Sep 23 2005, the artificial schism of "science" and "the arts"

I have meant to comment before now on the death last month of Bob Moog. For those of you who know me well, the fact I want to comment on the death of someone known better for music-related activities than IT will be no surprise. Moog was of course one of the great innovators in musical synthesis: even if you're not aware of it, the famous Minimoog sound is one you would recognise instantly. (If you want to hear samples from the current version, then visit here).

I have never believed in the relatively modern conceit that "the arts" and "science" are somehow separate fiefdoms with nothing in common. When I was pursuing my MPhil into the applications of artificial intelligence (AI) to music composition, it was astonishing the degree to which the computer scientists were wonderfully ignorant of anything happening outside their immediate sphere of interest. And likewise for the music software developers who seemed completely unaware of some of the computing tools that would have made their task - and that of the users of their software - greatly simplified, if only the two disciplines had been able to find some common forum and vocabulary to communicate with each other. These divides between disciplines are enormously unproductive and we should be working to find ways of bridging them. It seems to me that true breakthroughs and innovations often only occur when we manage to bring together such differing viewpoints and specialisms and hence spark new ways of looking at the world.

At its best, music represents to me one of the best fusions of science, technology and arts that it is currently possible to find. Modern music-making is a compelling combination of science, technology and creative arts. Modern desktop composition systems comprise complex software that involves detailed mathematical and physical modelling of the building blocks of musical synthesis, the manipulation of software tools (such as sampled instruments, sampled voices and even sampled acoustics taken from major concert halls of the world) and the art of mastering these in the creation of new musical compositions. Of course, my old alma mater, City University, was one of the first universities to understand these issues - offering a BSc in Music: what better indication can there be of how science and the arts can be brought together?

When I was observing and researching composers' behaviour to see where AI techniques might be usefully applied to assist in the process, one of the most interesting aspects was the way the best musicians moved between complex manipulation of physical waveforms, mastery of software and the actual composition process itself. In fact, in many ways the composition process was as much about control of the underlying physical and acoustical principles of sound and software programs as it was about the more traditional concept of putting notes on a piece of paper. If science is about applying consistent principles and processes in pursuit of knowledge - and the recognition and formulation of a problem - then modern music composition is often a demonstrative application of scientific principles.

It was innovators such as Moog who first saw the opportunities to apply the physical, acoustical foundations of music to the commercial production of musical tools to assist composers and performers. His death provides a chance to reflect on how the lessons from the world of music might be applied elsewhere to similar dramatic effect. I never cease to be astonished at the type of control and synthesis that the PC has made possible on my desktop: it is now possible to compose music on a home computer that would once have required a full orchestra and a concert hall - and a lot of financial backing. Or a specialist computer costing hundreds of thousands of pounds (I recall, not without some nostalgia, using the early Fairlight CMI systems for example). But more than that, it is now possible to conceive music that would not have been previously possible to produce. I mean by this the production of unique sounds that go beyond the physical boundaries of what was possible with previous generation instruments or human performers. These new soundscapes are equivalent to suddenly discovering a whole new range of colours never previously imagined or seen before.

Indeed, as grid and high performance computing moves from the research world into the mainstream, I have little doubt that modern composers and the music industry will be amongst the first to take real advantage. If current single-processor, single-system desktop composition takes my breath away - what on earth will the upcoming generation of 64-bit, multi-core, grid computing developments do? How far will the acoustical and physical modelling that these systems will make capable take us in the discovery and invention of entirely new sound canvases? In the past, these advanced tools were once limited to specialist research establishments such as IRCAM. Now, they will be on our desktop PCs.