Innovation
18 January 2008
Musical Innovations
By Carol Walker
A country’s music reflects various facets of its culture. So it’s not surprising that technological advances are having a big impact on music in the United States. Traditional rock, pop, classical, and jazz have been joined on today’s American musical spectrum by some 21st-century innovations. Among them: role-playing games that allow teens to become part of a virtual rock band via the Internet; electronic devices that enable persons with severely limited mobility to hold and play musical instruments; and laptop computer orchestras in which electronic musicians perform using computers as instruments.
Virtual Rock
Monica Cho, who is rehearsing Mozart’s “Piano Concerto No. 15 in B flat Major” for a piano competition and Mendelssohn’s “Concerto in E Minor for Violin” for a recital, has little time on school nights to relax.
But on the weekends, when the Maryland teenager has time to unwind, she plays electric guitar in a rock band with her friends. Except they don’t play any actual instruments, and they meet in front of the family television set instead of in the family garage.
Cho is among millions of teens — and, increasingly, adults — around the world who play music on interactive computer game platforms in virtual rock bands.
The game controller is shaped like a guitar and is fitted with five fret buttons and one strum bar. “You just hold the fret button and strum the strum bar at the same time to produce a note,” Cho explains. The game comes with a drum kit, including drumming pads as well as a pedal, a microphone for a vocalist, and a controller for bass guitar.
Depending on the quality of the players’ television speakers, even without instruments the virtual rockers have the potential to wake up the neighbors.
Rock Band, one of the newest virtual music games — also known as role-playing games (RPGs) — is a collaboration between MTV and Electronic Arts. The guitar-shaped game controller is based on the Fender Stratocaster electric guitar of the 1950s and is made by Contel Corporation, designer and manufacturer of digital media products in China. The game was developed by Harmonix Music Systems for the Playstation 2, Playstation 3, and Xbox 360 game platforms.
When the original Guitar Hero was released in 2005, the RPG appealed to “a mass of people,” said Robert Kotick, chair and chief executive of Activision, the game’s publisher, in newspaper reports. In the first week of its release in late November, Guitar Hero III, which, like Rock Band, puts players in the role of rockers, had sales of $115 million. The latest Guitar Hero game is also owned by Harmonix, which was purchased by MTV in 2006, and, like Rock Band, players can form bands connecting musicians using a high-speed Internet connection.
The games allow players to assign such characteristics as hair color and clothing accessories to themselves in order to create a virtual display of the band. They choose a name for the band and create a logo, and when the band is performing in front of a crowd of screaming fans, another player can act as the concert director by using lighting effects and interesting camera shots.
Cho says that playing music will always be an important part of her life as she looks forward to a career in politics or economics. What kind of music, though, is “TBD” (to be determined), she says — and “how” she’ll play it might be virtually impossible to guess.
The Sound of Healing
Even when you’ve got the beat, it’s hard to play music if you can’t move.
For several years, companies have been equipping musical instruments with devices that make it possible for individuals with disabilities to hold and play instruments. But for people with little or no ability to move their arms or legs or to move them in a coordinated way, it has been impossible to play an instrument or to consider playing music at all.
Yet innovations in music technology are making it possible — and enjoyable — for people with severe physical disabilities to play and compose music. Research shows that music therapy is effective in promoting wellness among healthy people, but it also has been shown to alleviate pain and improve the quality of life for persons with disabilities.
Several rehabilitation centers and other organizations are working to find ways for people who are otherwise unable even to hold standard musical instruments to play music. At the REHAB school in Poughkeepsie, New York, for example, patients using tiny movements of their head are able to make music as part of a project developed by musicians and computer software designers at the Deep Listening Institute in Kingston, New York.
Instead of using instruments, physically disabled children and teenagers at REHAB have been able to play music using a computer program. A digital video camera connected to a computer displays an image of the musician on a screen. A cursor placed on some part of the screen image of the head tracks even subtle head movements electronically that translate into musical notes heard through the computer’s speakers. The program can be played in two modes: In piano mode, a movement from side to side plays a piano scale; in percussion mode, the same movement creates a drum roll.
The computer program Hyperscore allows people to compose music by scoring it using line graphs comprising a broad range of instrument sounds. Hyperscore was developed by Tod Machover, a professor of music and media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and director of the Opera of the Future project at MIT.
Other organizations developing digital instrument-processing software (known as MIDI, for musical interface digital instrument) include New York’s Institute for Music and Neurological Function and the Drake Music Project in London. At Drake, students, including those as young as 11, with cerebral palsy wear a Cyberlink headband that detects electrical signals from tiny facial and eye movements and even brainwaves. Special software, called Brainfingers at Drake, turns the signals into “fingers” that move a mouse and play notes on a keyboard to create music.
According to the American Music Therapy Association, goals of music therapy are often nonmusical, since playing an instrument can improve motor skills and coordination. In addition, clinical studies conducted by Oliver Sacks, a British neurologist on the faculty at Columbia University in New York and the author of Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, and Concetta Tomaino, a leading music therapist, have shown that singing word phrases such as “Hello, how are you?” affects speech recovery by “rehearsing” speech. By putting regular speech and common phrases into a musical context, patients who have trouble speaking but are conscious and cognizant of what is being said to them are learning to say “hello” and more.
Innovations in digital music projects expand the goals of music therapy by providing a mode of creative expression for people with severe physical disabilities, said Pauline Oliveros, founder of the Deep Listening Institute, in a published news report. “Making something empowers,” Oliveros said. “That can be very healing and exciting.”
Turning Electronic Noise Into Music
One way people often use laptop computers is to download and play music files. Recently, some musicians have gone a step further, harnessing the ability of laptops to generate all kinds of sounds electronically to use the machines themselves as musical instruments.
Using laptops this way is not that different from the way hip-hop artists of the 1970s used turntables to “scratch” old, worn records to talk over music, creating an entirely new musical genre, according to composer and sound artist Scott Smallwood.
Smallwood is a co-director of PLOrk, the Princeton Laptop Orchestra, at Princeton University in New Jersey. The orchestra was founded in 2005 by faculty members Dan Trueman and Perry Cook with graduate students Smallwood and Ge Wang, and is a collection of musicians who perform together using computers as their instruments. The computer-generated music is based on new kinds of sounds — made up of noise and texture — rather than the traditional sounds of instruments in an orchestra.
Performances by the Princeton Laptop Orchestra differ from those by most laptop musicians because the orchestra members are working together from a musical score, or instructions to the whole group that govern what sounds are made by which musicians at what time, rather than individual musicians performing works with “their own voice.”
When people hear the term “laptop orchestra” they think of a symphony orchestra and assume it is a group of people sitting around with computers mimicking such instruments as the violin or clarinet, according to Smallwood.
“It is not about this,” he said. Instead, the laptop symphony makes new and unique sounds work in the same acoustical context as a traditional symphony.
Computers have had the ability to replicate individual instruments in a band or orchestra for years — in fact, many pit orchestras in live-performance theaters have been replaced by a single computer that is programmed to play an entire musical score. What distinguishes the laptop orchestra from electronic music is the role each musician plays in the group and the unique speakers designed by Trueman and connected to each laptop to enable electronic sound to become acoustic.
Carol Walker is a staff writer with the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of International Information Programs. As a writer on U.S. culture and values, Walker has interviewed musicians including Dolly Parton, Native Deen, and Fab 5 Freddy.
The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.
