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Computers have even poked their
digits into the realm of that most
"liberal" of liberal arts, music. At the
Eastman School , for example, the electronic
mu sic studio co nta ins a "dedicated"
(i.e ., for music-studio use only)
PDP-II , which assists in realizing,
analyzin g, and, to some exten t, even
composing musical scores.
"Since the CPU will be running all
night anyway ," say s R ob ert G ross' s
introductory manual, " we might as
well use it to make music. " A former
doctoral cand ida te in compositio n who
now head s a large com pu te r system at
the Univer sity of California, Gross has
written mu ch of the software for the
digital facility.
" C ompos ing with a co mpu ter gives
us a new element ofcon tro l," he says.
" W e ourselves can construct the
sounds, without using any in stru me n t
but the com puter. " On the other hand,
he adds, instrumental sounds can be
very effectiv e in computer mu sic. " I n
fact, mo st o f the pieces that come out
of the Eastman stu dio begin with live
performances or other familiar sounds
tha t are then transformed by the co mputer."
An example: Some com posers working
in computer music experiment
with the pr ecise "movement" of
sound , adding Doppler sh ifts that
make the music seem to move and
swirl around the concert hall. " You
ca n ' t very well ask a string quartet,
while it' s playing, to pick up its instruments
and sidle aro und with
them ," Gross remarks with a sm ile.
" Rep resen ting sound , thou gh , is
com plicated . You need about 40,000
digital characters per second to do it.
The Eastman system,w ith eightymegaby
tes ofadded memory, ca n
handle twelve minutes of continuous
sound. Longer pieces a re spliced together
from these sho rte r sections. "
Currently the system supports abou t
two dozen u sers: stud io director Allan
Schindler, fellow p rofessors Alexander
Brinkman and Robert Morris, a handful
of advanced composition students,
and a class in " Co mputer Applicati ons
in Music ."
"My recent work," says Brinkman,
"has been setting up software tools for
musical analysis. " Brinkman's program
"Score-l l , " for instance, helps
make the comp uter more friendly to
the com poser. It allows the user to
enter no tes in a form th at is more like
music than like machine language .
" We're fin ally getting some real
music out of the machine," Schindler
exults. " It's close to where you won't
put on a separate hat for compu ter
music and say, ' H mm, that's interesting
,' and then go to hear a symphony
a nd say, 'Ah , that ' s beautiful.
' "
All composition majors at Eastman
study computer or electro nic music
techniques, or both . "It's part of the
In stant reg istration: Students in the Graduate School of Management register by computer. "It's
common en ou gh to enter reg istrations into a computer," says GSM's associate d ean Richard
West, "but it is usually done by staff people after stu d en t s have m ade out all their forms. This wa y
is qu ick and con venien t for everybody, and re cords are always up to the minute. " The co mputerized
sy stem al so allows for phoning in a re gi stration from a home or office co mp u ter via
telephon e lines.
equ ipmen t you 're expected to have as
a composer . The co mpu ter is a ba sic
element of the technology ofou r age, "
Schindler says, " a nd we're working to
170 Data, University's
computer science department;
founded 1974, devoted
primarily to graduate
education and to research;
individual courses as well
as an introductory course
avai lable to undergradua
t e s . Primary research
areas: Artificial Intel-
I igence, computer systems,
and theory.
pu t this technology at the service of the
im agination and feelings of mu sicia
ns ." It is com forting, nevertheless,
upon leaving his office, to notice there
is still room for his practice piano and
met ronome in the corn er. The compu
ter ca n cr eate new worlds of sound ,
bu t most of these sounds have a
familiar origin: a co mposer plinking
out a few strands of melody at the
plano.
M eanwhile, back at the Ri ver C ampu
s, the visual arts ha ve also begun to
explo it computer technology. O ver the
course of the last year, two "com pute r
artists" from the U n iversity of Pari s,
wh o were visiting at the electrical
enginee ring department's Production
Au tomation Project (PAP), created
three-dimensional art using FOR­
TRAN and 3-D com pu ter-gra ph ics
techniques. As Science News reported
last fall , one of their ex perimen ts
resulted in a model of a dinosaur based
on measurements taken from a bal sa
wood kit, its su rface deformed to
sim ulate a furry coat. The hai ry hybrid
wa sn 't beautiful, recalls PAP' s
Arist ides Requicha, " bu t it was cu te ."
U su ally, how ever , the Production
Automation P roj ect , whi ch is directed
by professor Herbert Voelcker , is cited
in national medi a for its involvement
in more practical proje cts . Computer­
AidedEngineering in its February issue
cited th e " strong influen ce" of
Voelcker and PAP on the direct ion of
the " most sophisticated U.S. solidmodelin
g systems." Earlier, a popular
magazine, in an article on the use of
compu ters in desi gning "everyt h ing
from oil re fine ries to tennis shoes,"
referred to Rochester as "the recognized
lead er in Computer-Aided
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