Paul Lansky was born in New York City on June 18th, 1944. He is an American composer of electronic and computer music, who was active in composition from about 1965 to the present day; yes he is still alive (McCarthy 1). He is a former student of the serialist composer George Perle, and also of the serialist composer Milton Babbitt. Early on, Lansky was clearly a serialist composer as well, advocating Perle’s technique of twelve tone tonality. Twelve tone tonality is a way to combine serial techniques with pitch centered harmony (McCarthy 1).
Lansky graduated from Queens College in New York in 1965 and played French horn with the Dorian Wind Quintet for 2 years. His first compositions date from around this period. They were entirely acoustic (McCarthy 1). Lansky furthered his education by getting a PhD from Princeton, where he has taught, until very recently, since (McCarthy 1). While at Princeton, he began to experiment with tape music. Interestingly enough, Lansky saw tape and computer music as a natural way to extend traditional serialism and chromaticism. His first piece, mild und leise, for electronic tape, is based off of Perle’s twelve tone tonality and the chromaticism of Wagner (McCarthy 1).
Since 1979, he has written exclusively for computer synthesized tape, sometimes in combination with traditional acoustic instruments. Lansky’s music has even influenced one of my favorite alternative rock groups, Radiohead. Chords from mild und leise is sampled and looped on their album, Kid A (McCarthy 1).
Lansky describes his own music in this way: “I’ve done a lot of pieces by creating complicated textures or scenarios which allow the listener to use an active imagination while listening- a piece on tape or compact disc has to perplex the listener; it has to have something about it that’s puzzling and not completely straightforward” (Chadabe 133). We’ll talk about this more later.
Lansky’s compositions in the early 1980s include Six Fantasies on a Poem by Thomas Campion (1979), and As It Grew Dark (1983), both of which use computer-generated sounds, and As If (1982), for computer-generated sounds and string trio (Chadabe 133).
However, Lansky’s big break came in 1984 with Idle Chatter (Chadabe 133).
More on Lansky’s philosophies and techniques: Lansky originally expected to be caught up in the search for new sounds, or timbralism; however, instead, he became much more interested in human sounds and the noise of the world around him, exploring the possibilities of the natural and human world since the 1970s (Cope 156). Most of Lansky’s compositions focus on real world sounds, not new timbres created by machines or computer processes, such as cars passing at night creating Doppler shifts, the sounds of a shopping mall during a pre-Christmastime rush, wind in the garden, and groups of people talking and moving about (Chadabe 134). Even Lansky’s synthesizer music and the plugs that he created for his synthesizers are based on pure human sound. Lansky let speech become the activator for rhythmic and speech templates, with the sounds being reproduced by synthesizers (Chadabe 329). Lansky states, “the best time I had [with a synthesizer] was when I set it up as an installation to improvise with its own output, so it became a kind of automaton- it would go on for five or ten minutes and then quiet down and someone would go in and clap or shout and it would go again…” (Chadabe 329).
Lansky also states that his preferences lean towards using processes that allow sounds to retain some of their more recognizable characteristics while embedding them in a musical context. There are techniques which many composers use to alter sounds beyond recognition, but Lansky tends to shy away from those techniques (Cope 158).
It is that musical context specifically that makes Lansky’s sounds music concrete. Electronic music constructed from nonelectronic sounds is called music concrete. Included in the concrete sound category are all sounds both musical and unmusical that come from a vibrating medium. The source may be singing or speaking, or any object or substance that vibrates or can be caused to vibrate in a suitable frequency range. The natural sounds are collected by means of microphones and then modified electronically or by tape manipulations. Early pioneers of this genre were Karlheinz Stockhause, Edgar Varese, and Iannis Xenakis, among others (Dallin 250).
Idle Chatter, being electroacoustical music, has no physical score (Beck 1). Lansky created this music using an early generation computer, the idea being that there is not going to be a traditional performance of the piece, according to Western classical music concert halls. Therefore it was very important to Lansky to build as much engagement as possible into the listening experience. Since there is only one recording, every single performance will be exactly the same (Cope 156). To remedy this, the work Lansky does involves a certain level of complexity that will, as mentioned earlier, hopefully baffle audiences upon first hearing. There are often many things going on and it’s frequently not clear what it is that you should let your ears follow. You have to make a conscious decision about how to listen and what to listen to (Cope 156). Lansky also thought it was crucial that the listener listen to the piece several times; this is essential for this work (Cope 156).
Lansky’s intention was also to make the listener into a performer, much in the same way that Cage intended for listeners to play an active role in his music, instead of being idle or passive bystanders (Cope 156). Lansky, also like Cage, wanted to eliminate compositional bias in his pieces; not in an aleatoric sense, but rather in a computational sense. Lansky decided that he wanted the software he uses to tell him as little as possible about how the music should go, and at the time, the only way to do this was to write his own software. He says his software deliberately has little intelligence and using it means investing more of his own intelligence into the music in the process (Cope 157).
However, Lansky tends to think of his musical approach as the inverse process as Cage’s. While Cage wants us to hear all sounds as music, Lansky wants to explicate the implicit music in so-called unmusical sounds where Lansky thinks music means something much traditional than Cage does, i.e., the melodies of informal speech, or the rhythm of traffic patterns and so on (Chadabe 134).
Lansky describes Idle Chatter thusly: “the surface of the piece is relatively simple but it’s a backdrop to a much more complicated texture. People would talk to me about the piece and nobody would say the same thing. It was as if I were providing them with an environment in which they could let their ears dance, where there was no particular thing they should be listening to at any point” (Chadabe 134).
Lansky wrote Idle Chatter using a process known as LPC, or linear predictive coding (or synthesis), which owes its existence to the analog vocoder. The analog vocoder is a device that was developed to analyze the characteristics of speech with the possibilities of subsequently reversing the process to create an artificial talker. Composers use it as a processing and re-synthesizing tool for a much broader spectrum of sound material, leading to techniques such as cross-synthesis, where the characteristics of one sound source can be superimposed on another. The development of LPC based derivatives was pioneered by James Moorer at Stanford University in the 1970s and was soon explored by Paul Lansky at Princeton (Manning 437).
LPC starts with the assumption that a speech signal is produced by a buzzer at the end of a tube with occasional added hissing and popping sounds called sibilant (articulated consonants caused by the tongue directing a stream of air towards the sharp edge of the teeth) and plosive (a consonant produced by the stopping or all airflow to the vocal tract by blocking the vocal tract by the tongue, lips, or vocal folds) sounds. This combination produces voiced sounds. Although this initially sounds like a crude model, in actuality it is not too far off from the reality of speech production. The glottis, or space between the vocal folds, produces the buzz, which is characterized by its intensity (loudness) and frequency (pitch). The vocal tract (the throat and mouth) forms the tube, which is characterized by its resonances, which give rise to something called formants (peaks in the sound envelope of an instrument or voice), or enhanced frequency bands in the sound produced. Hisses and pops are generated by the action of the tongue, lips and throats during sibilants and plosives (Wikipedia 1).
LPC works by analyzing the formants, removing their effects from the voiced sound or speech signal, and estimating the intensity and frequency of the remaining buzz. This process of removing the formants is called inverse filtering and the remaining signal after the subtraction of the filtered modeled signal is called the residue (Wikipedia 1). The numbers which describe the intensity and frequency of the buzz, the formants, and the residue signal are recorded and can be stored or transmitted to other devices for analysis. LPC synthesizes speech signals by the reverse process; use the buzz parameters and the residue to create a source signal, then use the formants to create a filter representing the tube, and run the source signal through the filter, resulting in speech (Wikipedia 1). Because speech signals vary over time, this process is done on small chunks of the speech signal, which are called frames; generally 30-50 frames per second give intelligible speech with good compression. If you’ve ever used the popular toy, the Speak and Spell, this was a 10th order LPC vocoder (Wikipedia 1).
Lansky uses LPC to manipulate the voice recording of his wife, Hannah McKay, so that the frequency is modulated to a stable harmony, based on the pitch of “F.” He sustains this F for a long period of time, and eventually joins it by a D and a B-flat, making the harmony a simple B-flat major triad in 2nd inversion. This supposedly makes Idle Chatter Lansky’s first tonal piece. Lansky originally was going to base the piece off of that 12 tone tonality, but realized, mid-conception, that the B-flat major triad was all the piece needed, and decided not to push through chromaticism and serialism. In this aspect, the piece is extremely akin to the works of minimalist composers, using repetitive pulses and static harmonies that develop gradually over time- recall John Adams’ Short Ride in a Fast Machine-“ a lack of melody for several dozen measures, and a slow embroiling stubborn harmony that very rarely changes, all over the steady, unchanging pulse of the woodblock.
Lansky’s piece can be divided into two sections, an A section, and a B section. The entire A section presents a foreground layer, the steady babble of incoherent syllables, which is joined about a minute in by a background layer, a more melodic and considerably longer chorus of higher pitched vocals. The B section is a bit more complex, containing more recognizable tones that highlight certain phrases in the foreground of the babble, while the background chatter remains consistent throughout the entire piece (Ranta 1).
Lansky’s music can also be described as trompe l’oreille, or “trick of the ear music.” Trompe l’oeil, or “trick of the eye” art, traces back to visual art, extending all the way back to the Renaissance, when artists played with perspective, proportions, shading etc. to literally trick the eye. Lansky does this as well, but with sound. While we know that Lansky’s sounds are real, we know that his space isn’t. Everything about it lacks ‘virtual reality.’ His pieces are not in a 3D environment. Surround sound assumes our ears are at the focal point of its virtual reality, it places us (literally) in a passive armchair listening position. However, Lansky’s music lacks fixed spatial boundaries- and by implication a fixed flow of time- from the absent dimension. Here, the removal of real acoustic space and its replacement with something that doesn’t make sense in real terms that both spaces us out and lures us in (Emmerson 221). This is from an article by Katherine Norman, author of “Stepping outside for a moment: narrative space in 2 works for sound alone.” This excerpt is describing the first movement of Things she carried for electric guitar and female voice, among other sounds- but it can be applied to Idle Chatter as well.
One final note, on the computer used to create Idle Chatter– information was inputted using punchcards, and the IBM 3081 mainframe filled an entire room. As a result, the construction of complex pitch relationships became less important to Lansky than learning how to write computer programs to achieve the results he desired, contributing to the minimalist effects we discussed earlier (Ranta 1). Form follows function.
Works Cited
Beck, Stephen David. Personal interview. 17 Sept. 2014.
Chadabe, Joel. Electric Sound: The Past and Promise of Electronic Music. Ed. Charlyce Jones Owens. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 1997.
Cope, David. New Directions in Music. Prospect Heights: Waveland Press, Inc., 2001.
Dallin, Leon. Techniques of Twentieth Century Composition: A Guide to the Materials of Modern Music. Ed. Frederick W. Westphal. Dubuque: WM. C. Brown Company Publishers, 1974.
Emmerson, Simon, ed. Music, Electronic Media and Culture. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000.
Linear Predictive Coding. Mar. 2010. Wikipedia. 23 Sept. 2014 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_predictive_coding>.
Manning, Peter. Electronic and Computer Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
McCarthy, David. “Paul Lansky.” Princeton University. Date unknown. 23 Sept. 2014 <http://paul.mycpanel.princeton.edu/bio.html>.
Ranta, Alan. “Idle Chatter About Paul Lansky.” PopMatters. 6 June 2011. 23 Sept. 2014 http://www.popmatters.com/column/141865-idle-chatter-about- paul- lanskys-notjustmoreidlechatter/>.
Other Cool and Useful Links About Paul Lansky
http://paul.mycpanel.princeton.edu/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Lansky
http://www.popmatters.com/column/141865-idle-chatter-about-paul-lanskys-notjustmoreidlechatter/
Minimalism and Paul Lansky's "Idle Chatter" 