Sound Experiments:
David Wessel and CNMAT explore the frontiers of music

With a computer and a touch pad not much bigger than a dinner plate, David Wessel creates a universe of sounds: a deluge of drumming that resembles sticks banging on an empty oil barrel; the sound of 100 flutes blowing simultaneously; a demented jazz band playing a cacophonous but arresting tune.

“I’m going to call up a program that does something quite, quite different,” Wessel says, pausing for a moment. “Here we go. I’m using a technology called granular synthesis. I’m taking little tiny fragments of sound like little grains and I’m overlapping the grains with themselves and creating a steady stream of sound.”

Wessel, far left, in performance

The eerie tones of a Japanese bell ringing over a rattling wind sound from the speakers in the performance space of Berkeley’s Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT).

CNMAT, which Wessel directs, specializes in developing new instrumentation for the use of musicians. That includes everything from writing software to help musicians better interact with computers to inventing brand new instruments.

In the 19th century, the invention of the piano enabled musicians such as Chopin to realize new artistic creations. Researchers at CNMAT hope to do the same thing for the musicians of the future.

“We think about the entire process,” Wessel says. “From gestural input via keyboard to more elaborate sensor systems like gloves, touch sensitive surfaces, and microscopic gyroscopes to control instruments. How do you map those gestures to underlying musical processes?”

Wessel and others at CNMAT believe that developing new ways of producing sound can further musical innovation. “We are not just about making a piece of electronic gear. We think a lot about artistic applications, about how technology can further artistic ideas,” says CNMAT Composer in Residence Edward Campion, like Wessel, a professor in the Music Department. The dedication to musical innovation can be seen in the frequent live performances at CNMAT. Wessel himself often performs, in improvisational duos with more traditional instruments such as the piano and violin. Technology, he explains, helps him push the boundaries of his music

CNMAT's 12-sided speaker

Wessel’s computer is rigged with microphones to take in and analyze what his collaborator is playing. Wessel uses this information to inform his own playing, much like a jazz player would, but with the help of advanced technology.

“I can know what pitches are being played and how they’re placed in time,” he says. “I have to decide how to take that material, internalize and use it as a point of departure for response. The computer is a listening assistant helping me collect material from the other performer so I can take it, transform it, and inject it back into the performance.”

The end result, Wessel hopes, is a performance that will be challenging and new to both the performers and the audience.

While CNMAT works to create new ways of producing music, Wessel says he is also contemplating the flood of music now available to the average consumer, and thinking about ways to use that barrage creatively.

“What do you make of the availability of music today off the Internet?” he asks. “There’s an enormous amount of material at our beck and call. With just the Apple iPod, there’s a few months of music in one tiny gadget. What’s it mean to have access to so much? How do you make sense of such a vast amount – millions of songs – how would forage in this and define things of interest to the culture you’re in?”

While DJs have remixed music in a basic way for years, Wessel says CNMAT is thinking about how to take the stream of music available today and allow people to manipulate it in wholly original ways. If this was possible, he says, it might redefine people’s relationship with music. “There’s a lot of passivity involved in listening to music. People just sit back and let it wash over them,” he says. “That’s only happened since early part of the last century. Before that, people really made music by touching things, playing things. Music was something people participated in.”

CNMAT is trying to redefine all aspects of how people experience sound and music. One of its latest projects has been to develop a 12-sided speaker. Wessel explains that the design is intended to produce truer sound than conventional speakers. The sound is OK, he says, but CNMAT researchers have already taken what they learned from that project and begun work on a 20-sided speaker.

CNMAT

“We’re really trying to find out exactly what you need to get that shimmering quality of sound you hear during a live performance.”

The mix of projects at CNMAT has drawn a combination of students, including undergraduates for performance courses and about fifteen graduate students from fields of study as diverse as music, psychology, computer science and electrical engineering. CNMAT is also involved in Berkley’s New Media Initiative, which involves departments such as Film Studies, Art Practice, Architecture, Journalism, Computer Science and Music, and aims to integrate new technologies into instruction at Berkeley.

CNMAT is already far down that path. A poster of revolutionary saxophonist John Coltrane sits above the center’s main stairwell, and Wessel says he wants to keep emulating his musical hero, who pushed boundaries his whole career.

“It’s quite possible to be fresh and new and at the same time be able to speak to people,” he says. “I like music that has a certain level of complexity associated with it. If it’s a little bit mysterious and I don’t quite know what’s going on, I’m delighted.”

-- Doug Merlino