Location

Media Lab, E14-633

Description

A view of speech as the interaction of acoustic energy sources weakly coupled to a filter system is the key conceptual basis for remarkable progress over the last half century in automatic speech understanding and text-to-speech systems. Starting in the 1960s here at MIT and continuing to the present day, Wayne Slawson has attempted to apply the source-filter model and the "terminal analog" speech synthesizers that follow from the model to the invention of a plausible way of making music in which timbre is as prominent and intricately controllable as pitch. Since publication of Sound Color in 1986, there have been some further steps in this direction. Slawson now composes with twelve “color classes” corresponding to a slightly artificial collection of vowels. They are treated as isomorphic to the pitch classes, so color-classes and pitch classes both have intervals, and the well-known pitch-class operations of transposition and inversion have color-class equivalents. The new scheme is supported by certain perceptual similarities in pitch and color, but there are sharp contrasts as well. This brew of similarity and difference organized by formal regularities is, for Slawson, a kind of ideal field in which to compose.
Some musical results: In his 2002 composition Snow, the color/pitch relationships tend to be weakened by temporal contrast: the noise-excited color strands move slowly, while the analogous pitched ”sparrow” sounds come late in the piece and are abrupt and quick. In contrast, Winter Rounds (2007) has a color-intense introduction that leads to a “crooked round” with color and pitch in the four voices closely associated. Finally, a section of Mixed Doubles, now in progress, features pitch and color shadowing each other directly.

Biographies

A native of Detroit, Wayne Slawson was educated at the University of Michigan (BA in mathematics; MA in music composition) and Harvard University (PhD in psychology), and enjoyed post-doctoral fellowships at MIT and the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. He has taught at Yale; the University of Pittsburgh; the University of California, Davis; and, part-time at Southern Oregon University and the University of Oregon. In addition to his computer-synthesized color music, his compositions include music for orchestra and various instrumental and vocal ensembles. His 1985 book Sound Color was chosen for the first Outstanding Publication Award of the Society for Music Theory. He has published articles on computer music, music theory, psychoacoustics, acoustic phonetics, and criticism. He directs Yank Gulch Music, a micro-publishing company headquartered at his farm in southern Oregon.

Host/Chair: Joseph A. Paradiso