Low Brow Eye Ltd - Music Technology Consultancy

jacobjoaquin:

Max V. Mathews, The Father of Computer Music RIP (1926-2011)

In 1957, at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Max Mathews demonstrated that the digital computer can be used as a fantastic new music instrument. He created a revolutionary software platform destined to form the basis of all contemporary digital musical systems (Music 1—Music 5).His audacious ideas were driven by the belief that “any sound that the human ear can hear can be produced by a computer”. Mathews’s mastery of this new instrument revealed new musical horizons and sparked a burgeoning curiosity into the very nature of sound. His comprehension and elaboration made five decades of art and research possible, laying the groundwork for generations of electronic musicians to synthesize, record, and play music. [+]

RIP, Max.

[photo by Marsha Vdovin]

Let’s talk about the Studer. First, to revisit this idea of process, where do you start modeling something like this? In some ways, it’s not the most non-linear of the things you’ve had to model. It does seem like it’s a complex system. There was a lot there to take into account in the design.

Yeah — the signal path is long, and there’s a lot of things happening in there. Also, the non-linearities, while they may not be as dramatic as, say, a guitar stompbox or something, they’re considerably complex. There’s a lot of behavior that has a fair amount of subtlety. I think that just about any magnetic mechanism is going to be complicated, because of the hysteresis that you get in magnetic processes. Not only is the tape deck magnetic, but it has a spatial extent. So whereas, if you have say a transformer or an inductor with a magnetic core, unless you’re being very picky, the coils of the wire don’t really move. They might deflect a tiny bit when current goes through them, but for the most part they stay put. And if you imagine the coils of wire are actually fixed on a transformer, the fields that are created don’t change their shape that much, unless you have a material that’s really saturating a lot. Basically, you have a one-dimensional system.

Whereas with the tape, there’s the thickness of the tape and then the width of the tape, and then there’s the length of the tape on which you’re making the recording. That’s all going by the heads, the record and the playback heads, and so the geometries become really important. Any time you have a system that’s got a spatial extent, and especially one that’s got moving parts like that, the computational complexity can go way up. Let’s say you have a tape that’s magnetized, it’s not going to be uniformly magnetized. The magnetization will be a function of the depth of the tape and the width of the tape and of course the length. If you wanted to keep track of all of that stuff, you have this sort of geometric explosion of complexity. It was really necessary to think very hard about how we could have some kind of a model that would be practical to implement – keep all the subtlety that we wanted to have.

Even though the original intent of the [Studer] deck was to be as linear as possible, to be a transparent recording medium, all those different factors made it one of the longer-term projects that we’ve ever done – just trying to figure out how to do the simplifications that we were going to have to do in a way that wouldn’t really detract from the fidelity of the model.

Except from Modeling Analog in a Digital Age: A Conversation with Universal Audio’s Chief Scientist at Create Digital Music.