Thesis: Exploration And Intuition - Nine Improvisations Recorded, Edited And Elaborated As Digital Audio
00:00 1. Three Sonic Spaces - I
01:36 2. Three Sonic Spaces - II
04:59 3. Three Sonic Spaces - III
10:52 4. Finding Voice
13:38 5. The Hollows
18:30 6. Two Archetypes - I Hall Of Mirrors
22:54 7. Two Archetypes - II Hurrican's Eye
26:29 8. Sound Zones
34:37 9. Riding The Storm
Antithesis: Reason And Preconception - Two Intellectual Interludes (Data And Process)
39:06 10. Strand Of Life (Viroid)
40:27 11. From A Harmonic Algorithm
Synthesis: Imagination And Form - None Of The Above
43:23 12. Passage
Computer Generated Music Composed, Coded and otherwise created by Laurie Spiegel. Composed between 1987-90.
\"I had started as an improviser, largely self-taught and playing by ear on \"folk\" plucked instruments. Once I began a formal study of music, only after college studies apart from music, I had to learn to adjust to writing silent notes on paper with a dim hope of possibly eventually hearing them played by others, though my lack of keyboard skills with which to compose and do theory exercises ultimately benefited my mental musical training. It was many years before I felt at home writing instead of directly playing my own musical creations.
When one of my teachers at Juilliard, Michael Czajkowski, took me to see Mort Subotnick's Buchla studio upstairs from the Bleeker Street Cinema ( Juilliard did not yet teach or even allow electronic music at that point) and I soon began to work with that instrument myself, music turned back into the medium I had loved. In fact it went far beyond that, virtually turning from black-and-white into color. Not only could I work directly with sound itself again, like painters and authors do on their works, instead of indirectly encapsulating them in abstract sets of instructions to others in an imperfect notational language, but also, I was able at last to represent the tenuous and vague sonic shapes that formed in my imagination and in which my inner emotions had always taken previously inexpressible form.
Ironically, my need for greater control, complexity, replicability, subtlety and precision led me within just a few years to an even less direct means of composition: the writing of computer code to describe my own musical decision-making, and by use of logic to attempt to enhance the musical power of any individual through new instrument creation. \"
