The Synthesis, Perception, and Specification of Musical Time Author(s): Milton Babbitt Source: Journal of the International Folk

Music Council, Vol. 16 (1964), pp. 92-95 Published by: International Council for Traditional Music Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/835091 Accessed: 28/01/2010 12:59
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Ways and Means of Tone Production in Art and Folk Music and their Resulting Notational Problems

THE SYNTHESIS, PERCEPTION, AND SPECIFICATION OF MUSICAL TIME

MILTON BABBITT Electronic Music Center of Columbia and Princeton Universities, U.S.A.) (The THE various notational means of signifying and conveying the composer's decisions and specifications to the various media for the electronic production of musical sound are probably temporary both in their exact nature and variety. But this should not be construed as a basis for concluding that these notational practices are, therefore, of consequence only to the historian of the ephemeral, or to the operators and designers of such media. The characteristics of these notations and, indeed, the very fact of their probable ephemerality embody implications of far more than mere "historical" interest, implications which extend significantly beyond the nature of the current means and even the structures of the particular media. These notations, unlike current conventional musical notation, are "machine languages," usable with and applicable to only a specific type of machine, or to one in which it is contained as a discrete sub-machine. They are instructions to an artifact only of a specific internal construction, with a particular input mechanism related in this single manner to the internal structure. Although the expression "machine language" is a product of the computer era, its designation is not, certainly not in music. Tablature notations, for instance, are machine languages, incorrect or meaningless as notations for musical instruments other than those for which they were constructed. They can be extended in their application only after having been recorded into a general symbolic notation from which the performer must translate again into the machine language of his particularinstrument. Conventional Western notation is just such a symbolic language, and the first rudimentary technique acquired by a performeris that of an assembler or translator, recoding this notationusually mentally-into machine language: fingerings, lip pressures, hand positions, etc. That there is as yet no general symbolic notation for music composed for electronic media is not simply, nor is it primarily, evidence of the inadequacy and inappropriateness of conventional notation for such needs and purposes, but rather of the profound change which these media have effected in the location of the boundaries of music: from those limits imposed by the physical structure of conventional musical instruments and the physiological structure of the human vocal and muscular systems to not only the relatively limitless capacities of the electronic media but also to the far more complexly constrained and less well comprehendedlimits of the human perceptual and conceptual auditory capacities. Therefore, our current machine languages are sufficient but not necessary, for they include an infinity of acoustical possibilities which are of no auditory significance. The electronic medium, perforce, provides regulable and measurable control of frequency, intensity and duration-and therefore, of envelope, spectrum, and mode of succession. This, in an adequate
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notation, would require means of signifying a continuous infinity of values in each of these dimensions, but realistic musical needs apparently are satisfied by a discreet, finite collection of values. Thus the creation of an adequate and efficient symbolic notation depends upon the acquisition of knowledge of aural perception. Until very recently we knew only how little we knew in this area. How difficult our tasks might be could be inferred from what we did know of the complicated many-one relations between the acoustical domains and what were assumed to be their correlated auditory domains, and from the intricate extent to which each auditory dimension is dependent upon more than one acoustical dimension. The solution of the apparently innocent problem of musical notation thus carries one to the central problems of musical perception, and onto the same path as that upon which the composer finds himself when he becomes aware that the responsible use of the electronic medium involves him, formally and informally, in acoustical and psycho-acoustical research. He must specify his compositional decisions with an accuracy and completeness that have been unnecessary and impossible in the past and he must discover the answers to questions that have never been posed before and which never could have been answered before. These questions can now be answered with the aid of electronic media and must be answered if these media are to be employed to the full of their singular capacities. The notation used in composing works for, and realizing works on, the RCA Electronic Sound Synthesizer eventually must take the form of input specifications most simply and completely described as vector representations: ordered quintuples (at least) of positive integers, with each element of the quintuple representing perceptually separable components of the musical event, and the values of the integers designating commands to the data stored in the form of electronic configurations. These integral values, in binary representation, are punched as holes in the inputcontrol paper tape. These holes are in turn sensed by brushes, which then energize the relays that switch this designated succession of commands in their electronic realizations. The five minimal dimensions are: frequency (the total audio frequency continuum is available); octave (the total frequency class of which the frequency is a representative is available; thus, frequency and octave serve to specify what normally is termed "frequency"); envelope (a range of temporal values for growth and decay from "electronic instantaneity" to those easily specified as intensities); intensity; and spectrum (usually obtained by the resonation and attenuation of frequency bands of an incoming "saw-tooth" or "white noise" signal, that is, the specifications of an electronically constructed "formant" to be imposed upon such initial signals). Most importantly, time values-values of duration or protensity-are not included in this set of specifications, for unlike time notation for a computer-generated sound, they are not represented digitally, but in analogue, as distances along the paper roll. Although a temporal specification for the total event can be adjoined to the vector, increasing its dimensionality to six, the meaning of this value is fundamentally different from that of the others in the representation, for its meaning necessarily is that of an intervallically-scaled measurement; for example-and this is only ordinal rather than intervallic-a smaller number in this category must represent a shorter duration, assuming that the input speed remains fixed. The values in the other five dimensions either cannot or need not have such denotations. They are nominally scaled, "arbitrarily"chosen and related, and convey no information, even within this machine language, without a description of the associated internal configurations which the numbers, for the moment, name and select. The temporal value not only

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has no such dependence on an internal configuration, but is never employed or applied in binary form. This decision on the part of the designers of the Synthesizer both reflects a wish to provide the most completely flexible, "over-efficient" mode of specifications in the temporal domain and corresponds to the composer's realization that it is in the specification and regulation of this domain that the electronic medium possesses and promises its most strategic, unique, and extensive musical contribution. For the first time the temporal in all its compositional manifestations-speed and flexibility of pitch; loudness and timbral succession; durational, timbral, registral and dynamic rhythm, etc.-can be analysed and synthesized to any perceptually realistic degree of accuracy. The taped examples that follow, therefore, are synthesizer-created instances of critically time-dependent musical phenomena. They are not intended as "science spectaculars" but, on the contrary, as the most apparently modest, brief, and simple ingredients of musical composition, which incorporate nevertheless profoundly difficult and conceptually new problems. These examples will serve to test the extension into the electronic domain of those invariants which have provided the basis for the formational and transformational principles of past and present musical systems, the extension into the musical domain of the hypotheses of the psychology of perception, and also those tenative generalizations of similitude and hierarchization which already have been proposed for phenomena producible only by electronic means. The examples presented included instances of: (I) Identical specifications of frequency which, for different spectra and only for durations of less than one-tenth of a second, produce what are identified as different, yet individually unambiguous, pitches. This provides an unprecedented case of one-many relations between the frequency and pitch domains and of the variance of pitch with regard to duration. The "threshold" durational values at which such frequency specifications produce pitch identity (equivalently, it appears, the "normal"frequency-pitch correlations) appear to be a non-trivial function of the characteristics of respective spectra and the absolute value of the frequency. (2) The threshold of identification of frequency succession as demonstrated in the presentation of a succession in which each of the components is of the same duration and loudness, at a speed at which only about half of the components can be identified. (Each component's duration is about one-thirty-second of a second.) The speed is then reduced in a number of stages. This is comparable with tachistoscope tests in visual perception to provide a reasonable criterion of "simplicity." These speed tests indicate the importance of pitch extrema in the perception of succession. (3) The effect of quantitative time factors on the identification of qualitative temporal relations. Certainsuccessions, identical in every respect except in the orderof the components, are perceived as totally identical, whereas others are not so perceived. Similarity of interval succession appears to be the basis of such misidentification. (4) The increase of the threshold duration for the identification of succession as the registral span is increased. (5) The greater accuracy of durational judgements when the durations are associated with "specific" pitches rather than with "indefinite," percussion instrument-like pitches. (6) The dubious status of certain "time-order errors" of classical psychophysics, when presented in musical terms to trained musicians; this includes both protensity judgements and loudness judgements as a function of the time interval between the phenomena to be compared. (7) The apparent alteration of timbral characteristics resulting from

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an alteration of the temporal relations between component timbres in an "ensemble": this result appears to depend on, for example, the coincidence of peaks between trills. (8) The "misidentification" of timbral families, and the inability to identify components in a complex as a result of the precise synchronization of attacks of the component frequencies. (9) The dependence of frequency discrimination on the duration of the presented frequencies. (io) The dependence of durational identification on timbral characteristics. Even such modest, if novel, attempts to determine the correspondence between input specification and perceived outputs in time-dependent phenomena serve, at least, to indicate the critically limited nature of our knowledge in this field. The mere identification of durational equality appears to pose considerable problems for the auditor and, therefore, even greater problems for him who would understand the processes of temporal perception. I hope I have been able to convey something of the character of and the musical occasion for this new and necessary compositional research and, by implication, of its highly interdisciplinary character. I regret the impossibility of discussing those investigations of larger scale temporal considerations, particularly with regard to figural after-effects and memorative determinants. I trust it is apparent that just as the machine translation of languages has necessitated and produced a far more satisfactory and efficient analysis of the structure of "natural" languages, so the necessity of precise and complete communication with electronic sound-producers motivates the reanalysis of the sound event and musical structure, providing us with information as to the nature of all music, non-electronic as well as electronic.

AN EXT'ENSION OF TONE-ROW TECHNIQUES THROUGH ELECTRONIC PITCH CONTROL

MYRON SCHAEFFER (Electronic Music Studio, University of Toronto, Canada.) IN January of this year, on the occasion of the first electronic music concert held at the University of Toronto, I composed a work for voice and electronic sounds in which different tunings provided the basis of three different octave species. Whereas the voice part was based on the diatonic tempered scale, the two accompanying parts were each in a different system of tuning. One part was based on a scale of twelve tones in which there was a difference of 63 cents between the successive steps; the second part employed tones separated by 172 cents. The results were sufficiently encouraging to attempt a generalization and organization of a comprehensive system of tuning for further experimentation. The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to some aspects of this tuning method. It is offeredas a suggestion to electronic music composerswho are interested in tone-row techniques as one direction in which experimental music might grow. One important difference between traditional and electronic music is related to intonation itself. Traditional instruments are limited to the productionof tones within a predetermined pitch system and are bound by this system. Relatively slight deviations of pitch can be achieved at the will of the performer,but the repetition of any