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groove & VAmpire - (1970)
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-(Generated Real-time Output
Operations on Voltage-controlled Equipment)
-(Video And Music Program for Interactive Realtime
Exploration/Experimentation).
In 1970, Max Mathews, who had coded the first real computer
music synthesis program back in 1957, pioneered GROOVE (Generated
Real-time Output Operations on Voltage-controlled Equipment), the
first fully developed hybrid system for music synthesis,
utilising a HoneywellDDP-224 computer with a simple cathode ray
tube display, disk and tape storage devices. A frame buffered
composite NTSC output was integrated, and a synesthesic realtime
instrument was born. Laurie
Spiegel, synchronously composed music and animated video.
Laurie wrote software for a FORTRAN IV with a RAND tablet for
input to create a new visual instrument in the mid '70's. Click
to see some of the output: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8.
Due to massive hardware changes at Bell Labs, the GROOVE system
met with an untimely demise in the mid '70's. Undaunted, Laurie
hacked things back together, and evolved the mid-1960s massive
roomsized DDP-224 computer platform into the VAMPIRE (Video And
Music Program for Interactive Realtime
Exploration/Experimentation). She eventually I got to know Dr.
Kenneth Knowlton, the computer graphics pioneer and master of
evolutionary algorithms, and began to work together on various
projects. After learning some graphics coding there, Laurie
became intrigued with the idea of trying to make musical
structure visible and embarked on the strange mission of bringing
GROOVE's compositional capabilities to bear on the frame buffer
output, particularly the ideas of time functions, transfer
functions, and interconnectible software modules. The modified
graphical GROOVE evolved from beginnings as a program called RTV
(Realtime Video), and Ken Knowlton contributed a way of
addressing the system with an array of instructions. As a
composer of music, Laurie discovered that she enjoyed playing the
drawing parameters in real time like a musical instrument.
"I could move around in an image and change the size, color,
texture, color and other parameters in real time as I drew it,
using knobs and switches. I would draw with one hand while
manipulating the various visual parameters with my other hand
using the 3D joystick, switches, push buttons and knobs."
"Things got to the stage in visual improvisation at which I
had found myself needing to switch over from improvising to
composing in audible music several years earlier. The
capabilities available to me had gotten to be more than I could
sensitively and intelligently control in realtime in one pass to
any where near the limits of what I felt was their aesthetic
potential. Concurrently, I had become increasingly interested in
the use of algorithms and powerful evolutionary parameters in
sonic composing, and the idea of organic or other visual growth
processes algorithmicly described and controlled with realtime
interactive input, and of composing temporal structures that
could be stored, replayed, edited, added to
("overdubbed" or "multitracked"), refined,
and realized in either audio or video output modalities, based on
a single set of processes or composed functions, made an
interface of the drawing system with GROOVE's compositional and
function-oriented software an almost inevitable and irresistible
path to take. It would be possible to compose a single set of
functions of time that could be manifest in the human sensory
world interchangeably as amplitudes, pitches, stereo sound
placements, et cetera, or as image size, location, color, or
texture (et cetera), or (conceivably, ultimately) in both sensory
modalities at once.
There are fewer parameters of sound to deal with than there are
for images. In a hybrid system such as GROOVE, which used fixed
waveform analog oscillators and computer controlled analog
filters and voltage controlled oscillators, each
"voice" may have frequency amplitude, filter cutoff,
and possibly, filter Q, reverb mixture, or stereo location. A
visual "voice" may have x, y, and possibly z axis
locations, size in each of these dimensions, color, texture, hue,
saturation, value (or other color parameters), plus logical
operation on screen contents (write, and, or, exclusive or), and
in the case of a recognizable entity, scaling and rotation
variables (for solid objects roll, pitch and yaw) in two or three
dimensions. (I did not deal with transformations of solid objects
in this relatively primitive realtime digital visual instrument
and composing system.)
In essence, what this system ultimately provided for the short
time that it ran before its untimely demise, was a instrument for
composing abstract patterns of change over time by recording
human input into a computer via an array of devices the
interpretation and use of each of which could be programmed and
the data from which could be stored, replayed, reinterpreted and
reused. The set of time functions created could be further
altered by any transformation one wished to program and then used
to control any parameter of image or of sound (when transfered
back to GROOVE's audio-interfaced computer by computer tape or
disk). Unfortunately, due to the requirement of separate
computers in separarte rooms at the Labs, it was not physically
possible to use a single set of recorded (and/or computed) time
functions to control both image and sound simultaneously, though
in principle this would have been possible.
Like any other vampire, this one consistently got most of its
nourishment out of me in the middle of the night, especially just
before dawn. It did so from 1974 through 1979, at which time its
CORE was dismantled, which was the digital equivalent of having a
stake driven through its art.
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