"Stria": Lines to Its Reconstruction

Author(s): John Chowning

Source: Computer Music Journal, Vol. 31, No. 3, The Reconstruction of "Stria" (Fall, 2007),
pp. 23-25
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40072591
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John Chowning
Center for Computer Research in Music and
Acoustics
Department of Music
Stanford University
Stanford, California 94305 USA
jc@ccrma.stanford.edu
There is a story that goes with the next four articles
about Stria and the forthcoming Computer Music
Journal DVD. It is not simply a set of articles and a
new recording with striking visualizations. It is a
story of four researchers and how they rehabilitated
a piece of music given a program with some missing
code and missing data, two different sound record-
ings, and my memory (aided by fading notes and
drawings) of what I had done more than 30 years
ago - then their carefully analyzing my not-very-
clean code written in an old language, linking the
code to my musical intentions, explaining the
music-theoretical underpinnings, tracking down
the versions and discrepancies, understanding how
it was assembled in the days of very limited disk
storage for sound files, confirming my intentions
through contemporaneous notes of long-forgotten
unpublished analyses, reconstructing the code for
the composition and synthesis in modern lan-
guages, preserving my original programming errors
that had an audible consequence, carefully analyz-
ing the existing recordings and inferring what I
must have done so they could faithfully recreate a
critical lost version of the program and its data -
and finally, creating Stria anew.
The four authors, Matteo Meneghini (a computer
scientist/musician), Laura Zattra (a musicologist/
philologist), Olivier Baudouin (a composer/re-
searcher), and Kevin Dahan (a composer/theorist),
all had independent interests and motivations. At
different times, each asked me for information
about Stria, which I provided as completely as I
could. They pushed hard, as the electronic mails,
documents, and finally sound files moved from
them to me and back. Excepting Laura and Matteo,
the four were unknown to one another.
Over the years, I had received a few inquiries re-
garding Stria - some casual and some specific.
Among the latter were those from Toby Mountain,
Computer Music Journal, 31:3, pp. 23-25, Fall 2007
2007 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Stria: Lines to Its
Reconstruction
Roberto Doati, and Giovanni De Poli, all of whose
early work enriched this current effort. Then, in De-
cember 2002, 1 received an electronic mail that re-
flected a wholly different level of interest. Matteo
Meneghini, then a graduate student in electronics
and computer science, asked detailed questions
about Stria and the program I had written to com-
pose it. At various times, I had provided copies of
the program when asked, and he had gotten hold of
one. His questions were pointed, about my use of
recursion and about the availability of the program's
input data and any other documentation that would
aid him in analyzing the program. His project was
being guided by Giovanni De Poli, professor of com-
puter science and director of Centro di Sonologia
Computazionale at the University of Padua, with
whom I had been at IRCAM at various times in
the past and who therefore knew of my work, as I
knew of his.
I sent Matteo all the information that I had, but
there were several important gaps that we did not
know about at the time. I had left the original, com-
plete set of documents, programs, and input/output
data files with the IRCAM library following the
first performance of Stria in 1977. They have since
been lost. Although finishing his PhD was his prior-
ity, Matteo found the time to examine with care the
program that I had written and to translate it into
comprehensible forms. It was an early publication
of his work (Meneghini 2003) that served as the in-
dispensable reference for the article about Stria in
the series Portraits Polychromes (Bossis 2005).
Some months later, I received an electronic mail
from Laura Zattra, a PhD musicologist also at the
University of Padua, who was by this time working
alongside Matteo. Laura wanted to know why the
Wergo recording of Stria (Chowning 1988) did not
correspond in length to the description presented in
Computer Music Synthesis, Composition, and Per-
formance (Dodge and Jerse 1985) and why the four-
channel tape I had given to the composer Roberto
Doati exhibited some differences, not only in con-
Chowning 23
tent, but also in length, from both the Dodge and
Jerse description and the available CD recording.
The process of examining the versions of Stria in-
volved her careful tracing of its history - including
my process of assembling the work from the seven
digital files just before its premiere, the post-
premiere revision, and the making of the Wergo CD
in a first-ever direct-to-digital series, produced by
Johannes Goebel - tracking down a click in one
recording but not the other, and finally, recording
my memory as it was gradually restored with the
material she accumulated and carefully organized.
It is this meticulous care that has allowed me to
provide the timing of fades and onsets of sections to
replicate the original assembling of the piece from
the several- to-one four-channel Ampex recorders.
Jean-Claude Risset forwarded a letter to me from
Olivier Baudouin, a doctoral candidate, in May
2006. Working on a paper about Stria and Ligeti's
Artikulation, he asked to see the program and any
other information, all of which I provided in addi-
tion to the four-channel version, now converted
from analog tape to digital files. I did not know pre-
cisely his intentions, but by mid July he had had a
newly coded working version of the program ren-
dered with a user-friendly interactive interface. Fol-
lowing some months of electronic mail exchanges
regarding the configuration of the synthesis engine,
with an interruption for doctoral exams, he sent me
in early December 2006 the first new sound files of
the first section of Stria and a week or so later a
beautifully rendered version with reverberation.
It was also Jean-Claude Risset who introduced me
to Kevin Dahan's work in 2000. Kevin's MA thesis
included an aural/spectrographic examination of
Stria that showed some of the relations of partials
to the Golden Ratio, and it drew an interesting par-
allel between my conception of the work and the
self-similar features of fractal geometry. I initiated
contact in September 2005 via electronic mail, not-
ing his insight regarding the fractal relationships in
Stria and that fractals were unknown to me in the
mid 1970s. Then, in November 2006, 1 received an
electronic mail expressing a renewed interest in the
piece. His center of interest at that moment was in
a meta-theory, and Stria was in the scope of his con-
siderations. At his request, I sent Kevin the material
24
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that I had sent to Olivier, and, much to my surprise,
by mid December he, too, had reconstructed the
program and sent me his first sound files.
Doug Keislar, editor of the Computer Music Jour-
nal, had proposed a year before that the two articles
by Matteo and Laura might be part of a publication
series, with a DVD including the four-channel ver-
sion of Stria that conformed to my original revision
from 1977 and made from the existing 30-year-old
sound material. The idea was to take advantage of
the DVD medium by including a unique real-time
visualization of Stria that Ge Wang, Ananya Misra,
and Perry Cook of the Princeton Sound Lab had first
constructed for me as part of a presentation in 2005.
But I began to believe that a completely new
recording was possible. The two reconstructions of
the original program in contemporary code were
progressing. All the details about the piece that
Matteo and Laura had already arduously uncovered
or recovered allowed the reconstruction effort to
move along quickly. Olivier and Kevin continued to
send me enticing, beautifully rendered sections of
Stria. But there were problems - missing pieces
having to do with the special reverberation I had
used and, especially, the missing code and data -
that I was not sure could ever be resolved.
Then, on 29 January 2007, when Kevin "broke the
code" of the missing data and code, I realized that a
complete reconstruction and realization of the work
was possible. I informed Doug, and he proposed that
we expand the project to include articles on its re-
construction with a new analysis, now that a score
was possible, as well as a new multichannel sound
realization accompanied by the Princeton team's vi-
sualization - in other words, not only an analysis
and history of Stria, but a complete artistic and
scholarly digital document.
The new recording is one that I had assumed to
be impossible to reconstruct. Yet here it is, multi-
channel, pristine, free of the artifacts and quantiza-
tion noise imposed by the analog tapes and 12-bit,
25.6-kHz converters of 30 years ago. It is the version
of Stria that I have always presented in four-channel
format at concerts, and the one I have always made
available to those who have asked. But this new
recording is of far better quality in other ways as
well. The vast improvements in signal processing
Computer Music Journal
have allowed corresponding improvements in the
somewhat complicated processing of the reverbera-
tion, which is intrinsic to the composition and its
special sound - its surface allure.
These projects began five years ago with no idea -
by me at least - of their ever reaching this state. It
happened almost by itself, because of strong indi-
vidual interests of gifted and dedicated people, cou-
pled with the ever-evolving, enabling technology. I
thank Doug and Computer Music Journal for open-
ing the door and then encouraging, indeed shepherd-
ing, the project; and I recognize Matteo, Laura,
Olivier, and Kevin for their imagination, analytical
skills, persistence, artistry, and collegiality, for fol-
lowing their own lines with their staggered begin-
nings, which finally interlocked toward an end that
no one of us foresaw - a bit like Stria, on its 30th
anniversary.
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References
Bossis, B. 2005. " Stria de John Chowning ou roxymoron
musical: du nombre d'or comme poetique." In P. A. Cas-
tanet et al., eds. John Chowning: Portraits polychromes.
Paris: INA/GRM and Michel de Maule, pp. 87-115.
Chowning, J. 1988. John Chowning: Turenas, Stria,
Phone, Sabelithe. Audio compact disc, with booklet
containing an interview recorded on 8 May 1987, tran-
scribed and edited by J. Goebel. Mainz: Schott/Wergo
Music Media, WER 2012-50.
Dodge, C, and T. A. Jerse. 1985. Computer Music: Syn-
thesis, Composition, and Performance. New York:
Schirmer.
Meneghini, M. 2003. "Stria by John Chowning: Analysis
of the Compositional Process." Paper presented at the
XIV Colloquium on Musical Informatics, Florence,
Italy, 8-10 May. (Available on-line at www.dei.unipd.it/
~menego/CIM2003_Meneghini.pdf . )
Chowning 25