Where: Bell Labs
Nokia’s Bell Labs is a research institute dedicated to using “telecommunications and information technology” to help “people connect, collaborate, compute, and communicate.” Founded by Alexander Graham Bell in 1925 using the money he obtained the French government through the Volta Prize, Bell Labs has numerous revolutionary products come out of its lab:
- In the early 1930s, Jansky accidentally discovered radio wave sources from the Milky Way at Bell Laboratories while investigating the interference of transatlantic voice transmissions.
- In 1947, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain discovered Transistors when observing that the output power exceeded the input power when gold points were applied to germanium.
- In 1957, Charles Townes and Arthur Schawlow built upon Joseph Weber’s microwave amplifier to produce the first visible light laser. Townes and Schawlow would file a patent that was disputed by Columbia University for 28 years, after which Columbia was given the patent lawsuit victory. However, the invention of lasers is still widely credited to Bell Labs.
- In that same year, Max Mathews wrote MUSIC-N, the first widely used program for sounds generation. MUSIC involved a graphic interface, upon which users could draw using a light pen to create sounds to be used in computer music
- In 1975, Bell Labs sold its first source license for Unix to Donald Gillies, and professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s computer science department.
With the COVID-19 pandemic keeping the world alert for future pandemics as well, one of Bell Labs’ current projects is to use lasers to detect changes in a human’s biophysical condition before traditional symptoms begin showing.
Who: Miller Puckette
Miller Puckette is a professor of music known for his creation of the programming language Max, which aimed to help provide a more user-friendly environment for artists to produce electronic music. After graduating from MIT in 1980 and earning a PhD in mathematics from Harvard in 1986, Puckette relocated to
the Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music (IRCAM) in France, where he created Max. Max was the first real-time audio processing programming environment and designed for the Macintosh, though it did initially have to rely on external hardware when Puckette first created it. It wasn’t until four years later, in 1989 that Puckette developed Max/FTS (Faster than Sound), which finally allowed for real-time audio processing. With lRCAM licensing this updated software to Opcode Systems shortly after, Puckette moved on to create another digital synthesis program called Pure Data by 1996: a program that still works with modern day operating systems including Linux, Mac OS X, Android, and Windows.
Puckette then moved on to be a part of the Global Visual Music project, sponsored by Intel, to continue developing Pure Data into a more friendly real time audio software by using graphics. Yet due to the computational limits of the time, the goal of rendering three dimensional graphics in real time was considered nearly impossible. Since 1994, Puckette has been a professor of music at UCSD.
What: Illiac Suite for String Quartet by Lejaren Hiller
Commonly regarded as the first piece of electronic music, Hiller’s Iliac Suite for String Quartet was the result of an experiment done with Leonard Isaacson. Originally a chemist who frequented with computers for his work, Hiller noticed through his analyses of music that there exists “laws of organization” that seemed to govern music such as chord progressions, scales, and triads, and that the “organizational choices” that composers made could be done by a computer as well.
The creation of the Iliac Suite involved three steps: initialization, generation, and verification. During initialization, Hiller defined the conditions under which the computer had creative freedom to create its own music, such as the “prohibition of consecutive fifth and octave parallels.” During the second step called generation, the computer was given freedom over a number of musical parameters such as dynamics (crescendo and decrescendo, arco and pizzicato) and rhythm, with 1000 notes generated per second. The notes were generated according to the Monte Carlo method algorithm. In the verification step, each generated note was compared once again with the set of rules, after which the next note would be verified. Invalid notes which broke the guidelines set would be generated once again. It should be noted here that the first two steps proceeded mathematically, in which the rules of composition refers to certain numerical patterns and the generation of notes actually refers to the generation of random numbers in accordance with the Monte Carlo method. Each verified note is stored in memory. At the end, all notes are then translated into musical notation in order to be performed by real-life instruments.
Sources:
Di Nunzio, Alex. “Illiac Suite.” Musica Informatica, 2011, www.musicainformatica.org/topics/illiac-suite.php.
H. Viswanathan and P. E. Mogensen, “Communications in the 6G Era,” in IEEE Access, vol. 8, pp. 57063-57074, 2020, doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2020.2981745.
Hiller, Lejaren. “Experimental Music; Composition with an Electronic Computer : Hiller, Lejaren, 1924-1994 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming.” Internet Archive, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1 Jan. 1970, archive.org/details/experimentalmusi00hill.
Ionescu, Maria. “Nokia Bell Labs: AI Is Being Fitted for a Diving Suit: How Reinforcement Learning Will Power the Transoceanic Cables of the Future.” Bell Labs, 15 May 2020, www.bell-labs.com/var/articles/ai-being-fitted-diving-suit-how-reinforcement-learning-will-power-transoceanic-cables-future/.
Mandelbaum, Ryan. “Miller Puckette: The Man Behind the Max and Pd Languages (and a Lot of Crazy Music).” IEEE Spectrum: Technology, Engineering, and Science News, 21 Feb. 2017, 20:00, spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/profiles/miller-puckette-the-man-behind-the-max-and-pd-languages-and-a-lot-of-crazy-music.
Puckette, Miller. Miller Puckette, msp.ucsd.edu/.