April 8, 1990

AN EXPLOSION of creativity is taking place in the emerging worlds of art and music. Because it’s rapidly becoming an all-digital world out there, artists with a bent toward synthesis are finding that today’s relatively affordable personal-computer technologies are making it possible for them to freely borrow and swap between digital music and digital imagery to come up with a whole new art form.

This ultra-modern form of expression seems to be attracting mostly musicians, who got sucked into the visual aspects of digital music via the Apple Macintosh’s prodigious music and graphics capabilities.

Programs like Jam Session, from a company called Bogas Software, may have started the trend a couple years ago by providing amateur composers with a way to compose original music — from heavy metal to symphony — on their computer keyboards. It even had chicken noises built in, for country-western fans. Though it didn’t fit into any traditional software category, it became a hit among Macintosh cognoscenti.

In fact, Jam Session inspired Todd Rundgren (yes, that Todd Rundgren) and programming partner David Levine to cook up their “music for the eye” product, Flow Phaser, shown at Macworld Expo last year and shipping this week.

Though it doesn’t produce musical tones, Rundgren says Flow Phaser is like music because you let the program operate on you, not with you. “We’re hoping to establish another software category which is more like music,” says Rundgren, “something which is non-interactive entertainment or meditation tools. People will use it for the same kinds of things they use music for — to relax to, to chill out with and to stimulate their imaginations.”

Rundgren and Levine’s program, which comes from their company Utopia Grokware, is one of the featured “performers” at what promises to be a wild and woolly party at this week’s Expo.

Verbum Magazine, a San Diego-based quarterly that editor Michael Gosney calls “a journal of personal computer creativity,” will spotlight Utopia’s product and many other digital artists at its second-annual “Digital Art Be-In” on Thursday night.

Gosney has lined up at least five performances by various digital artists, and the results promise to be spectacular.

San Francisco-based Stephanie Sutton will show her 3-dimensional, animated “virtual” environment. Jaron Lanier, who coined the term “virtual reality,” will participate in a more traditional reality by playing a whole slew of MIDI (an instrument-to-computer interface) instruments. Christopher Yavelow, an award-winning “computer-assisted composer,” will team up with computer fine-artist Brentano Haleen for a sound-and-vision performance.

Another San Francisco-based musician, David Zicarelli, will be cooking up a multimedia event using sounds and images with Max, a MIDI programming environment, and Ovaltune, a program that creates kaleidoscopic graphics and music simultaneously by moving the mouse around on the screen.

If this is beginning to sound somewhat on the psychedelic side to you, you’re on the right track. And a party performance by Stephen Nachmanovitch may prove the point.

Nachmanovitch is a Venice, Calif.-based violinist, composer, writer, computer artist, teacher, psychologist and Gregory Bateson protege who’s written two programs — World Music Menu and Z Music — which definitely harken back to the days of psychedelia.

Z Music, for example, creates random mandalas, a kind of visual meditation aid, from musical input.
“I’m interested in visual music, which goes back to things like (Walt Disney’s film) “Fantasia’ and some other ancient sources,” says Nachmanovitch. “It’s called synesthesia — the crossover of the senses. In this case I’m working with color and sound, but it could be any combination of the senses. Almost everyone experiences it in childhood — you hear music and you see colors with it, or a sensation up your back, or smells. Many people experienced this in psychedelic states, but it’s something that’s available to everyone, really.”

Nachmanovitch’s World Music Menu also attempts to connect mind and music, via a body of knowledge he says harkens back to arcane mathematical studies by the ancient Greeks and Chinese, in which each scale is connected with particular states of mind and emotions. The musical instruments of our culture, he says, aren’t able to play these scales. But World Music Menu works with a computer to “re-tune” a synthesizer into any of these scales, allowing it to play such things as the Indian ragas (remember Ravi Shankar?) that so many of us associate with the consciousness-raising of the 1960s.

“Even a person with no musical training instantly senses the effect of these things,” says Nachmanovitch. “It opens up both very new and very old territory that is going to be quite fascinating to musicians and non-musicians alike.”

“We see a real ’60s-’90s connection between hippies and hackers,” affirms Gosney. “We see a lot of parallels between people changing the world with new ideas and new art forms reflecting those ideas. In this case, we’re talking about programmers and entrepreneurs who are pushing the frontiers of computer technology, specifically with creative applications of computers.”