierce (who coined the word "transistor") Same idea. MUSIC I only had "one waveform," Mathews recalled, "and that was the triangle wave. There was no cadence. The only performance parameters you could control were pitch, sound, and duration." Max later called MUSIC I "just the beginning." This was just modesty on his part: in fact, it was an excellent proof-of-concept for what had previously been purely theoretical research. According to former Bell Labs colleague Claude · Shannon's information theory, the ability to generate sounds in large computers meant that any sound could eventually be synthesized, stored and modified, or, as Mathews wrote in an influential 1963 article in Science. As said, "" there is no theoretical limit on the performance of a computer as the source of musical sound. MUSIC I went through five iterations in Mathews' hands until MUSIC V. MUSIC II was released the following year, adding three more sounds and a wavetable oscillator. By 1960, Mathews had transformed MUSIC into the responsible "Modular" - allowing sounds to work together as a band. In 1997, Mathews said: "Music I leads from II all the way to V." There are also a group of people who wrote Music 10, Music 360, Music 15, Csound, Cmix and SuperCollider. Mathews continued to write music for computers and encouraged others to do the same. Pieces like "Numerology" sound like the sound effects and music from Donkey Kong or another arcade game. One tune, though, is not original. , but is probably the most famous cover song in the history of computer music. Since technology first gave humans godlike powers to build computers, we quickly began to think of the many ways our creations can destroy us. The concept of mechanical servants rebelling against their masters was most evident in culture when the killing spree began in Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

When astronaut Dr. Dave Bowman returned to the spacecraft and began to deactivate the computer, HAL reverted to its original programming mode and performed a song with childlike innocence, a song taught to it by its beloved creator, The name is "Daisy Bell". (Despite HAL's begging, Dave was still forced to shut down HAL. On his deathbed, HAL sang the first song he learned to the person who created it. This is one of the most touching death scenes.) However, There is something real behind this, and this anecdote is perhaps more famous than any of Max Mathews' scientific stories. In the early 1960s, science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke visited Bell Labs, where he heard a demonstration of speech synthesis on an IBM 704 mainframe. He heard a voice coder "sing" an old song, "Daisy Bell," which was originally written by Harry Dacre in 1892. The IBM 704 was demonstrating the song, whose voice was by John L. Kelly and Carol Lockbaum, with music by Max Mathews. This demonstration (which was part of the repertoire offered to important visitors at Bell Labs for many years) and the computer's innocent rendition must have left a lasting impression on Clark. Impression. Perhaps he saw this as an important turning point in history - the computer was about to transform from a useless toy that was "taught" to recite children's songs to a neural brain capable of killing people. In 1968, Bell Labs " A demo of the song "Daisy Bell" was featured in a short film called "The Incredible Machine," in which Mathews relied on a device called "Graphic 1" that the user could use a light pen to draw on. Draw directly on a CRT monitor. You don't have to look closely to see that this thing is a precursor to the modern DAW. On this device, sounds are represented by shapes and can be moved, manipulated, cut and pasted. Mathews writes. Dao: ""Graphic 1 allows you to insert image graphics directly into memory by drawing objects... In addition, the computer can also modify, delete, copy and remember these drawings. "This shows the spirit of a place like Bell Labs, which is that equipment originally used to model circuits can be appropriated by art lovers to simplify music programming. In 1970, Max Mathews went on to develop GROOVE program, which focused on computer-aided synthesis of performance. He also invented a strange device called the Radio Baton - two sticks that look like timpani drumsticks, but are actually like a conductor's baton. Incorporating gestures to control every aspect of a recorded music file in 3 dimensions, Radio Baton became something of a symbol of Mathews' wild experimentation, as Buckminster Fuller said so many interesting things. But mostly related to Dome Architecture. After retiring from Bell Labs, Mathews became Professor Emeritus of the Center for Research in Digital Music (CCRMA) at Stanford University. Mathews died on April 21, 2011 at the age of 3. Speaking to WIRED last month, Mathews expressed some dismay that the vast amounts of computing power available almost for free today haven't been fully utilized yet, while offering a unique perspective on the computer's place in the modern music environment. He didn't just look at it. The work is not a synthetic substitute for a brain, or a musician, or an instrument, but it is also regarded as an instrument itself - "" but he believes that this has not yet been achieved. "What we have to understand is what the human brain and ear considers to be beautiful," Mathews said. "What music do we like?" What sounds, rhythms and harmonies do we like? Once we find the answers to these questions, computer-generated music will be a piece of cake. ” Translator: boxi. User Survey In order to provide better articles and user experience, we are conducting a user survey on the 36 Kr headlines. We sincerely invite you to take a few minutes to help fill out this questionnaire. Thank you! Please stamp: 36 Kr Toutiao user research