Musicians continue to push the envelope with wave after wave of electronic and digital experimentation, sophisticated recording and synthesizing equipment, innovative musical styles, and a burgeoning industry to boot. Long before the iPod Nano came along, digital technology was doing cool things in the world of sound, such as making music from scratch without a musical instrument in sight.
Such possibilities delight techies like Prof. Anthony Holland, a musician and composer of both traditional and electronic music, and his student Bryan Nielsen '09. Last summer, with a Skidmore collaborative-research grant, the two revived an early sound-making program and the user-friendly tutorial written for it by Holland and Jon Ryan '91. The original idea came out of Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics in the late 1980s, when Holland was a visiting composer there. The NeXt computers that ran the application ceased production in the mid-1990s and access was lost, until Holland and Nielsen succeeded at the Herculean task of resuscitating it in Java, a universal, open-source programming language.
Dubbed Bessie 3.0, the revived program can run "on any computer anywhere in the world," says Holland proudly. (FYI, it's called "Bessie" in honor of Bessel functions, the mathematical underpinnings of frequency modulation, better known as FM.) Released free on the Web this fall, Bessie is so easy to "play" that amateurs can create funky new notes ranging from bullfrog-deep to nearly dog-whistle highs. Bessie's updated tutorial contains a sample of electronic music created by the pioneering sound genius John Chowning, who discovered FM synthesis. "I really wanted to get music out of this thing," explains Nielsen, who is composing a self-determined major in computer-oriented digital arts from Holland's music-technology class, computer science courses, and foundation arts like drawing and painting.
Reviving Bessie is an important contribution to the history of computer music, says Holland, who plans to compose some new electronic music on his next sabbatical. Nielsen adds that Bessie can also synthesize human speech: He clicks something and a dulcet female voice coos, "Hello, professor." He says with a smile, "It's great getting sound from numbers."