Once upon a time, like around 60 years ago, electronic music was made not with synthesizers (which hadn’t been invented yet) or computers (which had been invented, but took up most of a room and didn’t really do much), but with tape recorders, test-tone generators, radios, and other sundry bits of electronics usually used for something else. It happened like this:
Mr Müller (former assistant of Stockhausen) performing on generator, radio and 3 tape machines from standuino on Vimeo.
Now, on one hand it’s easy to watch what’s going on and think, “wow, it’s so much easier now that we can run multi-channel recording software on laptop computers and use all sorts of cool plug-ins from companies like Audio Damage.” To a large extent, that thought is completely true. However, working with tape and mixers and things in real time has a degree of immediacy and an organic quality (for lack of a better way of putting it) that’s absent with computer-based electronic-music studios. Software’s lack of direct, hands-on manipulation is what motivates things like the iPad, Windows 8, the new controller from Ableton and Chris’s onging experiments with multi-touch monitors. There is huge power and flexibility inside the computer, but our interaction with it is limited by an inability to reach in and touch it.
I take it as a point of pride that I’m old enough to have spliced tape, made loops with it, built rhythm tracks from loops of found sounds, and so on, years before personal computers became fast enough to manipulate audio signals. Some days, particularly days when my sequencer program is crashing or my audio interface is making mysterious little clicking noises, I miss that way of working. I’m not sure that one can really say whether it was better or worse, but one can say that it was different–and it was completely unhampered by concerns of operating-system updates, copy protection, virus protection, 64-bit compatibility, USB 2.0 or 3.0 or 1.1 compatibility, etc. etc. ad nauseum.
(Thanks go to Chris for bringing this video to my attention.)
