CCRMA and the Culture of Invention

This paper attributes contemporary Wave Sequencing to CCRMA composer Bill Schottstaedt’s 1987 work Leviathan, which radically extended musique concrète techniques by computing over 15,000 splices of common sound effects. Wave Sequencing’s commercialization epitomizes the often-accidental nature of synthesizer development, as exemplified by a variety of CCRMA-influenced initiatives.

Silicon Valley Synthesis

Since the Wavestation appeared in 1990, wave sequencing has become a staple synthesis method under the Korg label, featured in several models (EX A/D, SR) through 1994. The method later found its way into the expansive OASYS (2005), and the challenging, nine-synth-engine Kronos workstations (2011). Today they offer a rethought, “lane-based” Wave Sequencing 2.0, featured in the Wavestate Mk1 and Mk2 series (2020-present) in both hard and soft versions. There is expanded user memory, new modulation paths, randomizations, and physical controls. After manifold iterations wave sequencing is mature, established, accepted, widely emulated, and enjoyed by many.

On its 35th anniversary, this article explores a significant gap in the history of wave sequencing—namely, how the technique first made its way into the Wavestation. There certainly is a relevant technical and aesthetic history to be addressed below. Here, the immediate answer is that wave sequencing as we know it today was released from Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) by resident composer and wizard Bill Schottstaedt in 1987.

I know this because that year Sequential Circuits sent me to the CCRMA Summer Workshops, where I was one of Bill’s students. He taught me how to use his Programming Language for Audio (Pla) on the storied and beloved Sambox (compiling, non-real-time) synthesizer, to realize a modally-constrained composition I had in mind. This necessarily acquainted me with his prior compositions as well as the concurrent, profound work named Leviathan.

In his lectures and his paper, “On Leviathan,” Bill asserts disinterest in traditional melody or harmony, to say nothing of expanding computer music or MIDI techniques. Instead, the goal is to liberate even the least musical sound effects from the negative side-effects of mere sampling. He focuses relentlessly on the basic problem with sampling traditional instruments: that taking their snapshot freezes their expressive capabilities.

To address this problem of stiff, inexpressive sample playback, Bill described and implemented two new signal processing algorithms: traveling loops and wave sequencing. A traveling loop slides the beginning and end points over a section of the sample’s playback range. Wave sequencing arranges a list of samples smoothed together by cross-fading each transition. Deployed under Bill’s appreciable experience and skill, the results yield continuously evolving complex timbres (without the need for a multi-modal filter stage) that had no recent precedent.

As I covered in my 1987 December Keyboard magazine time capsule about the facility, CCRMA, of course, has been a cornucopia of profound compositions, diverse synthesis methods, score writing technologies, auditory perception studies, real-time polyphonic audio transcription, to say nothing of the especially influential techniques of John Chowning’s frequency modulation (FM) and Julius Smith’s Physical Modelling (PM).

CCRMA had begun an industry outreach program at which Dave Smith, Fred Malouf, and I represented Sequential for several years, listening for applicable commercial opportunities amidst all the research results. By 1985 I had become conversant with most of the staff—who were brilliant, international, multi-disciplinary, and prepared with ready humor. Director Chris Chafe maintains that the center needs this kind of free-wheeling, eclectic, cross-fertilizing culture to produce its results. Indeed, it is hard to hang at CCRMA for long without experiencing its inherent cultural power washer attacking one’s accrued industrial cynicism. Participating in these research reviews was enlightening and energizing. During advanced DSP lectures clouds would part and the sun shine brightly. Yet, there remained a chasm between computing-intensive non-real-time academia and what real-time techniques Sequential could affordably bring to market.

Simultaneously it should be noted that unlike some other U.S. music centers that turned up their noses at MIDI—as if we should have sought their permission—CCRMA embraced MIDI from its inception. In this, they were encouraged by their illustrious resident Max Mathews. I recall lively audiences attending my 1986 Studio 440 presentation and a few other guest talks I gave. Admittedly, CCRMA may also have been stimulated to address the emerging popular standard by their benefactor Yamaha, which stocked its studios with a wide range of MIDI gear. But MIDI was perhaps the area in which Sequential needed the least external help.

By late 1986, Sequential was in a bit of trouble. We had designed the Prophet-3000, a powerful and intuitive 16-bit sampler, but didn’t have the funds for full production. Worse, Yamaha had no interest in it as they had plenty of unwanted TX16W 12-bit samplers on hand. We started a vague specification for an “F8”-denoted sampler that would somehow eclipse the 3000. But, dependent as the company was on “the analog sound,” we had no digital filters to implement new features even had they been defined. Money was tight, and Yamaha was circling the company like a patient buzzard.

Circuitous Development

Then I heard Leviathan, and it changed the entire course of things:

Bill Schottstaedt, Leviathan (1987). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UY5ZoDZi0Lk

Likely on the Monday after the summer CCRMA concert where Leviathan debuted, I strode into Dave’s office to breathlessly describe Bill’s new sample animation techniques and their profound effects. He received my report like the good poker player he was. Yet, within a few days, I heard the initial scratchings and scrapings of early traveling loop and wave sequencing experiments emerging from our lab.

The results were mixed. On one hand, we didn’t have enough CPU power to implement traveling loops in real-time. When Leviathan was compiled, the audio processing could be pre-calculated, allowing the system to predict and implement smoothing as needed. This would make it easier to avoid issues like clicks or pops from abrupt waveform changes at non-zero crossings. In a real-time keyboard context, however, processing demands are far more complex. A challenge with travelers is that you can’t exploit zero crossings. One must increment (or decrement) at adjacent words. So, there will almost always be a discontinuity, however small, needing repair. Thus, every loop requires a newly-computed fade (or interpolation) over a few words both at its start and again at its end. Note that this makes travelers far more demanding than playing grains that start and stop at zero. Emerging granular-capable systems have limited polyphony or compromises, such as the speed at which a loop can travel. Evidence that travelers remain a non-trivial challenge is there is not yet a chip set able to support professional polyphonic capability.

On the other hand, because the wave sequencing splices and crossfades are programmed in advance, that technique seemed more feasible for a performance keyboard. So, within a week, the ill-defined F8 spec became tuned as the first wave sequencing prototype: its new mission defined as a sampling resynthesizer.

Why go this route? Memory was still expensive, firmly restricting our sample libraries, thus requiring time-wasting floppy disk transfers or expensive and proprietary ROM or RAM cards (large hard drives were not yet affordable). Resynthesis offered substantial relief from this situation. Instead of recording a typically lengthy instrument sample, one might record a far smaller selection of waves, such as its distinguishing attack, followed by selected cycles from the sustain period. Each sequence selection could have its own sample, duration, tuning, and a host of modulations. One then might reconstruct the sound for playback by blending or otherwise modulating these sequenced “wavetables.” So, a single wave sequence would, in principle, be able to use the same resources to recreate an instrument imitatively real as well as one extraordinarily unreal. Fully deployed, the result would be a completely novel instrument relying on four independent oscillator wave-shaping channels simultaneously voicing independent wave sequences without the need for additional analog filters.

For good performance measures, we kept the Prophet-VS’s mixing joystick. Clearly, this dynamic oscillator extravaganza was a marked departure from Sequential’s typical subtractive analog filter architecture originating with the 1960s Mini-Moog upon which the Prophet-5 had been modeled.

After the acquisition, a second F8 was specified using Yamaha hardware. But this went nowhere as Yamaha dithered over its purchase, perhaps wondering whether this new F8 would indeed become another DX-7, compared to the promise of CCRMA’s physical modeling. So, half of my job became voicing Sondius® models running on a Digidesign Sound Accelerator card. A 25-foot-long piano? No problem.

In 1989 May, Yamaha’s DSD transitioned into the newly-formed Korg R&D, with a half-dozen Sequential staff merged with some Ensoniq transfers. After a decade in Sequential management as Publications Manager and a DSD Product Planner, I was accustomed to wide autonomy and found the hybrid of three disparate synth cultures uncomfortable. I left after completing the Wavestation documentation and alpha testing—but before its sound design was conducted. I had no visibility into the sound programming decisions. So, on the machine’s release, I was surprised that the original resynthesizer concept of the Wavestation was seemingly compromised, if not neglected, by the inclusion of a host of percussive samples. I disapproved of its presentation as a joystick-controlled drum machine. However, it turns out that in this opinion, I was ultimately proven presumptuous.

The Wavestation appeared in 1990, selling nowhere near the DX-7-level expectations set for it. To be fair, Korg had in 1988 begun the M- and T-series, which became some of the best-selling workstations of all time. So it took a minute for Wavestation innovations to claim Keyboard magazine’s attention and, therefore, its 1991 Keyboard of the Year award. (In 1995, they declared it one of “20 Instruments that Shook the World.”)

In 1992, Intel told me that they needed to reduce their OEM computer costs and size by eliminating the sound card in favor of merely a DAC on the motherboard. Dave had departed Korg with dispatch. So, I was able to recruit for my new Seer Systems Dave, Chris, and Fred as initial consultants under the radically attractive scenario that we would need no manufacturing—Intel would become our hardware department.

Andrew Grove introduced our unprecedented “Satie” 486 software synthesizer as an industry paradigm shift to 1994 Comdex, immediately provoking an all-out war with Microsoft over control over the interrupt system. Their settlement integrated “Satie” into Windows in concert with the Roland GM sample set. While they were preoccupied, four-person Seer Systems spun up a new Pentium version to achieve a market valuation of $6M. Seer added 32 software voices to the Creative Labs AWE32 to create the AWE64, selling an unprecedented quantity of perhaps 20 million synths. Surprises continued to accrue; few could have predicted that Seer Systems would be the only software company to compete with Yamaha by distributing Sondius® physical models (upon which I had worked in 1988). The processing demands of modeling encouraged us to, in turn, engage CCRMA’s Chris, “Nando,” and Julius as consultants for the new Reality synthesis engine.

From 1992-1995 Chris, Fred, Barry Hall (also from CCRMA), and I performed as the band Qwire. And because we lacked a drummer, here is where, ironically enough, to conduct and keep us in sync, I was forced to exploit the Wavestation’s very percussion features that I had previously criticized! Moreover, I had failed to appreciate that especially such found or percussive sounds are dispositive of the tradition into which this paper firmly places the Wavestation.

On Musique Concrète

Inasmuch as Bill declares “Leviathan is pure musique concrète,” we must review the defining features of that tradition, which includes both technical practices and a guiding aesthetic. On the technical side, today we are abundantly familiar with their techniques under the general category of sampling. Modern keyboard samplers can play from 1 to 100 sounds on one key. They are increasingly packaged at lower costs as novelty instruments enabling one to “turn your world into music,” including a handful of non-musician and child-oriented samplers (e.g. Donner MEDO and Artiphon Orba 3). Looping is hugely popular now (e.g. Boss RC-600 et. al.). And as real-time processors become more compact and powerful, surprising digital sound-mangling is now packaged into guitar pedals (e.g. Chase Bliss Mood II).

Pierre Schaeffer is generally credited with initiating the school of outrageous sampling in 1948 through avant-garde magnetic tape experiments emerging from the French Radio Broadcast studios. Not content to regurgitate traditional orchestral sounds, they created their own, famously, by cutting and splicing tape, reversing its playback, looping, effecting speed changes, creating delay effects from multiple playback heads, and so on. For example, a crossfade between any two taped samples could be produced by a long diagonal splice. We may use computers to replicate many of these 75-year-old tape techniques, yet in principle, they remain functionally similar.

However, the aesthetic difference between sampling and musique concrète lay in deeper issues in the philosophy of music. The school as flagrantly and experimentally as it could rejected the entire classical tradition with its programs, pseudo-emotionality, tiresome harmonies, and representationalism. They advanced the idea of “reduced listening” to those larger, distracting schemes in favor of attention focused on the details of the constituting sampled and manipulated sounds themselves. These “found” sounds were often unapologetically sourced from non-musical expressions of the real world, such as utterances, natural sounds, or, for that matter, unnatural sounds such as machines and street noise.

How Leviathan Fits

Bill’s essay “On Leviathan” is detailed, profound, and deserving of your attention. He outlines his aesthetic concerns and goals, backed by some thirty footnotes primarily referencing philosophers of aesthetics, including Plato, Kant, Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein, and Gadamer. As much as I would like to fully engage those issues, space limits our project to understanding how what the composer tells us about Leviathan qualifies it for Schaeffer’s tradition.

Bill’s port of departure is sound quality. “My starting point in many pieces is the feeling that justice has not been done to a sound, that the sound is begging for a setting.” Simultaneously, “Our sounds should be good enough that we can ignore them.” But “synthesized sounds are ugly; they lack life; they cause fatigue; they suggest nothing.” In contrast, real sounds have a richness that often contains subtlety beyond the technical capacity of a synthesis system to accurately recreate. To prove the point, Leviathan began with the mundane sound of a creaking ship’s mast from a basic sound effects collection. Eventually, thirteen “noises” were employed—including a dog, horse, train, pump, and a rooster—which specifically forms many of the extended timbres. By stretching and sequencing these non-musical sources, Bill extracted from the creaking ship auditory effects so unnerving that Chris once compared them to “a compound fracture grating on ice.” Bill’s treatment of humble, environmental sound sources in this piece expands a creaking ship to suggest an apparently nautical scene.

However, it would sell Leviathan way short to think it solely represents an ocean serpent. The inspiration is Melville’s story “White-Jacket,” which is about a punishing and uncertain life aboard a warship. (Moby Dick appeared some years later.) In Hobbes, the Leviathan was the powerful and possibly insurmountable centralized system of laws imposed by the sovereign. These several features combine to define the Leviathan of this music as far beyond a mere whale. The unsettling fear and isolation the piece suggests may be directed at any or all of a host of psychological stressors. Without the need to sample a breaking bone, a cramped and swaying galley, a circling serpent, an irate sovereign—or ultimately, specifics the composer did not anticipate at all—his method of integrating nominally mundane, disparate sounds towards an interpretable effect aligns precisely with the concrète aesthetic. Without ever replaying an ocean wave, Leviathan may stimulate the expansive grandeur of a sea journey or the amorphous fear of drowning—whether amidst actual waves or oppressive economic or political systems.

Under the musique concrète aesthetic, transparency increases within the context of reduced listening. Without orchestral cliches, listeners are left to experience Leviathan through the impacts of transient textures, freely crafted dynamics, non-obvious tonalites, and indeterminate emotions. This is not background music for enjoyment: it demands mental engagement. So, it must be devoid of cheap sentimentality and distractions. For example, moving players bother Bill: “Why can’t they just sit still?” He further asks if performers are even needed, complaining that their muscle memory inclines them to repetitive cliches:“You play what falls under your fingers.” Well-tempered training also makes live microtonality a practical impossibility. Further, Bill also rejects stereo sound movement as so many “gimmicks.” So, while other CCRMA composers were writing for quadraphonics, Bill anachronistically wrote Leviathan to be monaural.

Ultimately, Leviathan’s aesthetic discipline testifies to the adaptability of Schaeffer’s original techniques, for “Were it not for the sheer tedium of making the 15,220 splices required in the final version, there would have been no compelling reason to use a computer.” Simultaneously, computing accelerated the generation of useful accidents, such that “Every day I found myself confronted with entirely unexpected, beautiful sounds.” Despite this significant advantage in reduced turn-around time, “Leviathan barely scratched the surface of these sounds.”

Listening

Besides being the conduit and witness for the transfer of wave sequencing from Bill to DSD, this brings us to my final reason for insisting that Leviathan is the source of wave sequencing. To the extent one is familiar with Wavestation programming, and one respects its tradition with appropriately reduced listening, it is impossible to attend to Leviathan without recognizing anticipations of the Wavestation’s unique sounds and textures. The only adjustment needed is to allow for the differences between a compiled, non-real-time score in Pla from the 80s, and the real-time abilities of dedicated hardware in 1990 and now. The contexts remain alike in their reliance on the model of tape manipulation. Obversely, assuming that you prefer to not code 15,000 splices programmatically, and particularly with expanded user memory Wave Sequencing 2.0 perhaps offers one the penultimate package for contemporary musique concrète.

Musicologists beyond my training can debate whether Leviathan violates concrète guidelines through any of the tonalities that it does express—remembering that none of them are synthesized; they all are essentially extracted from noise. The question of how strictly one must obey Schaeffer fills shelving with studied opinion. To judge for yourself how much Leviathan aligns with the concrète aesthetic, the listener may wish to compare some of its precursors listed in the Discography.

You may have wondered about the intellectual property status of wave sequencing, who owns it, and whether you can copy it. The answer provides supplementary, legal proof of wave sequencing’s connection to music concrète. Precisely because of the lengthy history of the magnetic tape model “prior art,” and the public release of Leviathan itself, wave sequencing is not patentable in a form that we would recognize. So, it is not a technique that Stanford could license as it did FM or Sondius® physical models. This business reality likely contributed to Bill’s innovation falling through the cracks of corporate acknowledgment.

Good Accidents

My purpose here has been twofold. First, obviously, to ascribe wave sequencing credit where it is rightly deserved. Secondly, to make a point about the “drunkard’s walk” that may stimulate paradigmatic development in general. I’ve seen product plans penciled on napkins or taking up entire whiteboards with feature vs. price x-y graphs. Yet, I’ve seen little correlation between a company’s ability to plan products systematically and its market success. For example, it took two decades after John discovered FM, and at least three prior FM keyboards before the DX-7 successfully coincided with artistic desire for its ”technical” sound in 1983. I’ll never forget an Intel VP confessing to me that despite all their expertise, the world wide web caught them completely by surprise when in 1993 the Mosaic browser appeared.

In contrast, Dave required no focus groups before designing the Prophet-5—the idea of his Model 700 Programmer writ large polyphonically appeared obvious to him to act upon before anyone else. Thus, I do suggest that in the long run, tightly arranged, interlocking PERT team bubbles probably cannot compete with talent-rich paths that are intuitive, serendipitous, accidental, unexpected, improbable, and even circuitous. ”World historical moments” don’t invent something non-trivial that individuals fail to. Thomas Kuhn gave us the criterion by which to recognize what counts: not incremental changes at a corporate pace that accommodate inertial systems, but paradigm shifts from radical minds that overturn those systems. The case in hand proves this. No one planned that Sequential’s sending me to CCRMA in 1987 so that I could spend a few hours with Bill would seed the Wavestation. Likewise, no one could have predicted that a 1989 CCRMA lecture by Diana Deutsch about perceived pitch bias would motivate me to begin Seer Systems with the idea of simply allowing listeners a MIDI player to adjust their preferred tonic key. By 1999, several of these ideas gleaned from a variety of CCRMA-related accidents grew into my comprehensive USPTO #5,886,274 System and Method for Generating, Distributing, Storing, and Performing Musical Work Files.

Postscript

Bill’s innumerable accomplishments at CCRMA over four decades speak for themselves. Intensely prolific, to avoid distractions and competition for computing cycles he regularly worked through the night and could be found at his terminal as the sun rose. Nevertheless, it may be useful to close by reflecting on the tension between general and dedicated systems in his corpus.

John used the AI Lab’s general-purpose PDP-6 to “stumble upon” FM in the mid-60s. The Sambox came online in 1977. Capable of multiple synthesis techniques, it required a powerful new compositional language to replace the more general, but less powerful programs CCRMA inherited. Bill provided this through Pla, which well-served CCRMA composers including himself for over a decade. Pla’s connection to the synthesizer was indirect as it ran under the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) on a PDP-10 system that in turn controlled the Sambox. So, it is fair to say that the system was a mix of general-purpose and specialized components. Its synergy successfully allowed one to fuse composition algorithms with computing tools to create customized synthetic musical constructions. He later rewrote Pla in MacLisp, gaining a generational leap in processing efficiency.

However, when I interviewed him in 1987 Bill was already expressing reservations about the direction of composition programs. In “On Leviathan” he firmly declared “There is no need for a special language such as Pla.” This seems to express an abiding suspicion that composing programs may violate pure concrète liberty. Keenly explaining the point of moving away from Pla, Bill stated, “The composer’s computing environment should make it possible to ask arbitrary questions.”

Though the name is today barely in popular circulation, it should be remembered that LISP was once regarded as the most promising AI language. The LISP Sambox retired in 1996 to be replaced by LISP workstations that begged for the new, general-purpose tools he had been contemplating. Bill crafted two new languages with real-time capabilities. No longer bound to one Sambox, SND and Common Lisp Music (CLM) enabled this evolution by supporting decentralized audio editing and research, algorithmic music and experimentation, and even MIDI.

Bill stopped composing “unintentionally” in 1991 and switched to the C language. Among other work, he undertook the rather massive and specialized project of building a Sambox emulator that could perform the back catalog of over a hundred historic works by over forty-five composers that the instrument under Pla had instantiated in the first place.

Bill has said that this period was for him a wonderful time to be alive. Having the privilege of briefly sharing some propitious CCRMA accidents with him, I can certainly agree. Bill has earned widespread admiration and gratitude for his music, pedagogy, and career-altering insights. He retired from CCRMA in 2012. Bill and Chris generously reviewed this paper. If I have used first names beyond convention, it is because I regard all these folk as friends.

References

David Abernethy   The Prophet from Silicon Valley A Morris Publishing, New Zealand, 2015.

Diana Deutsch  “The Tritone Paradox: An Influence of Language on Music Perception.” Musical Illusions and Phantom Words: How Music and Speech Unlock Mysteries of the Brain, Oxford University Press, 2019, pp. 71–81.

Thomas Hobbes Leviathan Edited by J.C.A. Gaskin, Oxford University Press, 2008.

Stanley Jungleib   “Stanford’s Computer Music Lab” Keyboard 1987 December, pp 58. At: https://www.jungleib.com/1987/12/01/ccrma-in-keyboard/

Wavestation Player’s Guide, Tokyo: KORG, 1990. At: https://www.jungleib.com/1990/01/01/wavestation-players-guide/

Wavestation Reference Guide, Tokyo: KORG, 1990. At: https://www.jungleib.com/1990/01/02/wavestation-reference-manual/

Music Possible: A Digital Analysis of Tonality, Los Altos, 1983. Amazon reprint.

Thomas Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 4^thed, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.

Herman Melville    White-Jacket. Good Press, 2020.

Bill Schottstaedt  “On Leviathan” Dept of Music Report STAN-M-44 (1988 MARCH). At: https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~aj/archives/docs/all/918 pp 39-44

Autumn Concert Notes 20111201. At: https://ccrma.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/user/ruviaro/2011-12-01_concert.pdf

Discography

Stanley Jungleib                   SAJ SUM MP19 1987: At:

Earth Sighs Music for the Inner Film (1992) At: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdfAIliTSMk

Qwire Live at Frost Amphitheater, 19940720 At: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PumhKoF3qMk&t=1548s

Qwire (Studio CD) 1995. With guest drummer Muruga Booker. At:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00rkGNLkTVI&list=PL_8KC0cehy7odCGHAXsorwburfMbbfnKz

Bill Schottstaedt                 Dinosaur Music (1984) Music with Computers Wergo 2016-50: At:

{This is mandatory listening.}

Water Music I (1985) Music with Computers Wergo WER2016-50, At: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyBtEAMLd3Y

Water Music II (1985) Music with Computers Wergo WER2016-50, At: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCVsT3y7KGo

Leviathan (1987) Computer Music Currents 3 Wergo WER2023-50. At: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UY5ZoDZi0Lk

Wait for Me! (1990) Perspectives of New Music PNM-28.

{Notable Musique Concrète }

Pierre Schaeffer                   Études de bruits (1948): At:

Pierre Schaeffer & Pierre Henry                      Symphonie pour un homme seul (1950): At:

John Cage                                Williams Mix (1952): At:

Pierre Henry                           Variations pour une porte et un soupir (1963) At:

François Bayle  L’Expérience acoustique II Le Langage des fleurs(1971) At:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixgm9xlWlt8