John M. Chowning

Stria: Lines to Its Reconstruction

There is a story that goes with the next four articles about Stria and the forthcoming Computer Music Journal DVD. It is not simply a set of articles and a new recording with striking visualizations. It is a story of four researchers and how they rehabilitated a piece of music given a program with some missing code and missing data, two different sound recordings, and my memory (aided by fading notes and drawings) of what I had done more than 30 years ago then their carefully analyzing my not-veryclean code written in an old language, linking the code to my musical intentions, explaining the music-theoretical underpinnings, tracking down the versions and discrepancies, understanding how it was assembled in the days of very limited disk storage for sound files, confirming my intentions through contemporaneous notes of long-forgotten unpublished analyses, reconstructing the code for the composition and synthesis in modern languages, preserving my original programming errors that had an audible consequence, carefully analyzing the existing recordings and inferring what I must have done so they could faithfully recreate a critical lost version of the program and its data and finally, creating Stria anew. The four authors, Matteo Meneghini (a computer scientist/musician), Laura Zattra (a musicologist/ philologist), Olivier Baudouin (a composer/researcher), and Kevin Dahan (a composer/theorist), all had independent interests and motivations. At different times, each asked me for information about Stria, which I provided as completely as I could. They pushed hard, as the electronic mails, documents, and finally sound files moved from them to me and back. Excepting Laura and Matteo, the four were unknown to one another. Over the years, I had received a few inquiries regarding Stria some casual and some specific. Among the latter were those from Toby Mountain, Roberto Doati, and Giovanni De Poli, all of whose early work enriched this current effort. Then, in December 2002, 1 received an electronic mail that reflected a wholly different level of interest. Matteo Men ghini, then a graduate student in electronics and computer science, asked detailed questions about Stria and the program I had written to compose it. At various times, I had provided copies of the program when asked, and he had gotten hold of one. His questions were pointed, about my use of recursion and about the availability of the programs input data and any other documentation that would aid him in analyzing the program. His project was being guided by Giovanni De Poli, professor of computer science and director of Centro di Sonologia Computazionale at the University of Padua, with whom I had been at IRCAM at various times in

Fifty Years of Computer Music: Ideas of the Past Speak to the Future

The use of the computer to analyze and synthesize sound in two early forms, additive and FM synthesis, led to new thoughts about synthesizing sound spectra, tuning and pitch. Detached from their traditional association with the timbre of acoustic instruments, spectra become structured and associated with pitch in ways that are unique to the medium of computer music.

Wave studies: Sailing an ocean with max and marjorie mathews

Max Mathews has been an important presence in my life since 1964 when I first met him at Bell Telephone Laboratories. His guidance and help in launching the Music IV program at Stanford (Chafe and Chowning 2007; see also the program notes accompanying the 2008 Computer Music Journal DVD) and with my first research efforts in simulating moving sound sources and Doppler shift (Chowning 1971) were invaluable to me. But he has also been a close friend, and in this article I present an aspect of Max that has nothing to do with computer music. Rather, I bring to light one of Max Mathewss secondary passions sailing, an activity in which he has teamed with Marjorie for decades and in which, with my family, we joined together to make an extended ocean voyage. Sailing a boat is a complicated business, requiring specialized skills and technical knowledge. Sailing a boat over long distances is complicated further by the fact that, in addition to keeping the boat in operating condition (and afloat!), survival depends upon knowing ones location the art of navigation. It is celestial navigation especially that fascinates Max it is an art that embraces a range of considerations, from trigonometry to astronomy, and which requires a kind of attention to detail and methodical habits of work that have led Max to such