One of CNMAT's instrument-specific projects involves digitizing the guitar. Simply put, it will do for the guitar what the synthesizer did for the piano's keyboard, but through the use of a technologically superior system.
Like the digital arts center, UC Berkeley's Center for New Music and Audio Technologies, or CNMAT, also brings together diverse communities through a shared interest in humanizing technology. Here, though, the creative output involves music.
Sitting cross-legged in CNMAT's performance space on a recent morning, CNMAT director and music professor David Wessel was playing an instrument that looked nothing like the instruments one would see in a symphony hall or on stage at a rock concert. In fact, it's not even called an instrument, though it produces an incredible spectrum of polyphonic sounds.
Wessel, whose pioneering work in music technology spans three decades, refers to his instrument as "a gestural controller" because it creates computer-generated music by transmitting and interpreting the gestures of his fingertips.
It is part of numerous high-tech music systems that the center has designed, each a byproduct of one of CNMAT's central goals: to invent and implement creative tools that serve the needs of live-music performers and composers. All of these tools operate in what is called "reactive real time," which is an essential function for live performance.
Shaped as an irregular hexagon and small enough to rest comfortably on Wessel's lap, the controller is covered with several sensory strips on which he moved his fingers up and down in a massaging movement. A slight roll of his middle finger on one of the strips produced a flamenco-like wave of string sounds, while his index finger moved on another and introduced a mix of bass tones. Each strip "reads" his finger's movement and pressure, then feeds the data into a computer that runs special software designed by professors and students at the center. The software -- which was written in a computer language that CNMAT also helped develop -- maps and synthesizes the gestures, instantly turning them into music.
A traditional acoustic or electric instrument produces one sound per gesture, Wessel explains; in other words, strike a key or strum some strings, and you'll hear a single note or chord. "The computer offers us the possibility to expand that gesture to something that's more like what a conductor has in front of him -- a full orchestra," he says. "The possibilities are enormous."
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Many universities across the country have research centers dedicated to exploring the interaction between music and technology, but CNMAT's focus on live performance sets it apart -- and some might argue, above -- the others. It is not simply a studio where musicians and engineers use computers to compose something that exists on tape, to be heard only through the touch of a "play" button. Rather, CNMAT's research projects are put in the hands of musicians and played on stage, where the artists put the real-time reactivity of the machines to the test.
A satellite of the Department of Music, CNMAT was founded by music professor Richard Felciano and opened in 1989 after the university acquired a house and transformed its rooms into computer labs, recording studios, classrooms, offices, and a 50-seat performance space.
The result is a place that attracts students and visiting scholars with backgrounds in music as well as in electrical engineering, computer science, mathematics, psychology, and other fields. The influence of these multiple disciplines on music creates a vibrant atmosphere for research that could fundamentally alter the musical landscape.
For example, one of CNMAT's instrument-specific projects involves digitizing the guitar. Simply put, it will do for the guitar what the synthesizer did for the piano's keyboard, but through the use of a technologically superior system that will likely be applied to other stringed instruments in the future. It creates a vast palette of sounds and effects that can be played on the guitar's six strings, and it updates the electric guitar -- the ubiquitous instrument of the 20th century -- for the digital environment of the 21st century. The project is jointly sponsored by the Gibson Guitar Corp. and the University of California's Digital Media Innovation Program, and Gibson is in the process of using CNMAT's research to manufacture the first generation of all-digital guitars.
"We aim to design and build interesting and musically expressive devices for musicians to use," says Wessel. As a percussionist with a longtime devotion to jazz, he strives to develop systems that allow musicians the full freedom of improvisation. "Most machines are ill-adapted to an improvisation situation. It is a real challenge to make them mutable, something you can transform. But the computers here can do that, and they're not cloistered in a studio. They're out there on stage, we're performing with them, and improvisation is a big part of what we do."
Wessel embraced the potential of personal computers early on, and in 1985 he helped develop musical software for PCs while at a renowned music and technology center in Paris known as IRCAM. A few years later, Professor Felciano recruited Wessel to direct CNMAT, and the center has pushed the evolution of music in significant ways since then. Under Wessel's direction, it undoubtedly will continue to do so as students and scholars promote and realize creative interactions among music, science, and technology.