ECONOMY vs. QUALITY

To PAIA (especially the users),
From the way PAIA has appeared over the last few years, it looks as if they really are trying devilishly hard to produce quality at minimal cost. It is often the case easier to design and produce electronic equipment using pre-established "algorithms" for various circuits, than to try and achieve like results using less elaborate methods. The people at PAIA demonstrated this point with their VCO designs lately. VCO's in my opinion have to be one of the most critical components in a system. Tractional deviations from S/H circuits and VCO's can be readily heard by the average musician/purist.

But somehow I get the feeling that PAIA is playing the economy route too well. For people like myself who perform mostly in real time, little things like 3-octave keyboards can be irritating. I feel a larger keyboard, say 5 octaves, could eliminate reaching for the pitch knob for drastic scale changes. Polytonic keyboards would be interesting enough, but their total impact could be realized through a larger keyboard. By now, most of us have become comfortable tracking several oscillators and it would be ideal if this ability could still be incorporated into the polytonic system (rather than having two separate keyboards). This is where economy and versatility come to battle. On the one hand you have the people able to produce these electronic wonders, and on the other one users/buyers who may or may not be offended by the price of the final product. This applies not only to keyboards but for everything else as well. I feel that users shouldn't swoon when they see prices on individual kits that would normally accompany entire package systems.

Perhaps if enough users get demanding enough, PAIA will have no choice than to satisfy these perfectionist-related whims of incomparable versatility and quality.

Sincerely,
Michael N. Levesque

WANTED - BASIC ELECTRONICS

Dear Sir,

I read the third Polyphony the same day that it came and let me tell you that the whole thing is great. The format is better in every issue so keep the mag. on & out of the press.

I was thinking of something that I forgot to put in the questionnaire. I think if you can add a special section that deals with how those new keyboards & black boxes work, and perhaps a section like the one of music theory, but instead of music write about the ABC's of electronics. (My weak points are the transistors & CMOS, not to mention the TTL & micro-processors; I don't have anything about them - I mean books).

That's all friend, Guillermo Santiago

COMMENTS QUESTIONS

Dear Editor:

I have a bunch of opinions and speculations in response to John's column on digital keyboards in the 1/76 Issue of Polyphony, and some questions that I would like answered about PAIA synthesizers.

I am a computer programmer (for money) by day and a musician (for fun) by night, so for me the most interesting idea in John's column was the idea of programming a digital memory to play music. I have programmed a computer to play music, storing bits in magnetic core memory and picking up the Hertzian waves caused by magnetizing the cores on a radio. I used two words for each note: the first gave the pitch (number of machine cycles before a bit is stored) and the second gave the duration of the note (number of times through the pitch loop - which varied for different pitches for the same duration). The most tedious part was coming up with the numbers to put into those two words for each note; that is, programming the tune. If the computer were larger and had a console typewritten I could have written a routine to accept some sort of typewriter input and calculate the pitch and duration from that. But what sort of input?

The problem in programming will be to come up with an operating system analagous to a compiler (like Fortran) for a composer to use in entering a composition into memory. However, by the time Fortran was invented, mathematics had a very extensive, precise notation easily adaptable to computers; this is not the case with music.

For programming a composition we need at least the following parameters for each note: pitch, duration, articulation, and intensity; or, instead of intensity for each note, phrasing over an entire phrase, which would be easier for the composer to work with. This is the minimum for piano and organ works up to the beginning of the 20th century; other instruments have even more parameters (vibrato and others); modern music can accomodate all these parameters and more besides.

What would I like to see in programmable synthesizers? Well, for a start, a machine that can play existing pieces of music that are unplayable by humans (some of Paganini's violin music, for example) with the same "warmth", "expression", "dynamics" or whatever that a human would use in playing them if he could. (I know that the words in quotes are not defined or even completely understood, but hopefully we will discover how to give a reasonable facsimile of them as we go along). Such a machine would make it possible for composers to write anything at all, playable or unplayable without any more work than would go into writing a piece with conventional orchestration.

Music like "Switched-On Bach" is nice but impractical when you have to spend 400 hours to produce what a few instrumentalists could do better after 10 hours of rehearsals.

Anyway, if we can ever understand just what we want from an instrumentalist clearly enough to be able to notate it precisely on paper, the programmable synthesizer will do for composers what the computer did for engineers, scientists, and clerks.

Changing the subject sideways, slightly, here's what I would like to see in ordinary synthesizers (and I'm surprised that no one has built it yet): Mainly, a pedal keyboard for bass lines. Preferably a 32-note organ style keyboard. It would not have to be polytonal. However, it would be expensive. The Shober Organ Company of New York offers 32-note pedal clavier kit for $276.50 and that's just the wood parts, no electronics. In my opinion, the most practical real-time-oriented large scale synthesizer would be one modeled on the electric organ, with a pedal keyboard for bass lines and occasional melodies (when your right hand is busy changing patches), one or two five-octave monophonic keyboards and at least one polytonal keyboard for accompaniment. This would give the synthesist a start toward becoming a self-contained live performance musician (like a pianist), but he would still need: 1) something analagous to an organ's combination action for instantly switching from one patch to another - perhaps a matrix switchboard like the Putney synthesizers, 3) sequencers for automatic accompaniments, or a program memory for large-scale accompaniments, and (most important) 4) more technique than Virgil Fox just to be able to handle it all and make it sound like something you would want to hear.

Maybe I'm dreaming, but it's fun.
Mark Lutton