Early Works Part 2
SUNY Albany CEMS (Coordinated Electronic Music Studio)

RICHARD: When I transferred to SUNY Albany in 1973 to study with Joel Chadabe, at what was at the time the largest Moog studio in the world, I continued to develop the One Sound idea, while absorbing Joel's concepts of human-machine interactivity and real-time electronic performance instruments (for more on Joel's ideas, see his "Electric Sound: The Past and Promise of Electronic Music".)

"The Wave-Sounding Sea" is a bit of a throwback to my earlier practices, but from "Iron Hill" on, I focused almost exclusively on One Sound work and on using sine waves in all their variations for several years, until the age of MIDI.

The sounds in "White Night", "Snow", and "A River On Cold Mountain" and "The FM Automat" are all derived from sine waves frequency modulated by complex combinations of other sine waves, all controlled by sequencers and, later, Daisy and small computers.

Daisy was a pseudo-random control voltage generator built by John Roy that allowed for high-level control of many synthesizer parameters at once. "The FM Automat" is all Daisy and a few sine waves, and was an attempt to create as many different sounds as possible from a single patch; it was all recorded in a single pass in real time.

"Snow" was created by controlling and modulating synthesizer sine waves with a PDP-10 mini-computer, running a simple program of my own - it was the first piece of music I wrote that used a computer in any way.

Three other electro-acoustic pieces from this period, "Bronze Cloud Disc", "Two Mirrors Face One Another", and "Cities Of Light", are available on "Ten Thousand Shades Of Blue", my retrospective release on XI Records

Note: Richard encoded all the music tracks in stereo as high-quality MP3s. Just click on each track name to play it in your browser. You'll need to have an appropriate MP3 player for your system installed to hear them.

 

MUSIC:  Early Works │ Walking Slowly Backwards │ ROMworks │ Five Nocturnes │ WDFH August 25, 2005 │ KymaWorks │ BuchlaWorks