Guitar Dreams

Several minutes after 8, the lights dim and the concert begins. The musicians – CNMAT grad student Roberto Morales Manzanares and the director of Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, Chris Chafe – are surrounded by three instruments each, ranging from harps to pianos, Mexican flutes to violas. On a small table next to each performer is a laptop.

In the first piece, Chafe plays the "Stegosaurus," an instrument he made out of a length of wood and protruding metal plates, which gives it a dinosaurlike appearance. He plays it by running a viola bow over the plates, wrenching out low but sharp metallic squawks that are simultaneously manipulated using a computer program. Morales Manzanares, meanwhile, blows viciously into a flute; because he has programmed the laptop to feed the sound from his microphone into speakers around the room in a rotating fashion, the audience hears a fluttering drone similar to that from a dragonfly's wings.

Except for the programming, all the music is improvised.

For about an hour, Morales Manzanares and Chafe serenade the audience with pieces that include quiet buzzing, plucking and scratching, and sounds that sometimes erupt into whirlwinds of thickly layered chords and arpeggios. Some of it is spacey and minimalist; some recalls haunting, long-lost folk melodies. All of it is cinematic.

In this space a week before, a twenty- and thirtysomething crowd had come to a similar "sound-making session" that featured wine and cheese in addition to bizarre and fantastic electronic music. The compositions on that evening felt more urban than those played tonight, but all the music produced at CNMAT has a common element: It's not easily accessible to the Top 40 radio listener. Computer music is more about mood, colors, and images than catchy choruses and danceable rhythms. Even the artists who inhabit this world sometimes have a hard time classifying it: They call it "art music," "avant-garde music," "sound art," and "un-pop."

Technology is the reason these composers and artists are able to realize the strange, complicated, and beautiful things they hear in their heads. "All the aspects of music – rhythm, harmony, pitch – all these things get totally expanded when you work in the area of technology," says CNMAT composer-in-residence Campion, who has written a piece that will be performed by the Berkeley Symphony in June. "The reason I'm interested in technology is certainly not tech for tech's sake. I engage in new technologies in order to question how they can inform and expand the kind of music that is possible to make."

He says the new digital guitar is one piece in the ever-growing tech-music puzzle. "With this guitar, you have possibilities of expanding the sensitivity of certain effects," continues Campion, who dislikes the term "computer music." "The guitar is just one example of an expanded instrument."

As much as he believes in the marriage of technology and music, and as much as he sees the digital guitar as the public's candy-flavored introduction to this idea, Campion knows that not everyone is ready for this future.

"I do encounter – and maybe rightly so – people writing for symphonies or chamber music in a more traditional vein who don't see any need for [this type of music]," Campion says. "What they think is, 'Well, the music that you're doing with technology is not as good as the music I'm writing, or that I love, because there's not as much structure.' I think in a lot of ways, they miss the point."

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Evening has arrived at CNMAT, and everyone but Adrian Freed has left the building. Though his wife calls him to tell him that dinner is on the table, Freed continues to putter around the rear basement studio at CNMAT, eager to show off one of the prized digital guitar effects he has created.

CNMAT doesn't have a final version of the MaGIC, so Freed plugs a regular Les Paul into a "Rimus box" (named after the pistachio-munching tech genius who built the thing single-handedly), which is an external version of the chips inside the MaGIC that convert analog signals to digital. (The Rimus box, which CNMAT hopes will someday become its own consumer product, also allows harpists, violinists, and other acoustic musicians to plug more directly and easily into computers than they now can.)

Freed calls up a program on a nearby computer and searches for a patch he has written called the "yeah yeah pedal."

"This is one of my dreams from way back when," he explains, taking the guitar under his arm. "So, you know the wah-wah effect? It's the 'ooh' sound and the 'aah' sound. The question I asked myself was, 'Why only wah-wah?'"

On the computer are two pull-down tabs, each with a list of all five vowels. He selects the letter "A" in one tab and "I" in the other. Freed runs his fingers over the strings, and they ring vibrantly. He steps on a pedal connected to his computer to activate the effect, and suddenly, the distorted chord sounds like the guitar is singing "aaay-aye."