Transcriber: Andrea Mussap Reviewer: Maricene Crus
All right, thank you.
I'm Erich Barganier and I'm a composer and musician.
But, what does that mean? Why is that important?
Well, one thing that we do as musicians
is that we have a big focus on electronic music right now.
And you may have noticed over the past few years,
this is becoming more and more present within our society,
whether it's on the radio, maybe it's in film,
maybe it's in a commercial.
You probably hear it when you go to the mall.
You can't really escape electronic music at this point.
But, why is that?
Well, over the past few years, why all of a sudden
have we started to focus on a technology that's been here for over 50?
And the easy answer for this is the developments of technology.
So, one of the things we've been focusing on lately is, how do we build sound?
You see, behind me are three sound waves layered over each other,
and these, along with a few other forms,
make up all the sounds we have in the world.
It's my voice, it's your voice, it's a car horn, violin;
anything you can imagine is a combination of these sounds.
One of the things we've been doing for years and years and years
is we've been synthesizing these.
We've been adding waves, detracting waves,
creating whole new sounds we never heard before.
But you know what? You heard this before.
We've had this since prog rock, this is nothing new.
So, why all of a sudden is it becoming
more and more present within our regular day?
And that is because we've had technological developments
in our instruments.
(Electronic music)
This is Vocaloid by Yamaha, and this is one of the next ways
that we're going about using electronic music in a commercial focus.
Now, just listen to this for a minute, and just think about it.
(Electronic music - robot singing)
[There is something in this world]
[that everybody's searching for...]
[Have you seen the signs that are sent by the universe?]
[Sometimes they are hidden and hard to find...]
Erich Barganier: You got the point.
But, you might be saying to yourself,
"Well, that's really boring, Erich, why would you show us this?"
Well, the easy answer is: none of that was organic.
That was not a human singing; that was a computer program.
They took samples from individuals:
it's Japanese language and English language.
They used phonetics and built the whole new system
that can synthetically create a realistic singing voice.
What you just heard, none of that was real.
There's no person, except one person at the control mixing board.
That's the future where we're going right now,
and it's going to be leading us who knows where?
And you may also be having an episode while you watching this thing behind me,
wondering, "What's this? Why did you choose this?"
Well, the next thing is: when you think about a performer who makes music,
you might think to yourself, "Well, Yo-Yo Ma, he's great,
he can do all the stylistic elements.
How can you replace Yo-Yo Ma?"
But what if you had a computer that could play even more than Yo-Yo Ma?
If you have a really fast piece,
a really complicated piece, three things are going to happen:
one, you're either going to need to have a really good performer to play it,
two, you're going to break your instrument,
or three, you’re going to fail, just bluntly speaking.
But a computer cannot fail because it's a machine,
that is very very precise.
So, one of the really cool things that's going on in composition right now
is algorithmic music.
And that's where this comes in.
It's a Fibonacci series, and it's a fractal.
And for anyone who doesn't know, fractals are images, sounds,
representations that are viewable on all levels of magnification.
So, this is something new that we've developed within math music
that we haven't had before until certain point.
So, you have new capabilities rising out
of what a computer can do that a human cannot.
But then you might say to yourself,
"So, what Erich? I don't care if a robot can sing to me in a nice accent,
or if this can be turned into music.
I don't even know what this is."
Well, what if I told you that,
maybe, a computer could go and make a guitar solo.
You might say, "That's crazy!"
But, it's not.
Something that people have been saying for a long time
is that a performer is really important because they can produce,
they can be spontaneous.
You can have spontaneous improvisation,
jazz, rock music, even modern composition.
It's all possible.
This comes into the play of what's generative music
and non-generative music.
Non-generative, that's most of the music we know:
it's Mozart, it's Beethoven,
it's where the composer has mapped out all the different elements
and the performer has to play them as such.
So, Western art music.
But then you have generative music,
and that's when you get the jazz and all that.
And, you might say to yourself,
"How on earth can a computer actually do that?
They can't do that, you're lying to me, Erich."
No, I guarantee you I'm not.
So, how do we do this?
And that is through randomness.
So, within the same algorithms that we have a Fibonacci sequence in,
you can program randomness to go and spontaneously
and create something out of nothing.
You can have generative music of any kind,
generative jazz, generative rock, generative classical music,
and, that being said, you might also be asking yourself,
"What does that sound like?
That probably sounds really bad, you let a computer do that?"
And I give you Emily Howell.
(Music)
This is a computer program that was developed
at the University of California, and it is 100% inorganic.
The professors that developed this,
they input code into the software itself
and from there, they can persuade or dissuade the program
from learning certain styles, you could say.
So, the composers that are working with this right now,
you can tell they've been working with classical music.
I think it's obvious.
So, you have a whole new generation of people
that are going to be composing for classical music with this.
But then you might say,
"That's boring, why would I do that?"
Well, that brings us into the idea of what's the future?
We have these applications,
we started using them for art music,
but how wide spread can you really go with art music?
Well, the future in my interpretation of this is pop music,
that's the next step to go commercial.
But, what would that sound like?
Instead of describing this to you and going on and on about what I think,
I'd like to go and demonstrate it for you instead.
So, I wrote a piece today, not today, a few days ago,
and...
it is what I believe the future pop music is.
It was done on a program called SuperCollider.
It's all code based and it's all generative.
I'm going to guide the computer while it plays in certain rhythms,
but it's going to create the notes and the harmonies itself.
So, I have no control over this; it's all the computer programming.
So, the future may or may not sound like this.
(Electronic music)
(Applause)
Thank you.
(Applause)
So, I'm Erich Barganier.
Thanks for listening to the future of what music may or may not be.
Thank you.
(Applause)