Sounding Off By the Numbers : Making Music the MIDI Way

Musically, as in so much else, this is the dawning of the age of algorithms. Music and mathematics have always been closely related in theory, but now, from DAT (Digital Audio Tape) to MIDI (Music Instrument Digital Interface), numbers are the tie that binds in practice as well.

Technologically, the wide and fertile field of electronic music has been a long time developing, but the introduction of digital synthesis in the late 1970s revolutionized the creation and performance of electronic music as thoroughly as digital recording changed audio standards. Digital developments have increasingly taken high-tech, high-fidelity music making and recording out of expensive academic and corporate studios, and put it in homes and on stage.

The results have been an explosion of new, technically sophisticated music, with fallout as heavy in sociological and legal implications as in artistic challenges.

Perhaps the most significant, though at the time unheralded, factor in the present electronic boom was the development of the MIDI standard in 1983. Now there are dozens of books and magazines devoted exclusively to MIDI and its uses, no manufacturer of serious electronic keyboards would be so rash as to send an instrument to market without MIDI capabilities, and MIDI ports have even become standard equipment on Atari’s personal computers.

Like the answer to one of those metaphysical riddles, MIDI is something you can neither hear nor touch, yet without it the cutting edge of electronic music--particularly in performance--would be dull indeed. A way of defining musical characteristics by numbers, MIDI in practice functions as a sort of communications protocol.

As Lachlan Westfall, director of the Los Angeles-based International MIDI Assn., defines it, “MIDI is a method of moving performance information from one music instrument to another instrument or computer.”

Or, as composer Carl Stone says, “MIDI is a means of communication between hardware, that has really opened some doors and has fantastic potential.”

What impact could an ostensibly boring, simple technical specification have?

Consider synthesizer sales: In 1983, according to the Music USA 88 report of the American Music Conference, 66,000 synthesizers were sold, following a pattern of modest yearly increases. That summer, the MIDI specification was released.

The next year synthesizer sales doubled, to 134,700 units. By last year, the business was worth $300 million, a figure that in the Music USA 88 accounting categories does not include sales of electronic pianos, organs or portable keyboards.

All of the increase may not have been due to MIDI, but it is hard to underestimate the importance of the interface, which made synthesizers easily connected to other synthesizers, drum machines, samplers and computers, and made a complex system readily controlled from a single source.

“It’s all because of MIDI,” Jeff Rosenfield says. “Because of that, musicians of all levels have access to very high technology.”

An independent advertising consultant, Rosenfield produced West L.A. Music’s second annual Keyboard and MIDI Show, at Cal State Northridge last month. Musicians of all levels, including apparently every garage-band techno-rat and lounge-act hopeful in Los Angeles, were indeed present at the weekend affair, where 109 exhibitors represented 150 different manufacturers.

Though the exhibitions ranged from simple accessories to demonstrations of do-it-yourself music videos, it was the rooms filled with keyboards and synthesizers from the major manufacturers that drew the biggest crowds.

With the advent of MIDI, however, keyboards are not the only recourse for electronically minded musicians. MIDI controllers now take the form of guitars, percussion pads and woodwinds, with ventures even further afield, such as the Drum Suit from Brocktron-X. With a belt-mounted high-hat cymbal, thigh pads and special Stompercussion boots, the suit makes drummers as mobile as other instrumentalists, according to the manufacturer.

Stompercussion is not without an already highly developed precedent. Alfred Desio, of the Los Angeles Choreographers and Dancers company, has been experimenting with what he calls Taptronics since 1982. His system of exploiting and processing amplified tap dancing, now MIDI controlled, will be heard in Gregory Hines’ film “Tap,” now scheduled for release in January.

According to Westfall, there are two key elements in the MIDI boom. One is that it is a specification that all manufacturers accepted, which has spared the industry from something similar to the operating system factionalism that besets the personal computer business. It has also increased competition, bringing prices down.

Secondly, what MIDI does is turn musical parameters into numbers, and numbers are what computers do best. Software developers have spurred the industry with new products for every need in composing, recording, performing and printing music.

The Music USA 88 report includes music software as a new category, placing a $20-million tag on that portion of the industry in 1987, an estimated 100% advance over 1986. Home studio composing and recording applications lead the survey’s list of uses for the new software, and as another indication of the pervasive influence of MIDI, the survey also found that MIDI capability was the most desired feature in home recording hardware after sound quality itself.

Although home uses for music/computer systems are an important market and sociological feature of the MIDI boom, artistically MIDI and the new generation of personal computers and software have been significant in increasing the electronic presence onstage. Until recently, computer music has been largely a laboratory product, made public only on tape.

With new software and MIDI connectivity, computers are beginning to take an increasingly active role in live, real-time performances. One master of the emerging medium is Carl Stone, a composer long active in electronic music. On Christmas Eve, 1985, all of Stone’s old, pre-MIDI equipment was stolen in a burglary. Rather than simply replace the lost devices, he took a hard look at current developments.

“I decided to change my approach,” he says. “I bought a Macintosh and all the other gear. Now, I’m able to do pieces more precisely, and it has spurred my creativity. I do about six pieces a year now, instead of two.”

One of his compositions that has been getting a lot of play lately is “Hop Ken,” (all of Stone’s pieces are named for Oriental restaurants), which won one of the Freeman awards at the CalArts Contemporary Music festival in March, and can be experienced on the Monday Evening Concert program at the County Museum of Art this week.

“Hop Ken” is also available, along with Stone’s “Wall Me Do,” on a CD anthology entitled “Another Coast,” just released by Music and Arts in Berkeley.

According to the composer,

both works are “very MIDI intensive. All the sounds are digital, and stored in a MIDI controlled sampler.

“Basically, (“Hop Ken”) is a disassembly and reconstruction of the very first and last material of ‘Pictures at an Exhibition,’ ” Stone reports. He has an overall formal scheme, which he fills with small fragments of Mussorgsky’s music, manipulated through rhythmic cells into a stuttering, permutational frenzy.

“I tend to use very familiar materials and musical cliches,” Stone says. These materials are available to him through sampling, a digital recording technique which provides him with the basic sounds of his work, largely drawn from CDs, where the information is already in digital form.

At its most basic, sampling has enabled electronic instruments to imitate any and all acoustical instruments with much greater realism than the most sophisticated synthesized imitations. The process can be extended, however, to access any element of a commercial recording, such as a rhythm track or individual vocal phrase. Allegations of such use--labeled groove robbing-- in popular rap recordings created copyright infringement lawsuits that have not yet been resolved.

Stone sympathizes with what he views as an iconographical use of borrowed material in rap music. What he does in his own compositions often makes the original, sampled material unrecognizable. “I’m interested in the aspect of transformation and time manipulation, to give a profoundly different musical energy to the material,” he says.

Nonetheless, he acknowledges that sampling must be done responsibly.

“After thinking about it, it seemed clear to me that the only thing I could do to be ethical was to get permission (to use copyrighted material), and I did,” he said, referring to a new composition based on sampled cuts from a Japanese pop song.

Unlike “Hop Ken,” Stone’s “Jang Toh” makes no use of MIDI devices. Instead, it is constructed from environmental sounds--highly processed--recorded on a portable DAT deck. The music is designed to collaborate with an installation by sculptor Mineko Grimmer at the Santa Monica Museum of Art.

Stone presented live versions of “Jang Toh” this weekend at the museum, using three DAT machines and a digital mixer, controlled from his Macintosh. Recorded versions of the same material can be heard when viewing the construction at the museum through next Sunday.

The DAT recorders were necessary in part because longer pieces of musical material are involved in “Jang Toh.” “Hop Ken” is built from a segment, seven to eight seconds in length, of the sampled “Pictures at an Exhibition,” which Stone estimates breaks down to 500,000 digital bits of computer data. In “Jang Toh” he manipulates about 10 minutes’ worth of material--taken from 50 hours of recordings--and samplers cannot handle that much data.

One of the limitations about the current technology that chafes Stone in this situation is that there is no MIDI-controllable DAT deck available. That will probably change soon, though it was not so long ago that Digital Audio Tape recording itself was threatened.

When DAT machines became a consumer reality, the record industry tried to keep the equipment out of the U.S. market through highly publicized legislative efforts, and then proposed a form of copy-protection for commercial recordings. Neither effort succeeded, and like familiar cassette recorders, DAT recorders are now available in many makes and models, including new hand-sized portables such as the one Stone used in gathering the sounds for “Jang Toh.”

The industry’s fears about DAT were essentially the same as those surrounding the introduction of VCRs earlier. “The whole controversy of DAT, that was just plain dumb,” Stone scoffs.

Though DAT recorders--still priced beyond mass sales--may not create an epidemic of record or CD piracy and copying, there is an undeniable countercultural element in the whole digital music boom. The ability to create, record and even distribute technologically sophisticated music is within the reach of individuals, operating on shoestring budgets.

That is apparent in the development of the paterfamilias of ‘80s digital music, the compact disc. Dozens of independent labels, in all areas of music, have sprung up. Having investigated the matter, Stone reports that CDs can be produced for $2 each, including the cost of mastering, in quantities as little as 400.

“As MIDI put the technology in the hands of the people, this has made the distribution of it possible,” he says.

None of this, of course, makes human creativity dispensable or guarantees artistic accomplishment. It does, however, significantly broaden and diversify the talent pool working in electronic music, and suggests that major achievements in technology based music may emerge from someone’s garage as easily as from established academic or industry studios.