Music: The Machine Closes In

French Composers Pierre Barbaud, 50, and Roger Blanchard, 43, have a peculiar ambition: they want to make composers obsolete. They have worked long and hard to create a composing machine as versatile as the one that swamped the masses with mollifying melodies in George Orwell’s fantasy, 1984. Last week French teenagers were dancing to the catchy theme for the new Paris hit film Chronique d’un Eté, which had been dreamed up in the electronic brain of an Orwellian monster otherwise known as Binary Digital Computer Gamma Three.

Mania for Numbers. The origin of such mechanical music is much older than Orwell. The German mathematician Baron Gottfried von Leibniz (1646-1716) observed that “composers are simply men with a mania for numbers.” Others have also noted the persistent relationship between music and math—between pure science and pure art. Barbaud himself began speculating on the musical potential of computers after reading that Haydn leaned heavily on the laws of probability and sometimes rolled dice to make a choice among possible chord and key combinations. Every type of music, Barbaud decided, must have its own laws, all equally rigid and equally mechanical. If a machine could be made to follow the rules, he reasoned, it could write music. Given proper orders, Barbaud concluded, a machine might even put together a Beethoven Tenth Symphony.

Other composers and scientists have toyed with the same idea. Computers have already been put to work on music both in the U.S. and Europe. But no other mechanical composer comes close to the musical sophistication of Gamma Three.

Borrowed from France’s biggest calculator manufacturer, it was “instructed” by Barbaud and his friend Blanchard in theory, harmonics and chromatics—i.e., they crammed the circuits of its electronic memory with all the knowledge necessary for composition. Now Gamma knows the mathematical rules by which chords are combined into musical compositions. It understands only a vocabulary of numbers and letters, so all the essentials must first be fitted with a coded description. Fed with the necessary information, and given instructions relating to the key of the composition, its length, and the number of instruments, Gamma Three then attacks the problem of composing exactly as it would an abstruse mathematical equation. Switches are thrown, relays click and the bulky machine punches out on tape a swift stream of chord combinations that meet the composer’s requirements.

Because both Barbaud and Blanchard are modernists, much influenced by Schoenberg, they have instructed Gamma in the twelve-tone scale so that it can spew forth Schoenbergian chamber works on punched tape with confidence and ease. Says Barbaud: “They are in some respects better, artistically as well as technically, than some of Schoenberg’s works.”

Terrible Reactions. Barbaud and Blanchard are well aware that there is also another type of mechanical music maker in existence—gigantic sound generators capable of imitating every imaginable noise, from a flute solo to an entire symphony. Some day the composers hope to link their machine to the great sound-maker at the Siemens electronic music studio in Munich. Since the Siemens machine can be made to imitate the style of any desired artist, the possibilities are devastating. The combination, suggest Barbaud and Blanchard, could make the performer as well as the composer obsolete. “What we’ve done,” they claim, “is simply carry the old discovery that music is an arithmetic process to its logical limit. Machines could replace every popular tune composer immediately and plenty of serious composers.”

The only catch, of course, is that if Gamma Three and other computers were turned loose to compose to the electronic limit, the frenzied output would need someone to judge it—someone to decide which compositions were worth keeping and which were pure junk. Many such judges would be needed, and as they picked off good bits from the machines’ output, stitched excerpts together with some work of their own, ran off passages now and then on a piano, they could come to be known as composers.