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From: XRJDM@SCFVM.BITNET (Joe McMahon)
Subject: Man-Machine Interface (part 1
Date: 2 Jul 90 21:05:38 GMT
A reposting of Metlay's ur-article on the man-machine interface...
The Man-Machine Interface
Emusic-L folx:
Well, the response has been remarkably strong, so what the hey: there
follows below Part 1 of a detailed, historically and contemporarily
relevant, and pretty much irreverent look at the whole process of user
interface and electronica, past and present. Structure will be somewhat
flaky, but I'll do my best to keep it readable. Also, watch out for
smileys |->, as my own twisted opinions have a way of mixing in with the
less arguable factual content of the piece. Okay? Here we go!
SYNTHESIS INTERFACING PART 1:
THE KEYBOARD
The whole relationship between the synthesizer and the ol'
black'n'whites has become so well-established, so historically
hidebound, so, well, INBRED, that after a while any attempt to interface
man and machine by non-keyboard means has come to be viewed as unnatural
and a bit painful, rather like the short-lived pastime of rhino toss.
The fact is, the keyboard was NOT by any means the only inevitable
controller for the synth, and that in fact a huge number of man-hours
have been devoted in recent years to getting around its many
shortcomings!
Own up and be honest, people. How many of you would have bothered to
learn how to play keyboards if they WEREN'T essential to synth
operation? I'll admit it: I learned to love the piano for its own sake
YEARS after I'd begun working with synths. My first keyboard and my
first love was actually the Hammond Organ in our living room, and touch
sensitivity for me has always been a weird thing to master. Which gets
us into historical perspectives.....
The first synthesizer, in general terms, was the pipe organ. Its various
manuals and stops allowed the tonal characteristics to be "programmed"
by its user, to hint at non-organish sounds to some extent. Arguably,
then, the first electric synthesizer would be the first electric organ,
right? (Well, no, not right, actually. The first electric synth was the
Telharmonium, a monstrous device that filled an entire building, ran its
music over Con Ed telephone lines to "Telharmonium Parlors" in New York,
generated a vast amount of relay noise and waste heat, and eventually
burned down. Alas.) Anyway, the invention and proliferation of the
electric organ produced one seemingly inescapable chain of facts, as
follows:
- Notes must be activated by the player, somehow.
- In an electric device, you activate things by closing switches.
- Ergo, the player must play switches, one for each note.
This is the Switch Proposition. The second chain of facts states:
- The easiest way to design switches in an understandable array is
to use a keyboard. After all, that's how organ manufacturers did
it for centuries.
- Ergo, it makes good sense, both from a standpoint of constructive
ease and from one of familiarity, to put a traditional organ
keyboard on a synth.
This is the Keyboard Proposition. Both of these modes of thinking are
fallacious and full of holes, but they established the industry as we
know it today rather than allow synthesis to go the way of the kazoo as
a fad, so I guess we shouldn't complain. |->
The manufacturers couldn't have foreseen the trend they were starting;
while many individuals utilized non-keyboard means of doing things (to
be covered elsewhere), a large number relied on the cheap and easily
wired organ keyboards for their research. A lot of good ideas that
violated one or the other of the above propositions ended up enjoying
little or no popularity due to the essential "alienness" of their
design. It was nothing short of a miracle that the Ondes Martenot
enjoyed the popularity it had at the early part of the century (Ravel, I
believe, wrote a number of pieces for it), in light of the fact that it
had a keyboard, but that the keys didn't move when touched.
Some designers relegated themselves to obscurity by their refusal to
give in to the pressure of traditionalism: Lev Theremin, Serge
Tcheprenin, Don Buchla, Louis and Bebe Barron, and so on. Others gave in
to the pressure of keyboard use, but reserved a number of other means of
controlling timbre, resulting in the fusion of keyboard and "Left Hand"
control we see today: Robert Moog, Allan Pearlman, and Hugh LeCaine,
whose left-hand controls for the Electronic Sackbut (It's a medieval
trumpet of sorts, people. Get yer minds outa the gutters! |-> ) set a
standard for expressiveness in real time that no one, and I mean NO ONE,
has yet to equal. But the keyboard, as a means of selecting event start
and note pitch, stuck, and gradually evolved into the form we see today.
The pressures to produce an instrument that could be triggered reliably
as well provide a pitch reference recognizable by some large percentage
of ordinary musicians resulted in the vast majority of synths being
controlled by keyboards. (The fact that the piano is a staple instrument
in most music schools must have helped a bit too, as schools were where
the first synths were used heavily.)
So where are we now? Well, the "average" synth keyboard has 61
unweighted plastic keys, each with a contact switch and some means
(electromagnetic or optical) of sensing how quickly the key is struck.
Some also can tell how quickly the key is released, and many have
sensors under the keybed to detect pressure after the notes have been
struck and held, either one for the entire keybed or tiny ones under
each key. These are the familiar velocity, release velocity, and
aftertouch sensitivities we demand from today's synths. It should be
noted that they developed at differing rates; Moog made at least one
synth that had pressure sensitivity without velocity sensitivity, and
the Sequential Prophet T8, one of the first MIDI synths, had poly
pressure rather than mono. When it went out of production, poly pressure
languished as an unused part of the MIDI spec for years, until the
Kurzweil and Ensoniq instruments revived it. There have been other
modifications to keyboard design as well: see this month's issue of
KEYBOARD for a bizarre but intriguing Japanese keyboard design using
multiple rows of keys, all white, and consider the Yamaha GX1, whose
keys bent pitch if you shifted them from side to side!
And, of course, the recent renaissance of piano technique in pop music
has strongly encouraged the development of weighted actions of 73, 76,
and 88 keys on many synths. There are even a few synths that have gone
beyond this, such as the 95-key Bohm controller or the 97-key Beilfuss.
The keyboard has a certain monopoly over our electronic thought
processes even today, though alternatives abound, but it's no longer
either stagnant or monopolistic. In fact, I rather think I'd miss having
one around: getting crazy is more fun if you have a reference point to
ignore! |->
That's it for part 1. In future parts of this series, if demand
indicates, we'll consider other means of applying traditional technique
to electronics through special controllers, then delve into my favorite
topic: realtime timbral control, via left-hand and other controllers.
Look for the Electronic Sackbut, the Theremin, the Ondes Martenot, and
the GX1 to reappear, as well as the Starwind, the Cyclone, the KAT, the
WX7 and EWI, the Simmons SDSV, the ElectroHarmonix Drums, Moog's system
55, the Buchla synths, the VCS3, the EPS and VFX by Ensoniq, the Yamaha
MCS2, the Mellotron, the IVL Pitchrider and Fairlight Voicetracker, the
Grid, the Roland GR500 and its many children, the SynthAxe, the Oncor
PolyTouch, and various ribbons, wheels, levers, buttons, sliders,
switches, joysticks, paddles, mice, pedals, and hooters. ("Hooters"?)
Sounds good? Well, let me know if you're interested! I'll also be glad
to elaborate on any particular instrument, answer any questions, or
throw queries on stuff I don't know much about (there must be something
here I'm not an expert on |-> ) to the List.
More, you say? MORE, you say? At ONCE, I say!
THE MAN-MACHINE INTERFACE, PART 2
PERCUSSION CONTROLLERS
Ah, drums. Whackety whackety whack! How we all love to hit things and
hear them make noise... it's a primal instinct we all share. The love of
percussion is as old as civilization, and it's a safe bet that the sorts
of percussion devices we consider commonplace these days were elegantly
refined millenia before the keyboard came along. So it was inevitable
that when someone discovered that you could press a key on a synth and
it would go "CRASH!", they might have begun to muse that it might be
eminently (pardon the pun. actually, pat yourself on the back if you
even spotted it! |-> ) more satisfactory to give some undefined THING a
good whack and hear it go "CRASH!" instead. And the rest is history....
The first well-known electronic drum was the Moog percussion controller,
a pad with an impact-sensitive resistance in it that could send a
trigger signal and a voltage based on impact velocity to a monophonic
synth. Each synth had to be patched individually for each pad, but the
sound was (to audiences in 1974) never before heard. Check out Toccata,
>from ELP's BRAIN SALAD SURGERY, or the live version on WELCOME BACK MY
FRIENDS.... for a real taste of history.
The late 1970's saw a huge proliferation of affordable analog drum pads,
each with its own unique sound and character. There were the Synares (I
almost bought a rusty old Synare 1 recently; they're rare as hens' teeth
and sound great!) from 1 to 4, ranging from 4-pad synths to single
drums, the Syndrum and Syndrum CN, the Pearl synthetic drums favored by
Klaus Schulze, and (sigh) the ElectroHarmonix drums, a series of cheap,
ugly devices that were a hell of a lot of fun to work with: the Space
Drum, Clap Track, Crash Pad, Sonic Boomer, Rolling Thunder, and
Clockworks "Percussion Brain." The Space Drum, with its awful descending
"Pooooo....", was a huge part of what made disco forgettable, and makes
it impossible to listen to the live version of Jean-Michel Jarre's
Magnetic Fields II from LES CONCERTS EN CHINE without laughing fit to
die. But drummers perservered; there was something here that they liked,
and there had to be a way to get to it...!
And then along came the rhythm machine, and the music world began
talking about the demise of the live drummer. Remember those days? Boy,
I do. And I remember a guy whom everyone laughed at and made fun of,
too. His name was Dave Simmons, and he had one hell of a good idea up
his sleeve.
Trivia question: What's the first album in history to feature the
classic Simmons sound? Give up? It's 1980's FROM THE TEA ROOMS OF MARS
TO THE HELL HOLES OF URANUS by Landscape. Great disc, actually, and the
Simmons drums were all over it. They really hit the scene when Bill
Bruford took them on tour with King Crimson the following year, and
since then, Simmons has defined the state of the art in electronic
drums, from the old hard plastic ones to the zone-sensitive ones for the
SDX.... and now they're out of business. Alas!
Technology advances, thank goodness, and the technology of pads is no
different. The old sensors have largely been replaced with transducers
and film-pack force-sensitive resistors, making the newer pads more
reliable and tough than their parents. Also, the epidemic of "Simmons
wrist" has led to more ergonomic designs for playing surfaces. As for
expressive control, the real key lies in what sort of interactive
software comes with the pads, for setting up gate times, response
curves, and so on. After all, a hit is a hit is a hit if that's the only
data you're feeding your synths. We've come a long way from the rubber
discs of the Synsonics kits (remember them?) or the genuine leather pads
of the MXR Kit (I almost bought one, in 1982... sorry I didn't, now...)!
Other notables in the "stuff to hit" genre included the Octapad and its
many, many imitators (the original Roland design still providing the
best pad-to-pad isolation in the business), the Kat and Silion Mallet
for marimba types, and various bizarre MIDI devices like the Dynacord
Rhythm Stick. (What a screech THAT thing was!) And although Simmons are
no more, the modularity of MIDI has spawned a whole slew of percussion
controllers accessing drum box sounds, samplers, and even (gasp!) the
occasional analog synth. These days, the stores are again filled with
cheap drum pads, but now they're digitally sampled and often have rhythm
sequences built in ! But I'll admit that my tastes run to hitting an
Octapad and listening to my Xpander go "CRASH!", but then again I've
always been hidebound! |->
I think that a fundamental understanding of rhythm is vital to a
musician's sensibilities, and there's something wonderful and visceral
about actually playing a drum. That's why I find that the most
convincing drum tracks on electronic albums these days tend to be done
live, at least with an Octapad.
And even if you can't afford the cheapest MIDI controllers, like the
$100 Yamaha DD5, you can always get a HandClapper or SpaceDrum and go
wild!
Next, in Part 3, we get a little more serious, as we discuss more
serious technical problems in a look at stringed instrument control of
synthesis.
Here we go again, folx. Feedback on Pt 1 was largely positive, and Pt 2
didn't seem to generate much comment at all, so let's see how we do this
time...
THE MAN-MACHINE INTERFACE, PART 3
STRINGED INSTRUMENTS
The guitar and its cousins are, in comparison to keyboards and drums,
huge pains in the anatomy to use as control devices. Why? Because they
violate both the Switch Proposition (each note is not an event in
itself) and the Keyboard Proposition (There's no logical layout for
pitch reference in a mechanical way). But guitarists are an insistent
lot, so let's look at the history books, but not until after we have a
quick tutorial on the technology!
There are two recognized means of controlling synthesizers from a
stringed instrument. One is to mechanically analogue the control
surfaces of the instrument and map them to a synth control interface,
and the other is to read the actual notes as they are played and
interpret them for the synth's use. These two procedures, which (for
reasons that'll be obvious in a moment) I'll call "fretwiring" and
"pitchtracking", each have strong advantages and disadvantages, which
should be enumerated here.
FRETWIRING has the strong advantage of being as quick and responsive as
the keyboard on a traditional synth. The analogue reads your actions as
fast as you can act, and the synth responds at the speed of light. In
addition, it is easier to directly incorporate control of the timbre or
nuance of the synth tone into such a design, merely by adding the
appropriate sensors for the types of mechanical movement the player will
produce as he plays. In other words, the instrument follows one's
movements perfectly and instantly. The disadvantages of fretwiring are
in its incredible complexity and expense, as the guitar neck must be
wired to sense fret contact by each string (hence the name) and other
performance sensors must be able to quickly and accurately follow the
guitarist's movements. Also, it is rare that such an instrument can
function properly and yet still serve as a real electric guitar, making
a synth/guitar blended sound impossible. Lastly, while the possibility
of direct timbral control of the synth exists, it must usually be
implemented at least in part by controls that are not common parts of
the guitarist's technique.
PITCHTRACKING relies on circuitry and special pickups that follow string
movement and determine the pitch and amplitude of a note being played
(hence the name). The string is plucked, the pickup or other sensor
reads its relevant data, and the synth is informed accordingly. The
advantages of this system are its ability to be easily and
nondestructively mounted to any good guitar, allowing for a natural
playing style and a blend of guitar and synth timbres, and its
relatively low expense and ease of upkeep. Its primary disadvantage is
in the tracking process itself: it takes some finite amount of time to
read a guitar's pitch, and more time to translate that pitch to a
voltage, and more time to go from voltage to MIDI. Thus, guitarsynths
can be noticeably slower and sloppier in the synth output than in the
straight guitar sound. This problem is compounded by the fact that many
guitar nuances serve only to confuse the pickup, imposing an artificial
and stilted playing style on the player. Lastly, any performance
controls that the synth alone will require must somehow be attached to
the already cramped guitar body, causing potential confusion and
clutter.
So how did these two approaches fare through history? Well, the early
years were dominated by pitchtrackers, as the pitch-to-voltage converter
was a neat technical problem that folks had been working on for years.
Early synths, such as the Korg X911, were monophonic: only one
cleanly-played note could be played at a time. The ARP Avatar was
another example of this strategy. Sadly, these instruments were ahead
of what the technology could do, and while the Korg was only an
embarrassment, the Avatar contributed strongly to the death of ARP,
alas. The first Zeta pickups appeared at about this time, for use with
outboard P/V converters and synths. The late 1970s and early 1980s saw a
profusion of these gizmos, and few if any worked well. Notable, though,
were boxes like the ElectroHarmonix MicroSynthesizer, which was nothing
more than a square-wave divide-down box, and the Oncor Touch guitar,
which was the first fretwired instrument in production: it had metal
bars in place of strings, and was actually an oddly-shaped monophonic
synthesizer!
The guitarsynth's evolution progressed slowly into the 1980s, and might
still be progressing today, if not for the interest taken by one
particular company in the challenge: Roland. Their first attempt, the
GR500, utilized a bass synth, a mono synth, a string machine, and a
divide-down polyensemble, all controlled by a hexaphonic pickup on a
very nice guitar. It tracked half decently, it sounded great, and it was
a big hit at once. (The guitar parts on "Follow You Follow Me" by
Genesis on 1978's AND THEN THERE WERE THREE are all GR500.) Roland
followed this up with the GR300 series, which Robert Fripp made his own
(see any King Crimson album from 1981 or after), and eventually, the
GR700, which was a breakthrough in three areas: it was a true polyphonic
guitar synthesizer, it could be set up reliably and personalized easily
to each guitarist's touch, and IT HAD MIDI! Since then, Roland's main
drive has ben to get faster and faster tracking pickups, and to an
extent they've succeeded. Ibanez has also marketed a MIDI guitar, with a
MIDI whammybar!
The fretwired guitars were much later in coming, but they had
advantages. Muting didn't faze them, nor did hammerons and pulloffs,
and unlike pitch sensors, if the neck was designed right they didn't
mind bends at all. The first and most famous of these was of course the
SynthAxe, an $11,000 MIDI monstrosity that was enormously powerful and
expressive, but actually required a fair amount of retraining to use
properly. (Allan Holdsworth's ATAVACHRON and SAND are loaded with
SynthAxe work.) The Stepp DG1, though the company died, was an
improvement on the SynthAxe in terms of familiarity of use. Other
designs that attempted to avoid pitchtracking problems utilized sonar or
light sensors (the Yamaha GS1 (?) and Beetle Quantar), but these
combined the disadvantages of limited fretwire control and no real
guitar sound and hence didn't catch on terribly well. On the flip side,
Zeta is marketing a guitar now called the Mirror 6, which is a real
guitar that at great expense has been totally fretwired, giving the
ultimate in both sides of the coin. The instrument's cost has been
offputting, but field reports say it may well be the wave of the future.
As for other instruments in the string family, the bass guitar has been
approached only by Roland and Zeta. Roland's attempts to quickly trck
the low-frequency bass notes have been frustrating, but Zeta has hinted
at a Mirror 4 bass to be released. Zeta have also developed a violin
synth, utilizing a special pickup. Since there are no frets and the bow
doesn't always start a note cleanly, this instrument uses pitchtracking,
and does fair to middling in following synths. Its real strengths,
according to users like Jean-Luc Ponty and Emilysue Pinnell, are as an
electric violin, which can be transposed down into the cello range
without difficulty.
If I've missed any designs, feel free to remind me of them. But as for
the future, my money's on a dichotomy of designs: some folks only want a
guitar sound with something else behind it, and for them the Roland
designs will do fine for cheap, but others want the precise control of
fretwiring and will pay to get it. That being the case, I think that
real-guitar-based designs like the Zeta will eventually win the day, as
they do leave open a chance to play the real thing. As prices drop,
we'll see who comes out on top, if any one type does. In the meantime,
we'll have to get used to guitar runs with string chords tagging along
behind them, I guess....
Part 4 will be delayed for a trip to do research elsewhere in the USA.
But when I get back, we'll look at wind instruments and the problems
they pose for synthesis. I'll also be taking suggestions for other
instruments to cover, because if I don't get any, then in the fifth and
final part I'm planning to cover all of the bizarro forms of synth
control that have come along over the years, from the pitch wheel to the
HANDS.
Well, here we are in Part 4 of my little series. Feedback has been
sporadic but generally friendly, so I'll quit while I'm ahead (after
this installment and the next one, which will cover unusual timbre and
nuance controllers).
THE MAN-MACHINE INTERFACE, PART 4
WIND CONTROLLERS
The wind and brass instruments fall in between stringed and keyboard
instruments in terms of translational difficulty: while there are sets
of keys that definitely tell the instrument what note is being played,
the nuances of breath control are perhaps more complex than those of
string playing. Lip and tongue pressure, expulsion of air, and jaw
stiffness can control vibrato, loudness, tremolo, even pitch bends and
octave jumps. But the fascination of combining this sort of
expressiveness with the sounds of the synth has fascinated people for
decades, and a number of attempts were made:
The two most famous historical wind controllers were the Lyricon and the
EWI and EVI. The Lyricon, marketed by Computone, was a clarinet-like
controller that allowed pitchy and vibrato control over analog synths
through variable control voltage levels. The EWI was a similar
development using a different approach to control style, and the EVI was
a design for trumpeters. While to hear the EWI you'd need to dig up
albums featuring people like Michael Brecker, the Lyricon was actually a
fairly well-known beastie: Emerald Web used them a lot, and the
Tangerine Dream album CYCLONE features one. Another device was the
selfcontained Starwind, a mono synth with a melodica keyboard and
elementary breath control. Neat device, and inexpensive, but never
caught on. It would take the advent of MIDI to produce the same sort of
revolution in wind control that had occurred elsewhere in the industry.
The primary advantage of these early devices was that they utilized
analog signal control, hence had infinite degrees of control shading.
Digital control, by definition, was coarser, and the Yamaha WX7, the
first MIDI wind driver, suffered from some complaints in this regard, as
does the newer, simpler WX11. The newer EWI and EVI, now made by Akai,
actually run a special synth via analog voltages, hence preserving the
expressiveness. They, however, suffer from a non-intuitive keying system
that many players find unpleasant to use. Other instruments include the
Synthophone, the Atrisyn MIDIsax, and the Sting. Each has its own
approach to handling the dual needs of familiarity to seasoned players
and of faithful synth control, and each involves tradeoffs in terms of
performance control, expressiveness, and cost. The WX11, for instance,
has a far more limited set of expressive capabilities than any other
wind driver as of now, but it's simple to learn and quite cheap. The
Synthophone, on the other hand, is built inside a real sax, but suffers
>from high cost and limited synth control. The WX7 is considered
difficult to "set up" by individual players, and the MIDIsax doesn't
even allow certain types of setups to be performed, though it does have
a number of useful features like expression controllers and a program
readout where the player can see it easily. And the list goes on.
The ultimate test, though, appears to be in the hands of the player.
While the guitar synths have divided their users into two clear camps,
the wind drivers are so diverse in their capabilities and limitations
that it seems neccessary for the individual to do a great deal of
legwork before making a personally satisfactory choice. These days, the
two best sellers are the EWI (due to its expressive synth control and
Akai's strong commitment to making it succeed) and the WX7 (customizable
to each player's embouchure and touch, universal in MIDI control use,
and now quite cheap now that it's out of production). We'll have to see
what the future holds. Oh, and what synths are normally used with them?
Hmm, the Akai comes with its own, and the WX11 does too (It's suggested
to use a TX81Z with the WX7), but outside of those obvious choices, the
strong favorite is the analog-controllable, MIDI-compatible,
UNBELIEVABLE-sounding Oberheim Xpander. It's also got a strong following
among guitar synthesists in both camps, for similar reasons, although I
know of no one using it heavily for percussion applications. Its rich
analog sound and fine controllability by multitimbral devices make it a
natural. (Forgive me, folx; I have two. |-> )
Next, our fifth and final part will cover timbral controllers of various
sorts. If you have a bizarre favorite, please let me know, and don't be
shy about which category they fall under: I'll be covering oddball
keyboards, pads, stringed devices, and wind drivers as well as other
stuff!
Well. Here we are at the end of this little series. If there's anything
I've missed, please feel free to ask me, and I'll include it later. But
for now....
THE MAN-MACHINE INTERFACE, PART 5
UNUSUAL CONTROLLERS
When I say "unusual" I mean stuff that either puts a new wrinkle on old
ways of determining pitch and start/stop times of events, or entirely
new methods of doing so. I'll be skipping all over the place, and I'm
sorry for that, but it was either unformatted or never to be finished,
so what the hey.
The pre-MIDI era, and in fact the pre-digital era, abounded with bizarre
attempts at control devices. As has been mentioned elsewhere, the Ondes
Martenot had a ribbon attached to a ring on the player's finger, that
slid back and forth as he played and served as a control device in that
fashion. But for the most part, the pre-vacuum tube age relied mainly
on old standbys of the organ design palette for control: stops and keys.
With the development of vacuum-tube synths, and then solid-state devices
for electronic tone generation, came a new generation of devices for
realtime shaping of tone and timbre. The simple organ-stop designs of
early keyboards were cast aside in favor of a plethora of new
approaches, the traditional keyboard was cast aside with somewhat less
success, and in some cases both were simultaneously cast aside in favor
of a new, combined tone-timbre control system. For example, I'm sure
that everyone here has at least heard of the Theremin: it was a
marvelously expressive instrument in the hands of a skilled player, and
they were turning up in various and sundry places for decades after
their invention. The Theremin consisted of two antennas, one horizontal
and one vertical (at least in traditional form). The player held one
hand over the horizontal antenna, and waved the other hand near the
vertical antenna. The horizontal antenna controlled loudness and the
vertical one controlled pitch, based on the proximity of the player's
hands to them. As late as the early 1980s, there were Theremins
available to generate CVs for synthesizers, and there exists a Theremin
society even today. Jimmy Page uses one in THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME,
and at least one version of the theme from STAR TREK uses one as a solo
instrument. I had a chance to play one a few years ago; it's not as easy
as it sounds, but the degree of nuance and subtlety were obvious even to
a neophyte like myself.
Other attempts to remove the early synthesizers from their dependence on
traditional keyboards took the form of, well, alternate keyboards.
There's been an ongoing argument as to whether or not the ole
black'n'whites are the best means of controlling ANY instrument of a
keyboardish nature, including the piano and harpsichord, and a number of
acoustic pianos and synths have been developed with alternative keyboard
designs. The Vandervoort keyboard uses a design similar to that
developed by von Janko earlier in this century; it uses four rows of
keys in whole-tone series, allowing for consistent fingerings and easy
multi-octave jumps regardless of key signature. It was designed in 1976
and was originally envisioned as a "shell" to be placed over a
traditional keyboard; what's funny is that KEYBOARD wrote of it as a
failed and forever lost idea in their Feb. 1987 issue (A great
reference, by the way), and just last week, MUSIC TECHNOLOGY mentioned
the Vandervoort in a working prototype form as being on display at last
summer's NAMM show-- complete with a photograph! Ironic, isn't it?
Another, less well-known design was the Secor keyboard, which utilized a
honeycomb of 240 multicolored hexagonal keys to allow easy (sic) use of
microtonal scales in performance. Its inventor, George Secor, said of
it that for less than 31 tones per octave it wasn't worth learning, and
that even if it never caught on it would look great as a prop in a SF
movie. That's for sure: only two Secor keyboards were ever built, for a
little-known synth called the Motorola Scalatron, and they were BIZARRE!
Beautiful, but bizarre.
Another proponent of alternate designs was Don Buchla, whose wonderful
synths almost never featured traditional keys. (One exception was the
Touche, his one attempt at a commercial machine: more on it in a moment)
He instead preferred capacitance touchplates, which were pressure
sensitive yet had no moving parts to break down. A Buchla synth was a
sight to see, with arrays of keys, controllers and expression devices
laid out as no more than patterns of wire on a flat plate: almost like
playing a bas-relief sculpture of a keyboard. The design was simple,
reliable, and infinitely flexible, and he still uses it heavily today.
Its one drawback to most users was its lack of tactile feedback; it
didn't move when you touched it.
Nevertheless, the touchplate design was inexpensive to build and
reproduce, so if feedback was less important than economy, it got used--
a LOT. Entire 1980s instruments in the pre-MIDI era used touchpad
keyboards: the ElectroHarmonix Mini Synth (of which I proudly own one,
and love to death), the EDP Wasp (Black and yellow keys...eegh!), and
one oddity called the Dubreq Stylophone, which required that a stylus be
used to touch each key. (It didn't catch on.)
For people who insisted on the old-fashioned piano keyboard, there were
still a lot of frontiers to cross: one manufacturer has marketed a
keyboard which not only has velocity and pressure sensitivity, but where
each key can move in and out or side to side! Watching one of those in
action is kind of frightening; like someone put LSD in your tip jar....
The Yamaha GX-1, the half-ton monstrosity made famous by Keith Emerson,
had at least one keyboard manual that allowed side-to-side key motion.
(As an aside: I'm looking for data on this beast: I know nothing of what
it could and couldn't do, how many were made, or how it worked. All I
know is, it weighed nearly 1000 pounds, had two fullsize key manuals and
one minikey manual, and Keith Emerson had two: one which got destroyed
by a runaway farm tractor (no, really!) and one he got from John Paul
Jones of Led Zeppelin. Stevie Wonder had one, and so did Jurgen Fritz of
Triumvirat (who was famous for having one of everything Keith had, no
matter what). Other than that, I'm stuck. Help!) And then, of course,
there were always the feet: organ bass pedals have been in existence for
centuries, and from the Moog Taurus to the MIDIstep they haven't been
far from the electronic world either.
Beyond the realm of actually playing the keyboard, however, was the area
of controlling the sound as one played. The area of timbral control is
even richer than the area of keyboard triggering, and has spawned all
sorts of approaches to seemingly trivial problems. Consider the two most
common ways to alter a sound played on a synth (not including the
sustain pedal, which is one thing that survived unscathed from the piano
pedagogy): pitch bending, or the addition of vibrato or tremolo, i.e.
LFO modulation of frequency or volume. "That's easy, man! You just get
these two things on the left side of the board, and...." Yes? And do
what? Pull them, push them, wiggle them, stroke them, press them, punch
them, squeeze them, what? And in which direction? Up, down, left, right,
in, out, forwards, backwards? And what do they do when you let go:
return to zero? Stay put? Keep going to some preset destination without
your help? Hmmm? Well, the answer to all of the above questions is, of
course, "Yes," so it might pay to look a bit at the simplest (HAH!) of
control surfaces before we get on to the heavier stuff....
The proliferation of left-hand controllers on the market, today just as
badly as yesterday, is due to three factors: ergonomics ("What feels
best to a player?"), functionality ("What'll work best for a technique
of play?") and, alas, marketing ("To hell with Items One and Two:
What'll make us look different than everybody else?"). In the beginning,
pitch and expression control was performed by varying control voltages
on modular synths, and this has persisted to the later, hard-wired
synths. Nowadays, it's done with digital data messages, allowing for
some new wrinkles, but the fundamental ideas haven't changed much.
You're holding a note, and you want the timbre to DO something: so what
do you do? Well, on the old modular synths, you grabbed a knob and
turned it. Simple enough, but it lacked something. So the earliest
synths for the mass market, the Moog modulars, had a ribbon controller:
you put your finger on it, and the pitch jumped up a bit. The jump
depended on where you touched it, and when you let go it jumped back.
Simple, right? Well, there were a lot of lead synthesists whose
techniques relied on them, and when Moog stopped putting them on their
machines, Yamaha did: the only MIDI ribbon available today is on their
KX5 strapon. I love it!
The replacement for the ribbon, of course, was the wheel, and this is
still (in its MANY forms) the most popular type of controller today. How
do they work? Well, that depends on the synth. For an old Moog, the left
one's bidirectional and is used for pitch bends, with or without a
center detent, and the right one's unidirectional and is used for LFO
modulation. This "standard" (with the modern additions of a spring
return-to-zero on the pitch wheel) is used by Ensoniq, Emu, Yamaha, and
on older Roland and Korg boards. Oberheim uses a reversed design that
was copied by Chroma and (partially) by Kurzweil: the wheels are shaped
like paddles, and both are bidirectional and springloaded. Older designs
for such a mod wheel were "dead" in one direction; nowadays, each
direction accesses a different modulation (VCO vs. VCF, perhaps). Roland
has a side-to-side pitch paddle, which is pushed forward for modulation:
I, personally, find this dsign unusable and not a little silly. Korg
uses a joystick for pitch bend and two types of modulation (left, flat;
right, sharp; up, VCO; down, VCF) that wouldn't be bad if the joystick
moved in a circular well rather than a square one and wasn't so flimsy,
argh! But I digress. The joystick idea was also marketed as a pressure
plate, where the XY position of the fingertip sent out voltages. Another
idea that ARP tried was the PPC, or Proportional Pressure Controller:
three pads, on which you rested your left index, middle, and ring
fingers as you played. Pressing one bent up, pressing another bent flat,
and the one in the middle added modulation. (It didn't sell.) Then there
was Yamaha's old setting-the-clock pitchbender, and... You get the idea.
One other expression controller, that's been single handedly shoved into
the spotlight by Yamaha, is the hooter: the Breath Controller. It's a
gizmo that generates a CV based on breath pressure, allowing lines to be
articulated as with a wind or brass instrument. As Chick Corea once
wrote: "You get into blowing." The Yamaha MCS2 specializes, in fact, in
adding controllers to MIDI pianos and the like: you get a MIDI merger
that adds a pitch wheel, mod wheel, hooter, two footpedals, two
footswitches, two sliders, and three buttons to your MIDI control
arsenal. Yippee!
Of course, this doesn't hold a candle to the single best design for
left-handed control of a synthesizer ever, which was invented by Hugh
LeCaine in the 1950s for his Electronic Sackbut. The left hand rested on
a plate, with each of the four fingers controlling a slider that varied
some component of the sound in realtime, so flexing the fingers caused a
very smooth and natural evolution of acoustic-imitative sounds such as
strings. And the thumb, not to be outdone, rested on a sliding pad that
moved joystick-like across a circular plate that was divided into
different waveform types, and allowed formants and waves to be blended
in real time with a twitch of the thumb. Only LeCaine himself ever
mastered this instrument, but the sound was, well, amazing. The
imitation of a string quartet he did in 1958 was frighteningly real, not
so much in sound but in articulation of the instruments' bowstrokes!
Other parts of the body were used for timbral control, of course:
footpedals and footswitches were and are common, and the GX-1 had a
gizmo for bending pitch when the player drove his knee up under the
keybed. Visceral!
Now, one off-the-wall area of timbral control that deserves a mention,
simply because it's an idea that just won't die (for obvious reasons),
is that of event triggering as part of the performance controls. For
example, instead of pressing the pitch wheel up a half step and hoping
one doesn't overshoot, one presses a button that tells the synth, "Bend
up a half step, at such-and-such a speed." This idea could be applied to
anything: sequences of notes, chords, vibrato or other modulatory
effects, and so on. And although the obvious way to do such things these
days would be with a MIDI sequencer, the idea's far older than that. An
early strap-on synth called the Syntar (used a lot by Michael Garrison,
among others) had nine such buttons on its "neck" as user- settable
triggers, and the Buchla Touche was designed to operate in this fashion
>from the ground up. Nowadays, we have the Roland Axis, whose thumb
button or finger buttons or footswitch can be set to slowly bring in
Controller 1, and the MIDI Mitigator, where every footswitch can deliver
up to 256 bytes of user-choosable MIDI data... even System Exclusive, so
that you can turn a knob on your-- wait a minute! Isn't this where we
came in? |->
And then, almost exclusively thanks to MIDI, we have the explosion of
percussion controllers; it's now possible to create drums sounds with
nuance and timbral variety from a number of sources. The Acoustic
drummer can supplement his kit with an electronic "box-o-pads" like an
Octapad, DrumKat, or Portakit: not a new idea, as MXR was marketing an
analog version nearly twenty years ago! And there's the Rhythm Stick, a
strapon drum controller you fret to select sounds and hit to play them,
and the PKI GunDrums, which are fired like pistols to play sounds
selected by the thumbs. Triggers are built into the heels of shoes, into
glasses frames, into body suits: there's no limit now to the event
control of MIDI via impact.
And what of the future? Well, we're seeing bits of it today, in the
Airdrums, a pair of MIDI batons that send messages when moved on their
axes in various directions, and the Hands of Michael Waisvicz that
control synth parameters in real time by flexing the fingers, touching
the palms, waving the arms and turning the hands (I want a pair.
BADLY!). Robert Moog recently spoke of a design student's idea for a
pole-shaped controller with keys on its grips, played in a dancelike
motion. And for the instruments themselves? I have fond memories of the
instrument that sank PPG: the Realizer, where you punched a button and
the entire front panel changed. Bip! It's a Minimoog. Bip! It's a DX7.
Bip! It's an Emulator....
Yes, this is a good time to be an experimental musician. Maybe most of
you will never take the time to wonder about all of this "man-machine
interface" stuff, but I know that my creativity goes way up whenever I
do... It's just part of the process with me. And I hope that maybe I've
given some of you some food for thought. Thanks for listening.
Oh, before I forget: I did get one contribution, from Pete Lucas:
Man-machine-interface: One instrument i came across some years back was
a thing called a 'Tactophone'. It was a metal framework (steel tubes
and angle sections bolted together, standing about 3 feet high) with
wires stretched between the upper and lower members, in the style of a
harp. It had about thirty strings if my memory is correct. An
electronically energised coil vibrated the top member, and hence the
strings, there were pickups on the individual strings along the bottom
edge. Output from the pickups was fed back to the energiser, hence if
you plucked a string, and then took your hands off the instrument, you
could get a sustained note, or a note that died away very slowly,
depending on the settings of the amplifiers (oh yes, i forgot to
mention, there was a mass of amplifiers, ring modulators, notchfilters
etc attached, with a console for the sound engineer to manipulate) You
could run your fingers up and down a string, instead of plucking it,
this produced noises like a musical saw (ethereal wailings reminiscent
of the ondes martenot, or running a wet finger round the rim of a
glass), or alternatively, since some of the strings were wound, running
a hard metal object up & down the strings made interesting
grating/screeching sounds. If you got the gain of the amplifiers just
right, then merely touching a string very lightly would start off a
vibration, which would grow louder and louder and louder. Brushing a
feather across all the strings sounded nice. There was a pedal attached
to the electronics, which cut the amplifier (and i think also introduced
negative feedback, coz it seemed to damp the vibrations very fast
indeed). I also saw the thing tipped on its side (strings horizontal)
and played like a xylophone with two metal rods as 'sticks'. The
'player' and 'composer' of music for the beast was, if i remember,
called David Morkrum (or was it Morkum, Morecambe?). Wonder if you've
heard of this 'thing'? Possibly under a different name?
Pete L.
Well, thanks for your attention. I hope folks got something worthwhile
out of all this; I had a lot of fun going back through my archives
getting this stuff out. Now it's time for me to go back into the studio;
I just had this great idea for a song, using nothing but a pitch
bender....