Machines, computers, and audio gear have joined the violin and the guitar as the musical instruments of the new era.
The future of music is unfolding at U.C. Berkeley, and it doesn’t look anything like what you’d expect.
Tucked away in the leafy hills just north of campus sits a spacious two-story house with a neglected front yard set behind brick walls and a simple, blue wrought-iron gate. The building blends easily into a neighborhood where Graduate Theological Union buildings sit side by side with neighborhood houses, but the investigations underway in 1750 Arch Street are anything but domestic or metaphysical. Rather, the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies, or CNMAT, is a multidisciplinary research center within Cal’s Department of Music where experimental-minded players and scientists of all stripes explore the creative interaction between music and technology.
Founded in 1989 by composer Richard Felciano, CNMAT (pronounced senn´mat) brings together leading researchers in physics, mathematics, electrical engineering, psychology, computer science, cognitive science, and music. It’s where cutting-edge musical explorers come to work with scientists to investigate, invent, and implement creative tools for music-making. And while CNMAT’s home is low-profile, its musical investigations have been showcased on some of music’s most visible stages.
Kent Nagano and the Berkeley Symphony have presented CNMAT-related events every season for the past six years, and there’s a strong relationship between the center and the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players. Last November, the Sacramento New American Music Festival dedicated an entire evening to CNMAT.
Two years ago, at the Ojai Music Festival, Nagano himself “played” CNMAT’s contributions with the symphony’s accompaniment. “I come from a jazz tradition, and there’s real interest in music that has some life on the stage, where there’s dialogue and interaction,” says CNMAT co-director David Wessel, during a recent interview in the center’s small, gear-strewn performance space. “One of the things that is critical to our way of thinking about technology is that we want to bring it to the stage, to the performance process, as opposed to just studio use. We openly admit that in order to succeed in this, musicians are going to have to think about performing and developing new performance practices.”
The role of the composer in this is very important, in that here the composer is now also responsible in some sense for composing the behaviors of the instrument,” Wessel continues, referring to the computer programs and electronic instruments built at CNMAT that respond to manual gestures. “So computer programs reside between performance gesture on one hand and musical material on the other, and that relationship has to be composed. And that’s not only true for composed music, it’s true for improvisers as well. You have to think about designing that connection, about how things respond to gesture.”
Wessel is quick to credit co-director Edmund Campion as an important force in steering CNMAT. Campion’s responsible for developing the center’s educational programs with the small but influential group of graduate students doing research at CNMAT (the pianist Vijay Iyer, who has gained considerable attention on the New York jazz scene, got his Ph.D. seven years ago from Cal based on work he did largely at CNMAT). A composer whose electronic work uses computer technology in a variety of groundbreaking ways, Campion, like Wessel, is committed to improvisation, though his work often stretches the usual notions of impromptu music creation, using programs and interfaces in which his gestures shape the music.
In his piece “Natural Selection,” for instance, Campion has developed an elaborate harmonic code that he’s taught to the computer, which understands and develops a reaction and interaction with his performance at the piano on an eight-channel system. Work like Campion’s requires not only the development of new software, but of cutting-edge speaker technologies, which has fueled a fascinating relationship with Berkeley-based Meyer Sound, a company long known to audiophiles looking for state-of-the-art sound systems.
“Three years ago we started to work more closely with CNMAT to develop speakers that simulate musical instruments, say, little clusters of speakers that create the polar patterns of a violin,” says John Meyer, who founded his namesake company with his wife Helen in 1979. “Every note has a different structure. The sound field might look like a figure eight, or a big soap bubble. The goal is to change the polar pattern on a note-by-note basis, using Mac processing.
“Wave field synthesis is the umbrella for this idea, being able to create a sonic image,” he explains. “If you were inside your car and rolled up all your windows but one, and there were people walking outside, you could hear and know how far away they were. If you took a snapshot of the sound coming through that window, it would look like the ripples from a bunch of rocks thrown in the water, and you could analyze that image. As you move your head around in a stereo field the sound image moves with your head. But with sound field synthesis, the image remains stable as you move your head.”
For aficionados of new music, 1750 Arch is a storied address. The building was owned by the great new music baritone Thomas Buckner, who was living in Berkeley in the mid-1960s when he began experimenting with extended vocal techniques. By the early 1970s, he had turned 1750 Arch into a new music hothouse, presenting hundreds of concerts and recording seminal albums by artists such as Laurie Anderson, Pauline Oliveros, Art Lande, and the ROVA Saxophone Quartet on his label, 1750 Arch Records. After moving to New York City, where he became a key muse to the composer Robert Ashley, he agreed to sell the building to U.C. Berkeley for a modest price, essentially donating the space for an ambitious program envisioned by composer Richard Felciano.
Wessel had been at the French new music institute IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique) since 1976, working with legendary composer Pierre Boulez, when Felciano approached him in 1986 about founding a new music and technology center in Berkeley. The idea was to take many of the avant-garde musical practices going on at IRCAM and place them in an environment with abundant technical research and development. Wessel became a professor in Berkeley’s music department, though he’s also affiliated with the department of psychology because of his work in music perception and cognition.
“When I arrived we had a mandate to develop a new center that would be highly interdisciplinary, that would leverage the incredible computer science and electrical engineering departments here and the auditory perception group in psychology,” Wessel says. “I think we’ve achieved this notion that there’s common ground where intellectual free trade can take place between all these departments, always with the focus on musical activity.”
One sign of the CNMAT’s reach is that it has attracted some of the most influential figures in jazz and new music. Alto saxophonist Steve Coleman came to Berkeley in 2000 and spent almost two years teaching and doing research, exploring advanced software applications within his band. Long interested in incorporating technology into improvisational settings, Coleman began working directly with software designers when he realized that the esoteric programs he wanted to use didn’t exist yet.
“The computer program I’m using, Ramses, draws on astrology and the I Ching, and all these different symbolic things, turning them into music,” Coleman says. “You can’t just go to the store and say give me some I Ching music software. But that’s what I thought before I started programming computers. I went into a store and said, ‘Do you have this?’ and the guy laughed at me. That’s when I realized it doesn’t work that way.”
The acclaimed pianist andcomposer Myra Melford, a major force on the downtown New York music scene for the past 20 years, was hired to teach improvisation at Berkeley in 2004, filling the position left absent when Coleman abruptly left Berkeley, feeling constrained by the academic calendar. Raised in the Chicago area, Melford gravitated to musicians associated with the avant-garde collective, Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), such as Art Ensemble of Chicago’s woodwind master Joseph Jarman, violinist Leroy Jenkins, and alto saxophonist and composer Henry Threadgill.
Known for her high-energy, percussive attack, Melford is also a tremendously lyrical player with a passion for classical Indian music (the harmonium has become an important textural element in her sound). She’s probably best known for her celebrated group, The Same River, Twice, featuring trumpeter Dave Douglas, cellist Erik Friedlander, drummer Michael Sarin, and Chris Speed on reeds. Teaching improvisation, Melford is happy she can research electronic music on the side. With CNMAT she’s developing a computer-aided extended piano, an instrument that she’ll be unveiling at Hertz Hall on February 11 in a performance with the UC Improvisers quartet (featuring Wessel, U.C. Davis professor Bob Ostertag on electronics, and the great bassist Mark Dresser).
“Cal offered me a chance to teach what I do,” Melford says. “But over the course of my development I’ve always been looking for how I could keep growing, and CNMAT seemed to fit that bill, really exploring electronics and computer-based music with a lot of support, in terms of resources and personnel. It’s something I’ve wanted to pursue for a long time, to see how to develop the piano into a more versatile instrument. I have the opportunity to do these concerts with David Wessel, and I need a very different kind of sonic palette.”
Melford is not only applying the new technologies to her own instrument. She’s working with one of the CNMAT researchers on developing tools to implement in a score she was commissioned to write for a dance theater project that premieres at the Minneapolis-based Walker Arts Center in the spring.
“We’re using research with sensors that would pick up the dancers’ movements, so they would be involved in playing the music,” Melford says. “This is right on the cutting edge with technology and the performing arts–music intersecting with dance and theater. It’s pretty darn exciting.” l
For information about Myra Melford’s performance with The Same River, Twice on February 11, visit www.cnmat.berkeley.edu/calendar.
Andrew Gilbert is a freelance writer based in the East Bay. He is The Monthly’s music critic.
