A Computer's Role in the Recording Studio (College Paper written April 1st, 1995)

[Kris]

I just stumbled across this paper I wrote when I was a lowly college student...

Kris Kolp
April 1, 1995



A Computer’s Role in the Recording Studio

The creation of music is a great and fulfilling experience. It is something that should be shared with as many people as can be reached. In this day and age, the best way for a musician to share his/her music with the masses is to make a recording. As a musician, it is easy to see the role of the computer and its great use as a tool in the recording studio. The computer is revolutionizing the way a recording studio works. Most of today’s major recording studios are centered around the computer. The computer is now being used to control most aspects of the mixing process, it is used to create and alter sounds in conjunction with instruments, its memory is invaluable for multi-track recording, and it can be used as a musical instrument on its own. There are many programs available for the recording studio and there are many more in store for the future. The computer is probably the greatest tool that a recording studio has access to and its role there is ever increasing.

Music has been an integral part of society from its beginnings. It is a creative and spiritual release that seems inherent to society in general. Although throughout history music has utilized the available tools of technology, its evolution was a slow process up until electricity came into play. Since then, the industry of music has been closely tied with the fast paced technological revolution of the last one hundred years or so. The “software” of early automatic and eventually computer influenced music may have originated with Pythagoras around 500BC. He believed that music and mathematics were not separate studies; an understanding of one was thought to lead directly to the understanding of the other (Cope, 1991 5). The first completely electrical musical instrument was called the Teleharmonium, invented by Thaddius Cahill in 1903. It was developed to generate music signals electrically and transmit them to subscriber’s homes over the telephone lines. The invention resembled a normal pipe organ, but the tone signals were generated at kilowatt levels by specially constructed multipole, multiarmature electric generators located in the basement (Chamberlin, 1985 35). Interestingly enough, the tone wheels used in today’s Hammond electric organs are electric generators that perform exactly like the Teleharmonium except that the power output is only a few microwatts instead of many kilowatts (Chamberlin, 1985 36). The Hammond organ in conjunction with a Lesley rotating speaker, or a computer synthesized version of the unique Hammond organ sound is definitely the most extensively used organ in the recording world today.

In 1932 the conductor Leopold Stokowski said, “We have possibilities in sound which no man knows how to write on paper. One can see coming ahead a time when the musician who is a creator can create directly into tone, not on paper.” (Appleton, 1989 2) This is a visionary remark that turned out to be right on the money. While Western musical culture used to think of musical instruments as devices that produced music in real time, the invention of the tape recorder completely revolutionized this idea (Appleton, 1989 6). The first wire recorder was developed by Germany during World War II. Now magnetic tape is the highest fidelity analog sound recording technique in common use (Chamberlin, 1985 37). In 1952, the RCA Mark II Electronic Music Synthesizer was developed which was controlled by a roll of punched paper tape. It could produce two tones at once in which all of the important parameters could be controlled. It was one of the first programmed musical machines, and was so large that it filled an entire room because all of the electronic circuitry used vacuum tubes. Extensive use of the machine emphasized the concept that programmed control was going to be necessary to adequately manipulate all of the variables that electronic technology had given the means to control (Chamberlin, 1985 38). Direct computer synthesis came about in the sixties where large digital computers were used to control the generation and arrangement of sounds and to actually generate the sounds themselves. The computers were used with digital-to-analog converters which can accept a string of numbers from a computer and plot waveforms from them as an audio signal suitable for driving loudspeakers or recording (Chamberlin, 1985 38). Developed in the mid-sixties, voltage-controlled synthesizers were modular music synthesizing systems utilizing voltage-control concepts as a common organizational thread throughout the system (Chamberlin, 1985 39).

Microprocessors are the latest and the greatest of the programmable, electronic, sound synthesis machines. A microprocessor in conjunction with a few integrated circuits can perform all of the functions of even the most sophisticated sequencers (Chamberlin, 1985 125). By the early 1980’s, most synthesizers contained microprocessors as the core of their control systems, and now most of them make sounds synthesized by microprocessors. Computers, along with Music Instrument Digital Interface or MIDI, can control every sound coming from any number of synthesizers, samplers, piano modules, drum machines, effects processors, mixing consoles, and more (Yelton, 1989 13).

MIDI is an interface for electronic musical instruments and related devices. Its transmission is a stream of digital data which is perfectly suited to utilize the speed and processing capabilities of a home computer (Casabona and Frederick, 1987 5). With a computer in conjunction with MIDI software it is possible to record and edit sequencer tracks, store and edit synthesizer patches in the computer’s memory, score arrangements by either playing them in real time or entering events one-by-one into the computer, print out the resulting notation, and it is great for live performances to control synthesizers, drum machines, and even stage lighting equipment (Casabona and Frederick, 1987 5). Released in 1981, the MIDI 1.0 spec. standardized the concept for all manufacturers and made it completely compatible (Wait, 1988 10). MIDI is a bi-directional interface, a digital interface, and a serial interface. Bi-directional interface means that a MIDI equipped instrument must have an input port and an output port. Digital interface means that information is passed from one instrument to another as a series of digital codes. Serial interface means that digital bits follow one another in single file through a cable containing a single pair of wires (Wait, 1988 13). MIDI was first developed as a solution to monophonic synthesizers which could only play one note at a time, and had an extremely sparse tone. Dave Smith, president of Sequential Circuits, and design engineer Chet Wood submitted a proposal at the Audio Engineering Society convention in New York City which described MIDI. The basic elements of MIDI are that each MIDI instrument must be able to understand a common language that provides information about events and timing, and they must each have specially designed input and output ports, as well as the accompanying circuitry for processing transmissions.


Outline
I History of recording
II How a computer benefits the recording studio
III Today’s digital equipment in the studio
IV Debate on analog vs. digital recording
V How computers are affecting musical instruments
VI Computer’s future role in recording