Asymmatrix
3 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2018–2024
5:14 · 147K views · Aug 6, 2009
John Chowning's 1977 computer music piece Stria, composed with FM synthesis, which he discovered in 1967. It unifies timbre and scale structure around the Golden Mean.
HN cites it as an example of early academic FM synthesis composition and the Golden Mean in music.
3 comments from Hacker News
There is a tendency to judge and predict the commercial success of this (and every) music project. As a long-time player and designer of digital music instruments in academic laboratory and underground contexts, i can say it's almost impossible to produce a hit directly from a laboratory. It has to go through a commercial layer first. Then an artistic layer. That's not a dig at anyone or anything. Music is a projection of life's experiences into sound... A lab can inject some tech into the music world, but we won't know for approximately 1-2 decades whether any instrument or technique is a hit or it. FM Synthesis, formalized by Chowning at Stanford ,comes to mind. His initial implementations were idiosyncratic. His math was an organization of community knowledge. It took Yamaha's need to make sound cards and keyboards to direct all this effort those sounds into the chips and instruments we ended up buying and loving in the 80s. And it took artists and producers to bring out the best of the techniques. Also, you'll find when the tech passes through the artistic layer, there are many more mundane variables than the technology, such as re-sale value and ability to get them re-paired. For example, if you think these sounds are non-compelling, I dare you to look up compositions by Chowning himself! [1] They are nothing like Samantha Fox's "Touch Me," [2] a famous example of the Yamaha DX-7 FM synthesizer. The point of research like this is not really to inspire music fans so much
The early FM pieces weren't very pop. this video You may think it sounds crude, but pieces like these took hours of expensive mainframe (PDP-10) time. There wasn't a lot of opportunity for careful sculpting of fine details. You could easily synthesize something like this in real time now. But not many people do, which I think is a shame. If you can read French, there's more background here: [LINK]
John Chowning's ( [LINK] ) work Stria ( this video ) unifies timbre and scale structure about the Golden Mean as a musical interval. It's completion predates this work by Carlos by nearly a decade (1977) and the composition process apparently began as early as 1972 ( [LINK] ). There are many academic papers available which analyze this work: [LINK]