采访

McGee: You came from a very traditional music background and learned programming, physics, acoustics, and signal processing in order to achieve your compositional ideas. What advice would have for those coming from highly a technical background trying to enter the world of composition? Chowning: Knowing about music is really important. My math skills are really low-level. For example, I can understand both the FM equation and the trigonometric expansion, but I could never possibly derive the latter from the former. I learned about physics by simply asking lots of questions. The Stanford AI lab was a very special place with engineers, computer scientists, philosophers, linguists, so I could find an answer to almost any question…. but the lingua franca between all of us was programming. A formal music background is very hard to recapitulate. Most of us as children go through the hard part… and I don’t think I would recommend that… if you have some performance skills that is probably enough. Looking at things like how sounds are made… how AM and FM synthesis work and what values to use… then you really learn, and that I would recommend. There are also some perceptual issues… the ear doesn’t like perfect symmetry … and understanding those issues has to do with understanding the internal dynamism of the art from the sound to formal structure. McGee: You have referred to Music as a symbolic art in the sense that the composer writes or in your case programs a composition before being able to hear it. Now that much music creation software allows one to work in real time, do you think that is strengthens or weakens the creative process? Chowning: It’s easy for composers having traditional training to learn programming because they are used to representing music as symbols. [The method of creating music] is very individual. I always begin with a sound… and sometimes within the morphology of a sound I find the structure of a piece. McGee: It is interesting that the narrative of Stria is based on mathematical relationships. You have shown an intimate relationship between art and science in the since that the Golden Mean was used as the creative foundation for that piece. Do you agree that the separation between art and technology is merely an illusion? Chowning: Yes, and I’ve never been of the school where the Golden Section is this magical formula, but you find it in nature and it’s true. It was a very practical application that generated a sound that I wanted to work with. [Because of the Golden Mean] I understood why I liked that sound. McGee: Considering all of your work in spacialization, what surround setup do you see as the future in the performance of electronic music? Chowning: I think the future for electroacoustic concerts is in movie theaters. Good ones have great sound systems that are tuned to the room… they are everywhere… you have a great display medium if there are visuals. They are culturally neutral… anybody feels comfortable in a movie theater while not everyone feels comfortable in concert halls.