"Paul Lansky: Room To Move"
soundout visited with computermusic composer Paul Lansky to sneak a peek at this instrument oftomorrow. In his dimly lit office at Princeton University (where he serves as chairman of the Music Department), we could find only a hint as to its true whereabouts. Amidst the stacks of papers, a few clues: a thinly wrapped coil of bluemylar tape (which we are told was used with an early refrigerator-sized digital-to-analog converter that has long since disappeared), and some computer circuitry resting atop a file cabinet. Flickering in the corner, however, was the best candidate yet, a NeXt computer, surfing the Web.
Created by manipulating recorded sounds mixed withdigitally synthesizedsound, Lansky's music is a unique blendof timbres, both natural and otherworldly. His music often incorporates the sound of ordinary instruments (such as theharmonica inGuy's Harp), ordinary objects (like the pots andpans ofTable's Clear), and ordinary occurrences(passingtrucks inNight Traffic, a discussion inSmalltalk).
"One thing that I've done a lot," said Lansky in an interviewwith soundout, "is composinga fairly complicated texture, like in myIdle Chatter pieces, in which there's not anyone thing that you're supposed to listen to." Instead ofcreating a texture in which there is a singular focus, such as a primary melody, Lansky createslayers of synthesized voices inIdle Chatter, out ofwhich the listener can choose to focus on one of a variety ofdifferentelements, including making sense out of the barrage of wordfragments.
Lansky's use of everyday sound as a basis for his music reflectshis desire to give the listener some breathing space whilelisteningto his piece. Unlike live music, tape music in a concertsituationcan be particularly alienating. "If instead of a string quartet playing up on stage you have sound coming out of a loudspeaker," Lansky reasons, "you've got a realproblem because you're being confronted directly with thecomposer's voice. In other words, you've got a situation inwhich you're listening at very close range to what the composeris saying. Typically, people find tape music in concerts veryexhausting to listen to. My sense of the reason for this is,very often, [the listener has] very little space to maneuver. As a listener you're being shouted at, in a sense."
His remedy? Give the listener room to move, to negotiatewith the sounds coming from the speaker by incorporatingfamiliar elements. In a sense, Lansky treats the loudspeakersnot as the instrument itself, but as a set of windows intoa larger world. "What I've tried to do is to create a sense that the sounds that are comingout [of the loudspeaker] have some relation to a physical action,for example, speech, or people actually playing instruments. Theloudspeakers are kind of windows into an environment in whichsomebody is able to perceive things occurring that have a kind ofphysical correlate." For example, inQuakerbridge,Lansky takes the sound of crowds in a busy New Jersey shoppingmalland sculpts musical lines and harmonies out of the mundane soundsof commerce. Throughout the piece, the listener can catch glimpsesof the typical American shopping mall experience (screaming kids,roving teenagers) filtered though Lansky's unique musical vision.
Lansky's musical career began in a more traditional manner as a french horn player. After going to Princeton in the late sixtiesas a graduate student in music composition, he got interested incomputer music just as the technology was being first developed.Now, over twenty-five years later, Lansky is a talented computerprogrammer as well, having written countless computer programsto realize his creations. In creating the softwareused in making his pieces, Lansky becomes, in effect,not only composer and performer, but the instrumentdesigner and manufacturer as well. Lansky is characteristicallymodestabout his software, which is available on the internet asfreeware. "I have this program called CMIXwhich is out, and a lot of people around here use. It's essentially put together as atoolkit. If a professional programmer were to start fromscratch, the whole thing would probably look a little differentand be a lot more efficient and easier to use!."
After an hour of chatting with Lansky, the magical instrument oftomorrow had yet to surface. Perhaps it was in the basement ofthe building, like the mythical Dynamophone of ThaddeusCahill,as it seemed impossible that the little computer sitting on his desktop could create all those strangeand wondrous sounds. Perhaps, like the composers of old, themagiclies within, and beneath his fingers at the keyboard. This time, however, the keyboard isn't made of ivory, andits limitations are the boundaries of imagination and sounditself.
For more information see:
http://www.music.princeton.edu/~paul/
Complete Interview Transcription
April 14, 1995
Princeton, New Jersey
Jason Uechi: How did you get started in music, and atwhat age?Paul Lansky: It was about the fourth grade, or so, when Istarted playing folk guitar and classical guitar. In the seventhgrade I started playing the french horn, and got very seriousabout that, and went to The High School of Music and Art as afrench horn player. I got involved in composition in highschool, and from there I went on to college, at Queens College inNew York, where I majored in music. At that point I was sort ofinterested in composition, musicology and performing.
After I graduated from Queens, I played horn professionally for a bit.I played with the Dorian Wind Quintet, which was really great, Iwas twenty-two. It seemed to me, however, that I that was about as good asI was ever going to be as a horn player, but as a composer youcontinue to develop your whole life, so I got more and moreinterested in composition and came to Princeton as a graduatestudent.
Uechi: You mentioned that you began composing in high school. Isthere anything in particular that inspired you to startcomposing?Lansky: I had some friends who were composing, a very close friendof mine was a fellow named Joshua Rifkin, who is now mainly doingrecordings of Bach, who was composing at that point. I justloved music so much that I figured that I wanted to do whatever Icould to get involved in music, and composing seemed like themost interesting thing you could possibly do.
I wasn't one of these people who just sort of "woke up onemorning with a mission from God" that I had to write music, itjust seemed like such an interesting thing to do, and I didn'tsee why I shouldn't do it.
I think its really been a long struggle for me. I don'treally think I actually composed any good music until I was in mymid-thirties. I'm not happy with my early music, and basically, still, the only music Ireally like I composed in the last couple ofyears.
Uechi: Did you first get involved with computer music at Princetonor at Queens College?Lansky: I got involved with computer music when I came here [toPrinceton] in 1966, and we had just started doing it, and itseemed like an interesting thing to do.
It was insane, because you had to drive to Bell Labs just tohear a sound. Imagine, first of all, you programmed everythingon punchcards, then you submitted it and came back the next day,because the computer only ran one job at a time, and sometimes itwould take hours and hours just to do anything at all. Then youwould come back the next day, and if it worked, you'd check out atape and you'd call Bell Labs and make an appointment to go up touse their digital-to-analog converter. And of course the thingwould sound terrible.
You'd drive up there and you'd park, and then you would haveto phone upstairs and have somebody come and escort you, becauseyou weren't allow to wander through the halls of Bell Labs. Ittook about an hour and a quarter to get there from here, so youwould go with your heart in your mouth, and then you'd go backwith your heart in your stomach.
I worked for about a year and a half on a computer piecewhen I was a graduate student, and one day I listened to it and Isaid "This is really awful." And I threw it out.
Uechi: Really? Literally nothing of it left?Lansky: Nothing! I don't think I could reconstruct it ifI tried. I remember what it sounded like, but I don't wantanyone else to remember.
It was actually a very liberating experience at that age tojust abandon a year and a half's worth of work. I felt goodabout it after I [abandoned the piece], but then I didn't go backto computer music until after we didn't have to drive to BellLabs anymore, when we got our digital-to-analog converter here.
Uechi: When was that?Lansky: I think they got it in 1969, and I started working on itaround '73 or so. And this is all that's left of it [he holds upa loosely coiled pink roll of thin tape, about an inch wide]. This is a mylar tape, and the converter was run by the firstcomputer that Hewlett Packard made. [The converter] was a bigthing, about the size of a refrigerator, and it had 64K ofmemory. It had no operating system, so you would have to loadthe operating system in with a boot-strap loader with 64 words ofmemory. Then you'd load the program on paper tape, which kepttearing, so we finally made the tapes on mylar, figuring thatwould last. And now it's twenty-five years later and the onlything left is the mylar tape with the program on it. The computer disappeared in the early eighties.
Uechi: At what point did you get involved with programming anddeveloping software?
Lansky: Very early. That was one of the things that attracted me. When we first started to use computers, using what's called aassembly macro language, we would write something like "oscil"and the program would then compile that into a couple of lines ofassembler. This was an assembler called BEFAP on the IBM 7094. One of the things that got me first interested in programming wasthat it was such a pain to punch cards. There were these thingsthat we used to have called A and B subroutines. Thesesubroutines were written in FORTRAN, and what you used to be ableto do was to use the subroutines to actually generate notes. Ilearned FORTRAN to write these subroutines, and I would generatenote lists. I'm still doing that sort of thing, actually.
Then when we moved to a bigger computer and had a programhere called Music 360, by Barry Vercoe, which was a predecessorof Music 11, which was a predecessor of CSOUND. It was a verygood program, it ran very fast on the IBM 36091. But then Barryleft, and you would never knew what was wrong [with the program]. I decided the only way in which I was going to become comfortabledoing this sort of thing was if I was my own best expert. Mythinking about these things is what you really want to do ismaximize the number of experts you have nearby. If you becomethe leading expert then that's the maximum optimization you canget.
So one day I said "Well, what will it take to write my ownsynthesis program?", and I wrote a very small synthesis programand it really turned out to be easy. One thing led to another,and I'm still using software that I write. I really like that,because I hate being dependant on other people, and having to say"How does this work?". My philosophy has been that you learnenough so that you become your own best expert.
Uechi: At any point did you stop what you were doing musically tostudy programming specifically?Lansky: No, it's all on the job training. I learned it all on thestreet. I've never taken a programming course, and I'mactually not a very good programmer. I write lots of programs,but when you see programs written by a professional programmerthey are clearly another order of thinking about how programminggoes. My programs work, but I don't feel that comfortable aboutadvertising them as "the way to do things".
I have this program called CMIX which is out, and a lot ofpeople around here use. It's essentially put together as atoolkit. If a professional programmer were to start fromscratch, the whole thing would probably look a little differentand be a lot more efficient and easier to use.
Uechi: The toughest question: how would you describe your music tosomeone who has never heard it before?
Lansky: Oh, that's a very hard question. I can deal with that sortof question in general terms. I think I can field that in asense as "How do I recommend approaching music that you areunfamiliar with, in general?"
The kind of thing that I think is important for somebody tothink about is to take the analogy of meeting people. When youmeet a person, your first take on them is to try to abstract thequalities that the person has and say, "Well, this person remindsme of this group of people, or this friend of mine." Your way ofindexing your response to that person has a lot to do with all ofthe people you know, and it has a lot to do with your attitudestowards people. Then what happens, and I'm sure everyone's hadthis experience, is that as you get to know the person better, all thethings that you used to classify, quantify and categorize theperson to start with, drop by the wayside. The person'squalities become unique qualities.
Then change the word 'music' for the word 'person'. You havethe same relation the first time you hear music that isunfamiliar music or that you're not used to hearing, what you tryto do is classify and index it by the kind of music you've known. Then, as you get to know it better, it becomes its own world. This is the case with Mozart as well as with new music. You heara piece by Mozart and the first thing you do is classify it bythinking about all the kinds of Classical music that you'veheard, with these kinds of configurations, and with yourexperiences with music theory, tonal theory, and syntax. Thisall tells you a lot things. But at a certain point, the pieceutterly transcends those things. The interesting thing aboutthinking in those terms is if you have a piece which ultimatelyfails to transcends those categories perhaps it tells yousomething [negative] about the piece.
Everyone's had the experience when they were about eightyears old of wondering how you could ever invent a tune. Thereare all these tunes, and they seem to be God given things. Youcan't imagine something you know as an object that was invented fromscratch at some point. That sort of leads back to the wholeconcept of what music is.
To cut to the bottom line: My recommendation for anybody whois listening to my music and finds it unfamiliar or bizarre (andI don't think most people do, I think my music is less unfamiliaror bizarre than a lot of music that is made with computers) is togive it several tries, and come back to it. Then if you don'tlike it [pause], don't listen to it again [laughter]!
I think that's the best I can do with a question like that. I go to parties and things like that and people say [mocksdialogue]:
"Oh, you're a composer! What do you write? Is it sort oflike Pearl Jam?"Uechi: Your music incorporates natural sounds into a musicalenvironment. Where would you point to as the beginning of thisaesthetic? I thought of perhaps Cage, perhaps Pierre Schafferand Musique Concrete?Lansky: No, no...I've thought about this a lot recently. Essentially, you start out with the fact that what I like to dois create sound on tape. If you just accept that as an activitythat I'm going to engage, the next thing I notice is that itreally creates a lot of paradoxes that have to do with how peopletake it in. There's not a familiar social institutionalstructure to be received: it's not music that's designed to beplayed in the concert hall, it's probably more congenial to beplayed at home. Still, it's a complex problem (over theyears I haven't ever really thought explicitly about this), and I think basically what I've been doing is responding to thesocial situation that the music sets up.
"No.."
"Sort of like Cole Porter?"
"No. I work with electronic music."
"Oh! [with a hint of recognition]" and I remember someonesaid,"Like Peter Gabriel, right?"
"Well, not quite..." [chuckle] What they are trying to dois to index it immediately.
The way I like to think about it these days is this: if youthink about sitting in a concert hall and listening to a stringquartet play, or something like that, you have a comfortablerelation to the composer's voice because the composer's voice isbeing activated by people. It's being activated by a liveensemble and people are interpreting and performing it, and youas a listener have a fairly large space to roam. You can wonderabout the performance, you can notice how the players are doing,you can concentrate on the way the music goes, you can do allkinds of things. You're in a fairly comfortable position to havea good relation to the music.
Parenthetically, I feel that listening to music is anintensely interactive process. When you listen to a piece ofmusic, you're constantly negotiating deals with the piece. You've got this chatter going on in your brain, and the piece istelling you something, you're working on what the piece istelling you and it's coming back and telling you something elseand you're going back and dealing with it, and so on. This iswhy I have real questions about the notion of "interactive"composition. I think music is interactive to start with, reading a book isinteractive, all these things are intensely interactive.
Now, if instead of a string quartet playing up on the stageyou have sound coming out of a loudspeaker, you've got a realproblem because you're being confronted directly with thecomposer's voice. In other words, you've got a situation inwhich you're listening at very close range to what the composeris saying. Typically, people find tape music in concerts veryexhausting to listen to. My sense of the reason for this is,very often, [the listener has] very little space to maneuver. They've got very little room to tinker with the experience, they're actuallybeing confronted by the composer's voice directly.
Uechi: So there's no question of interpretation...
Lansky: There's no question of interpretation, but as a listeneryou're being shouted at, in a sense.
My take on what I've been trying to do over the years is tocreate in the piece itself a space that the listener can use tomaneuver. This is all sort of "Monday-morning quarterbacking",because I didn't calculate this before I went in to doing thesepieces. I just tried to respond to what I thought was going tomake an interesting piece. I think that what I've been trying todo is to engage a lot of things in pieces which make it morecomfortable for people to deal with the piece, and to give themroom to walk around.
For example, one thing that I've done a lot of is composinga fairly complicated texture, like in my 'Idle Chatter' pieces['Idle Chatter',' just_more_idle_chatter',; 'Notjustmoreidlechatter', all on Bridge CD 9050 'More Than Idle Chatter'], inwhich there's not any one thing in particular that you'resupposed to listen to. You know, there's not a lead tune. Soinstead what happens is that you're put in a position where youcan browse up and down the spectrum, and there's not one thingthat you have to listen to. Also, the textures are fairlycomplex, so that the kinds of things that you will do will veryoften not be easy to parse. They'll be seemingly easy to parse,but essentially they're kind of difficult. In the 'Idle Chatter'pieces dancers have had a terrible time because it seems rhythmicand perfectly obvious, but as soon as they try to figure out howto count the thing, everything falls apart, and they have hadvery little luck in doing it.
Another thing that I've done that sort of gives the listenerroom to maneuver is to create textures which have a lot to dowith the sense that the loudspeakers themselves are windows intoa larger space. The traditional notion of recording, forexample, is that what you have is an archive of an event thatactually existed, that the sounds themselves originated by somephysical action. The notion of sound as abstracted from anyphysical action is a fairly new one. That's what leads people todescribe early electronic music as outer-space music. What I'vetried to do is to create a sense that the sounds that are comingout [of the loudspeaker] have some relation to a physical action,for example, speech. Another thing that I've done a number ofpieces with is to use people actually playing instruments, andactually playing familiar kinds of music. In a sense, theloudspeakers themselves are not the actual instruments, but theloudspeakers are kind of windows into an environment in whichsomebody is able to perceive things occurring that have a kind ofphysical correlate.
Another thing that I've tried to do in pieces, and this issomething I'm increasingly interested in now, is to create a kindof ambiguity so that you've got to actually do some work in orderto figure out what's going on. The first piece I actuallysucceeded in doing this is called 'Now and Then' [Bridge BCD9035] which just consists of phrases from children's stories. When people listen to this piece they hear something that soundslike it should be a story, but they don't hear the story, theyjust hear some connecting phrases. As a listener you've got toactually go in and pick apart things and make associations. I'mtrying to engage a kind of interactive sense in the listener. These are all things that I didn't plan. I didn't say "A-ha! What I'm going to do is such-and-such, in order to do such-and-such!" But as I look back, I think essentially what I'vebeen trying to do is to create a space for the listener to movearound, with respect to the piece. This is particularly becausethese things are on tape and because they are not performed bypeople, in a sense I am the performer.
I think that a lot of really powerful electronic music pieces,which can really knock you out, are in a sense very oppressive,and almost abusive in a way.
Uechi: "Knock you out" meaning...
Lansky: Well, you know, just impress you with all kinds of "zingo"sounds that swirl around the room and shatter your ears, and doall kinds of things to you. It's sort of a real macho view ofthings. Those are fun, but what happens to me is that I justfind myself backing away because I don't have any room tointeract with the piece, I'm being told what to do. There's alsoa kind of paradox that has to do with the way in which a lot ofus are trying construct a new model of what musical continuityand musical discourse is all about.
Uechi: What would you say is 'the venue' for your music? Do youpurposely conceive of it to be played in concert hall, at home,or does it not matter?
Lansky: I don't think that the venue matters as much as the overallcontext. If you take one of my pieces and you try to play it asthe seventh piece on a whole concert of electronic music, I thinkit's going to essentially fall flat. On the other hand, we'vedone a number of concerts around here where we've mixed computerpieces and instrumental pieces, and you can do it really nicelyso that you get a flowing sense of one thing rolling intoanother.
What I like a lot is putting pieces out on CD, so thatpeople can use them any way they want. I know dancers have usedthem, and I just got a royalty check from Public Television because they used one of my pieces as the background music tosomething called "The Sports Connection" [laughs]. I haven't theslightest idea what they did with it, but I was perfectlysatisfied. One of my pieces was used as the ambient sound of theopening of a jazz festival in Zurich a couple of years ago. Andsomebody who runs an alternative rock and roll magazine inMinnesota got very excited about my recent CD, and she likes toput in her Walkman listen to it on the bus.
I would say that I have no sense of any kind of sanctityabout the way in which it is to be used, but there are certainlycontexts in which it's going to be awkward, and contexts in whichit's going to well used.
Uechi: A few of the things you mentioned earlier still play aimportant part in who you are now. In a sense you're stillperforming.
Lansky: Yes, absolutely.
Uechi: And also talking about controlling the technical aspects,and becoming your own best expert, that's still a part of makingtape music. Now what about writing for acoustic instruments? Doyou still interested in doing that?
Lanky: I have, usually kicking and screaming. It's happenedseveral times that some performers say "Hey, we'd love tocommission you to write a piece for tape and our instruments." And I say "Oh, alright. That's not my favorite combination...butI'll listen." So then they apply and they don't get the grant[to fund the commission], so then I do the piece anyway, butwithout the tape [chuckle]. Because I essentially don't enjoydoing [pieces for instruments and tape], although I'm still opento the idea, I haven't been that good at it.
I did a piece [entitled 'Hop'] recently for Marimolin, amarimba and violin duo, which they've recorded very nicely[Marimolin, Combo Platter. BMG/Catalyst 62667-2] and performed allover the place. I just heard them do it last week in New Yorkand they just creamed it, and it was great!
I think in order to write instrumental music, it's likeanything else, you've really got to do a lot of it and getexperience at it. I don't think I've spent that much time overthe years doing it, so it's difficult for me. When it works, itworks okay. [Marimolin] loves this piece, but I was veryfortunate because the marimba player lives here in town. I mustof gone over to her house eight or nine times and showed herthings, and every time I'd go over there then I'd throwit out.
My whole relation to composition is I basically have to havefeedback, in terms of sound. I'm not a good abstract, pencil-and-paper composer. I've really got to sit in a room and havesound coming at me, and then sort of punch it and do things withit. [mocks internal dialogue] "That sounds better?" "Okay...",and that's really what I love about doing tape music. Myhappiest moments have been just sitting in my room at home,playing something and saying "Well, how can I make this a littlebetter?" [Then I] tweak something, and "Yes!" And finally aftera day's work you get something that sounds great.
I've always been very frustrated putting notes down on paperbecause it takes so much time to do. I think that if you'regoing to write for instruments, you've really got to hear it alot and work with players.
Uechi: What are your views on the future of live music?
Lansky: People are always going to play instruments and sing andshout. That's just part of being human. I don't think anyoneshould have any fear that somehow computers are going to replacehumans. There was a period, I guess we're coming back from itnow, when a lot of musicians were being put out of work bymachines. Essentially, I think we discovered that machines werenot that good substitutes for people.
I don't think that somehow we're going to see, a generationfrom now, people who just don't play instruments. Take the guitar, for example. If you walk along Forty-SeventhStreet [in Manhattan], or you go to any [music] store and thereare guitars all over the place. All of a sudden you see three orfour guys in there (usually men at this point, but I think womenare getting involved, too), and they pull down the guitar [offthe rack] and they play incredibly. The level of guitar playingin the world at this point is just astounding, and the nice thingabout the guitar is that you can get up to speed fairly fast. There are all kinds of great players out there who are doingwonderful things.
I think we will see more automation [in live performance],in a sense. You already do see it with a lot of guitar effectboxes, and MIDI studio type things. You see lots of kinds ofthings where people are using machines in a variety of ways.
I don't think, in the long run, that technology is going toforce the issue by virtue of being technology. People areultimately not going to be interested in the fact that somethingis done on a computer, and already that's happening. 'Computermusic' as such is becoming a dead issue and in effect what I'vebeen working towards for a few years is 'the death of computermusic'.
I would really like to see us reach a point where the factthat something is made on a computer is just totallyuninteresting to anybody out there. You already see it inpopular music. My stuff still sometimes ends up in the computermusic bin [at record stores], although I try to avoid it. ButPeter Gabriel's stuff doesn't end up in the computer music bin,and his use of computers is much more sophisticated than mine. He probably spends much more on hardware than I do, and I'm surethe number of CPU's in his studio is twenty-times the number inmine.
Uechi: You briefly mentioned MIDI. What's the relationship betweenMIDI and your music?Lansky: I've been very unhappy about MIDI. I've used MIDI on acouple of occasions for gesture capture. I did one piece whichwas kind of a real-time version of my piece 'Smalltalk', which wassort of a voice activated system. The thing I don't like aboutMIDI is the musical situation that it puts you in with respect totimbre. In the piece that I did, which was called 'Talk Show',you basically speak into a microphone and it activates all kindsof stuff. The piece works best when you turn the gain up and letthe thing improvise on it's own output. That sort of worked wellas a nice installation.
What I really disliked about MIDI was the way in whichtimbre and physical action are detached. I don't like the waythat you arbitrarily link a patch and a note. Anybody who hasworked a lot with MIDI would say "That's obviously not the way Ithink about it." But I think the basic structure of [MIDI], inas much as it is arbitrary with respect to timbre, leads you tothinking about things in a rudimentary way, so that what you dois you compose the music, then you orchestrate it. It's almost areally primitive view of orchestration, at least that's my takeon it.
So, I haven't been that pleased with MIDI synthesizers and Ihaven't got that involved with them. You know, they're fun andyou can do a lot with them.
I think what we are going to ultimately see, and we're veryseeing it somewhat right now, is a merging of software andMIDI, so a lot of the things that you do on a MIDI keyboard, forexample, will be able to be done in software. There's a companythat's coming out with a child's game next Christmas that does agigaflop worth of processing. If you realize that the DX7 is a25 mps machine, the difference is a huge amount of processing You could have five hundred DX7s being synthesized inreal time on one of these machines.
Uechi: Along the same lines, what changes in technology over thelast fifteen years have most profoundly affected your work? Perhaps, where do you see that going in the future?
Lansky: The thing that has most directly affected me was theavailability of cheap workstations. The fact that the pricesjust keep going down, so that now you can get for the price of acheap used car, what used to be the price of a Mercedes Benz,what before that was the price of a fairly expensive house, andbefore that was a couple of million dollars worth of things.
In the early and mid-eighties I used to really feelterrible. I would go around to schools and play things forpeople that I had done on a two million dollar machine, and showthem what could be done, but there was no way in which they coulddo it. One of the things I liked about MIDI was thedemocratization of the field, so that anybody could set up astudio fairly cheaply.
The drop in prices has been the most sensational thing, andthe increase in speed has certainly allowed us to contemplatekinds of processing that we wouldn't have even considered yearsago. People now routinely do convolution of sounds, which isfairly time consuming, but in the old days that would have takentwo days and now you can do it in a few minutes. Just in thepast four years we've seen a speed-up of almost two orders ofmagnitude in computers. Going from 68030 NeXt Machines to a 90megahertz Pentium, basically that's about a hundred fold increase. At the same, the cost has dropped by a factor often, so you've had a two fold increase in the order of magnitude of computational ability, and a one order of magnitude decreasein cost.
Now you can get a gigabyte disk for eight hundred dollars. We spent twenty-eight thousand dollars for about six hundredmegabytes a few years ago, and it wasn't too long ago that peoplewere spending a million dollars just for one megabyte of memory. You were probably practicing piano really hard at that point[chuckles].
That kind of acceleration has not been matched by musicaldevelopments. Music has moved much more slowly, but I thinkthat's the way that music works. Music does not move at thespeed of technology, music moves at the speed of humandevelopment. I would say that essentially there's probably notall that much difference between computer music today andcomputer music twenty years ago. I think that we're doing thingsin a more complicated way, and we're experimenting with thingsand not so interested in the 'sci-fi' aspects anymore. Thetechnological aspects are not knocking us out so much anymore,and the fact that it's done on a computer is not making that muchdifference.
Essentially the use of computers to make music is still inits infancy. It's really not a mature field at all, and I don't think there is any reason why you would expect it to be. Peopledidn't learn to write for the piano in thirty years. If you justlook at the difference between Scarlatti and Chopin (what's that,a period of about eighty, ninety years?), that's a reallyinteresting development. Even Scarlatti to Beethoven, which is aperiod of fifty years. Things moved more slowly back then, butstill I don't think that music is ever going to move at speedswhich are comparable to what you see in science. It's just notthe nature of the thing. The way we listen develops very slowly.
Actually, a really good measure of this is to look at what'shappened in recording technology. Recording technology is now ahundred years old. It's gotten significantly better,particularly in the last couple of years, although there's stilla lot of things that have to be worked out. Still, what peopleuse recording for is fairly similar to what they were usingrecording for forty or fifty years ago. Basically the market isbeing driven by a lot of recordings of things that have theappearance of records of live performances. It's less true inpopular music, but it's still the case that these things moveslowly.
I would say that maybe fifty years from now we'll be able toassess how things have developed, but I don't think things havemoved all that much, although people disagree with me.
Uechi: An easy ones to finish up: What's on the table? What are youworking on now?Lansky: Umm...I'd prefer not to describe what I'm working on[chuckles]. The last thing I did was a very interesting project. I did a piece for Tim Brady, who is a Canadian guitarist, forelectric guitar and tape. The tape part is essentially aseventeen minute, wacky drum track, and the guitar part isentirely improvised.
Uechi: Nothing is written down?
Lansky: That's right, nothing. I didn't even tell him anything! When I first started to do it, I realized, as I started to try tofigure out how I was going to write for guitar, nothing I couldever do would come near what an electric guitarist could make upon the spot. So, it's kind of a collaborative composition. It'sreally interesting to me, because it opens up aninteresting space for the way in which people interact. I'm sortof building a studio in which he plays, or another way to look atit is I'm doing the soundtrack for his movie, or he's doing thesoundtrack for my movie. The two components really interact. Alot of people have been interested in doing this piece. It'sgotten an interesting reaction.
Uechi: What's the name of this piece?
Lansky: The piece is called "Dance Tracks". Right now, I'm workingon a couple of things but I'd prefer not...If I describe them,then I'll have to know how I want to think about them. So...