League Of Automatic Music Composers - Computer Music

The first band for networked computers, the League Of Automatic Music Composers forged an experiment that was a watershed for the genre and revolutionary (though it went completely unnoticed) for music as a whole. An experiment born amid the Californian ferment of the 1970s, from a group of colleagues and friends united by a passion for music and technology.

John Bischoff was born in 1949 in San Francisco, the son of Elmer, a painter. After earning his degree in Fine Arts at the California Institute of the Arts in 1971, and a master's, also in Fine Arts, at Oakland's Mills College in 1973, he studied composition under the supervision of Tenney, Robert Moran and Robert Ashley, already a trio of authors of the Californian avant-garde. In 1978 he decided to found, together with his colleagues and friends Jim Horton, Tim Perkis, David Behrman (author of the genre's well-known "On The Other Ocean", from 1977), Paul DeMarinis and Rich Gold, a computer music ensemble, with the stated intent, declared in the name itself ("League Of Automatic Music Composers"), of creating improvised music for electronic and computer instruments, tape recording, mixers and every kind of microcomputer.

The performances were strictly live, but in fact they were concerts sui generis, consisting, during the first part, of the setting up of the network of computers, in the form of a circumscribed but highly concentrated LAN (a photo in the booklet depicts the "heroes" Perkis, Horton and Bischoff at the ends of a kitchen table covered with some twenty of their ingenious machines); in the second part, they played, each handling around five instruments, improvising, generating music that was always unpredictable, yet beyond (and this is the revolution) the will of the individual "musician", because the sound arises from the extremely complex interaction of the members, so complex as to be unpredictable, never fully or constantly controllable and, therefore, random: it is the musical embodiment of complex systems theory, that is, a system so branching as to be practically infinite in its possibilities for relationships and, consequently, for perceived sound.

Beyond this, one must also consider that the improviser in this case does not think and act according to the musical rules typical of an instrument, and moreover traditional instruments are not linked to one another by a network — a situation which, even though premeditated in its connections (that is, in who sends the signal to whom), allows for a sound output that is the result of numerous branchings and mutual influences among the various software and chips. Starting, in other words, from a "premeditated", automatic network, what comes out is a sound that is precisely the negation of automaticity (it is the oxymoron of the mathematical algorithm that generates pure chaos): the machines are automatic, but the will of whoever controls them is not automatic (or premeditated), since it cannot account for the infinite variables per second arising from the manipulation of keyboards and mixers and all the possible interactions between the algorithms. Four musicians change, countless times per second, the values of the parameters governing the equations that link the chips and, therefore, the network.

It is a radical change in the way of making music, of composing sounds and of creating sonic works of art: the avant-garde within the avant-garde, a Copernican revolution carried out within a genre that, by its very nature, already sets out to be revolutionary: it is a new musical form, innovative above all live, but still astonishing on record. By comparison, free jazz, which shares with the League the idea of total improvisation, comes off as limited, since in free-jazz performance each member follows their own path, remaining only minimally influenced by their colleagues while playing their own part — whether because hearing the other instruments is unavoidable, or because there is always, in a human being, an attempt to recreate something at least vaguely coherent and harmonic (in Coleman's "Free Jazz", for example, the central motif, even amid the improvisation, is repeated in the same way several times, despite the leader's claims of having no order at all). It is indeed fairly common, in free improvisation, for instruments at certain moments to play parts that have a certain symbiosis or affinity with one another. In "network computer music" this almost never happens, because what actually decides and regulates the interactions and the sounds produced are, in fact, the computer systems, the machines; and not only that: whoever operates the systems cannot predict their actions and reactions.

The true protagonists of this music are the instruments themselves, at least when the sound produced is simple and comes from a single machine; when it becomes complex, the real artist is no longer the machines or the technician operating them, but pure chance itself. There's more to it: the music that emerges transcends what the individual improvises, depending instead on the combined work of everyone at once, influencing one another and altering a colleague's performance through the network.

In the free improvisation of other genres, no real instrument has the ability to completely distort or radically alter the sound of another instrument: they play simultaneously, without "destroying" and randomly recreating one another, as instead happens with multiple systems in a network.

To help convey the complex system devised by our subjects, it's worth citing the case of "Blind Lemon", the eighth track, a highlight of the group's career, performed in 1978, a symbol of a deeply punk and free way of approaching music (to put it in context, two years after the Ramones' debut album): punk in its break with the trappings of tradition (in this case, the trappings being the practical limits of traditional instruments, physically constrained compared to the immediate frequency at which mixers and computers alone can generate a variety of sounds — let alone when connected simultaneously). Here is the detailed description of the intricate connections devised: the tone and melody are set by Horton, from which are derived: the algorithm for the digital tune information directed to Gold, the audio signal output directed to the machines controlled by Bischoff and those controlled again by Gold; Bischoff's own controller for harmonic intervals and chords sends a message, concerning tone adjustment, via computer keyboard input, to Gold; Bischoff's software also sends Behrman a notification about the state of the other software and its respective settings; Gold himself sends audio input in response to Bischoff and Behrman; the latter closes the loop, indicating to Horton, again through digital adjustments, the pitch or timbre to set.

Here, briefly, is the (translated) commentary on the track included in the booklet, which clarifies that evening's performance: "Behrman operates an analog filter controlled by a computer which, silently interacting with the audio signals coming from Horton and Gold, produces beats and makes chord sequences vibrate according to the frequency distribution received".

The artistic effect is a sonic thicket of buttons, intermittent bips colliding like atomic particles in an accelerator, a myriad of sounds sharing the same timbre but with variably infinite pitch and tone — one of the definitive monoliths of post-modernity, the cyberspace that finally and, above all, physically opens itself up to the listener; an evolution of musique concrète that moves from natural-artificial to purely artificial, the perfect sound-symbol of the electronic, computerized age.

"Dense Drone", the opening track, recorded at home by Perkis, Bischoff and Horton on October 14, 1980, features Perkis's virtual set as a network made up of nine units, each controlling a sonic expression (they call it a "voice", precisely an expression), deciding what the next sound to emit will be based on the state of the neighbouring systems and on Horton's latest "expression" ("state" in the manual probably refers to the sound emitted by the colleagues' systems and the relationships established with them).

The pitches are determined beforehand within a precise range of possibilities. Horton's computer applies part of Max Meyer's psychological theory of melody, using a particular scale, different from the original one Meyer spoke of, with a tonality equal to exactly 29 tones less than a chosen octave. Bischoff's program, on the other hand, constantly monitors the harmonies accidentally formed by Perkis and Horton, flagging them with a bip or emphasizing them even more decisively through an accompanying chord. This activity is typical of one of the League's fundamental strategies: reacting to each other's produced sounds through preset automatic computer communication, forming a kind of coordination between the compositions each musician plays independently, relating them within the context of the group.

All the sounds follow a square-wave pattern, filtered and reinterpreted by Perkis through analogous envelopes; Horton's case homogenizes the sounds, slightly altering their tonality, creating a kind of chorus formed from the sounds produced by the other two.

"Martian Folk Music", from 1980, is an explicit statement of intent right from its title, and consists, as with most of the pieces composed by the League, of a composition that originally involved only Bischoff, and was subsequently adapted for the whole League.

Bischoff would start up his piece called "Audio Wave", which establishes a synthesis between his own 8-bit audio signal and the KIM-1, his computer system dating back to the late '70s. The original performance involved pressing hexadecimal codes on a keyboard, an act here simulated by Perkis's machine, which reproduces a track similar to "Dense Drone", though its envelope has a more percussive effect.

It's worth briefly describing the characteristics of the KIM-1: 1152 bytes of RAM, 2048 bytes of ROM, 30 input-output code lines. The KIM-1, built in 1976 by Commodore, was the first Hub; a Hub is the central element of a LAN network with an extended star connection, where "star" means a central hub from which multiple branches extend, each in turn divided into three terminals. In effect, a Hub reduces the total bandwidth to a fraction of the original, due to the multiplying of data sent, with a negligible signal delay of just a few milliseconds compared to a simple connection between two computers. Its purpose, then, is to make connections possible between a virtually infinite number of terminals.

The League was an example of a LAN connected via a Hub: two nodes (branches), six terminals; although in most of the pieces composed, there were only four terminals. In this rhythmic context, even Horton's system, usually devoted to structuring melodic architectures, plays glissandi for each of the thousands of inputs received per second from Bischoff (bear in mind that the "computers" of the time were bulky chips with processing power far lower than what's found today in a PC mouse).

"Finnish Hall", the third track, from 1979, is composed by a quartet (Gold, Bischoff, DeMarinis, Horton). Paul DeMarinis joins the group, filtering Gold's and Horton's sounds through a set of analog filters controlled by his own machine. Gold, meanwhile, operates his "Terrain Reader", a program for the KIM system, in which a program called the "traveler" reads a cycle of instructions allowing sound to be reproduced within a range of sounds, expressed by a mathematical function called the "terrain", where variations in this terrain define the shape of the resulting sound wave. These wave variations are manually controlled by Gold, while Horton and Bischoff (the League's two fixed members, present on every composition on the record) upstream alter the playback, selecting which lines of code to run, and therefore ultimately the sector, the terrain, that Gold will then modify. Bischoff, moreover, as in "Dense Drone", works by adjusting the tones with a program written specifically for that purpose.

"Oakland One", recorded at home in 1980, starts from the basic setup already established in "Martian Folk Music", to which Perkis had previously added another voice of similar timbre, while the code sent to each group member's set is configured to trigger abrupt attacks and interruptions, delays and repetitions of each artist's actions, defining a sonic structure that is always different and completely unpredictable (the term "music", in such a context, is by now obsolete). A similar echo effect is applied to the sound produced by Horton.

"Radio Air Check" (1981) relates to music the way Heisenberg's uncertainty principle relates to scientific research: the possibility of control is denied, and this denial is swallowed up by error, by the crash that the Phase Lock Loop hardware often commits while trying to create harmony with Bischoff's track, at a tone interval set by Bischoff's own central control computer; with the effect of the Phase running idle as it fails to pinpoint the tone of Bischoff's machine.

"Oakland Three", another home recording, from May 25, '81, is a new attempt, once again shaky, to locate the tonalities of a colleague's machine; this time it's Horton who is "the pursued", not Bischoff. "Oakland Four", recorded on the same day and in the same place as the previous track, is a clear example, according to the authors themselves, of the mysterious interplay between patterns, where one prevails over the other with no apparent explanation; the result, that is, goes beyond the intentions of the "players". Taking part: Horton's melody, with Perkis's program generating envelopes and sending a 4-bit code signal to Bischoff, Horton receiving Bischoff's signal and trying to pinpoint, with a single bit, Bischoff's tonality. In the end, Horton plays back his tape with an echo effect, Bischoff emits his audio signal based on Perkis's 4-bit key, who mixes it all together.

The result is utterly incomprehensible and unpredictable.

"Pedal With Twitter", recorded at New College in March '80, is a genuine live performance. The tracks are diverted by the audience's outside noise. Horton plays a slow bass line. "Oakland Two" is the final track, recorded at home in October '80. Here, Perkis's machine, which governs the orchestra (in computer music jargon, "orchestra" refers to the melodic and arrangement track), plays a scale derived from Javanese gamelan, a type of Indonesian orchestra, using the same tonalities as "Audio Wave", Bischoff's track played on the KIM-1, already heard in "Martian Folk Music".

The oldest known recording of computer-generated music was made on the Ferranti Mark I in the autumn of 1951, during a session recorded by the BBC in which several famous pieces were performed; it was the first computer in the world capable of playing digital music. The world's first digital music, "Colonel Bogey", rang out at the first computer conference in Australia, in June 1951, before an international audience.

James Tenney was the first composer of computer music, when, in 1963, he created "Dialogue", a halfway point between pure noise and natural tonality, and above all, in 1969, "For Ann", the first suite of computer music, with programmatically set glissandi.

The children of John Cage, those who translated his approach into computer music, were precisely the members of the League with 78-83, who, however, with the creation of the first networked compositions, went further still. The network computer music established by the group is, as Perkis wrote, a "social" form of computer music, one that is not based on the controlled, carefully weighed prediction of every single sound produced and the elimination of every human imperfection - the standard technique of this genre - but rather, on the contrary, is founded on the unpredictability of multiple simultaneous interactions, on the exasperation of what their peers regard as a flaw to be eliminated: chance, lack of control, nonsense, instinct. It is the musical expression that comes closest to Ilya Prigogine's theory of complex systems, from an aesthetic and artistic point of view, and to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, as far as technical and instrumental approach is concerned. What makes the calibrating algorithms unpredictable is precisely the cooperation among all these algorithms: the sounds of each artist-technician in the group are calculated, but the complex mutual interaction that results from them is not - the definitive, and therefore emotional, sonic effect of each system is in fact subordinated to its relationship with the other systems.

John Cage was pure and simple aleatoricism; the League, by contrast, was the construction of randomness - not premeditation, but the development of it, the preparation of the instruments to achieve it, whereas Cage produced sounds through sudden blows on everyday objects. Randomness that is calculated, built into its premises (the individual systems), and then "freed" through relation and connection.

The aesthetic message of the work in question lies precisely in the concept of connection. It is connection that enables creativity; it is in connection that the genius of 78-83 resides. This is the secret of such systematic randomness, such unpredictable precision; an altruistic mathematics, a tool no longer suited to the understanding of rules, but pushed toward the most anarchic freedom.

This Copernican revolution arises from an oxymoronic encounter, unthinkable before then, between the two opposite poles of computer music and aleatory improvisation, and has as its sole artistic aim a reinterpretation of the apocalypse that is as fascinating as it is tremendous: it is a big bang that is born and dies, or develops, at every instant, as if someone had recorded the birth certificate of the universe and played it back on loop: surreal, catastrophic, hyper-creative.

1978-1983, with its atonal trios and, at times, quartets for mixer, sequencer and videogame consoles, is the final destination of free music, a frenzied, Babel-like assault of beeps, not necessarily cacophonous, capable of an unmatched fervor that only the Royal Trux of "Twin Infinitives" would come close to matching (through the barbaric layering of sound tracks, tape recording, of raw noise) - but only in 1990.

The League's music is a particular kind of centrifugal force that, instead of flying off along a single tangent chosen at random, follows, still at random, countless different ones; like the frenzied molecules of a heated, pressurized gas, but above all like the cinders of an erupting volcano, leaping everywhere with no fixed direction - a cascade of sharp, blazing darts.

This album can also be read as the most radical antithesis to cyberpunk culture: machines dominate human will, which, rather than opposing them, goads and spurs them on toward dispersive, senseless production. This sound, besides being aggressive, hysterical and lightning-fast in its intensity, is also constant in its sheer quantity, a mass of differing tonalities that produces a kind of sub-species of continuity. It is so deafening that it becomes impossible to distinguish the changes in notes, thereby also embracing a maximalist side (in the manner of LaMonte Young and, in years to come, Rhys Chatham) - that is, a drone minimalism that envelops the listener, making them perceive changes of key and pitch as if they were slight variations on the main theme (when in fact they are anything but negligible), free of any gap, leaving the listener unable to follow all the sonic twists produced simultaneously.

After this experience, the individual members' careers went their separate ways. Hub, the supergroup formed by Bischoff and Perkis, would continue the League's discourse, keeping its principles intact, but no subsequent creation would manage to reach the heights set by the "League".

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