I can’t image where the world of music would be without technology. And I don’t just mean how we listen to music. I’m thinking about how it’s made. So much of what creative musicians do these days couldn’t happen without help from technology. I read an article about Final Fantasy (Owen Pallet) in the New York Times last weekend. It describes him as he’s testing out a computer program he wrote to coordinate the sound of his violin through a group of daisy-chained amplifiers. Owen usually performs as a one-man band, using technology to create a full sound all on his own. An amazing number of musicians perform that way. This weekend we hear from Mad Eskimo, Lucky Dragons, Jay Bharadia and Culture Reject, to name just a few. We wouldn’t be able to hear any of that music if it wasn’t for these new technologies.

One of the most interesting genres of the last few years is the remix. Sampling and sequencing software make it all possible. Radiohead recently opened a site where anyone could submit their own remix of the song Nude, from their album In Rainbows. A whopping 2252 remixes were submitted. That’s a whole lot of people who were willing to pay to download the stems (individual strands of music) and tweak the sounds to come up with their own vision of the song. How much better than karaoke is that!

On Sunday night I’ll be playing a piece by Frank Zappa. He was an early adopter – someone who jumps on board at the beginning of a new technology and rides the rocky road of system crashes and programming bugs. His instrument of choice was the Synclavier. It was one of the first big jumps forward in computer-aided composition, sound sampling and FM synthesis. When I was a graduate student, I was lucky enough to work on a Synclavier II at the University of Western Ontario. It had a 20 Megabyte hard drive (my phone currently has 4 gigabytes) that wasn’t very robust. If you were in too much of a hurry and closed the door to our studio quickly, the hard drive crashed and whoever was working had to re-boot and start all over again. This was before computers could really produce graphic notation for music (something that composers take for granted these days, the same way we all use word processors). I was particularly interested in trying to use the computer to help write music. At the time, I was obsessing over a musical language that could be described with a mathematical formula. The computing power of the Synclavier could run the calculations and play a passage I had designed. That way I could try things out in the same way I would improvise at the piano, but I didn’t have to stop and calculate a bunch of numbers.




On Saturday night we’ll play some music by the Icelandic composer Kjartan Olafsson. He’s deeply involved in computer-assisted composition. He’s even written a computer program, called CALMUS, that helps solve compositional problems as they come up during the process of writing music. A lot of indie pop groups and laptop musicians are using a program called GarageBand. It can set up beats and loop patterns of notes and chords, so you can improvise over top.

It used to be that only the rich or those attached to big Universities could have access to the computing power needed to do anything useful with technology in their music. Now almost anyone can set up a home studio and let their imagination run wild. Another Icelandic musician, Mugison, was in our Studio a few weeks back and he was telling me about how he worked for almost a year on one piece – all on his home computer – only to trash what he’d done and go with a studio session of that song with his band. Computers are very useful tools, but the don’t generally save on creative time.

Saturday night we’ll also hear a track from Paul Linklater. His new double CD and bonus EP are out on the Jibcut label. The whole purpose of that project is to elevate the aesthetic of DIY music, which usually involves recording directly to a laptop.

We live in a time of extremes. On one hand there’s a group of happy DIY knob twiddlers, exerting total control over the music they make in their basements and bedrooms. On the other side we have high-end studios, where sophisticated production teams work in tandem with multiple creators with the objective being to produce something that’s more than the sum of the parts.

Either way, those of us who like our music to be unique and unexpected end up the winners.