The first track of Dartmouth music professor Jon Appleton's latest album, "San Francisco Airport Rock," includes, over a gentle soundscape of what resemble electronically produced wind chimes, recordings of several human voices, each talking about the same thing.
"When I listen to it, which I don't do often, I find it soothing," Appleton said. "I think its exciting, the way that computer technology has made it for us ... a new way of self-expression and a way of life."
"It's just designed to keep people in some sort of stasis while the drugs are working, basically," he said in describing electroacoustic music, an art form with a history rooted in Dartmouth. This weekend, a national conference will celebrate its many developments over the years.
What is electroacoustic music? According to Appleton, who heads the College's electroacoustic graduate program, it is any "music that is dependent on technology for its production." This includes a huge range of musicians and genres. The Beatles, starting around the "Revolver"/"Sgt. Pepper's" era, used electroacoustic techniques.
Hip-hop, with its beat-boxes and samplers, is electroacoustic. Recent "electronica" artists like Aphex Twin and the Chemical Brothers have eliminated traditional elements of popular music (such as vocals) in favor of a funkified mass of bleeps and buzzers. Electroacoustic music is everywhere, but the music of the SEAMUS festival (Society for Electroacoustic Music in the United States, pronounced "Shay-mus") may remind you more of "Revolution #9" than "Eleanor Rigby."
The festival, which began Thursday and culminates in a concert in Spaulding Auditorium on Saturday night, is in celebration of the new directions of music: acoustic collages, nontraditional instruments, improvisational techniques and the increasingly seamless combination of music and technology. Instead of being rooted in one particular culture, these sounds draw on a plethora of traditions and seek to represent a time. That time is now, the electronic era.
Dartmouth's biggest role in the history of these new sounds came in 1967 when Appleton co-designed the Synclavier, the first digital synthesizer. The Synclavier was the invention of Appleton, Thayer engineer Sydney Alonso and Dartmouth undergraduate Cameron Jones '75. The trio started The New England Digital Corporation in 1974, and by 1979 they had a marketable product.
Further improvements to the keyboard-shaped device led to a second edition in 1981, and eventually they honed their design into the instrument that was used on tour by such artists as Sting, Pat Metheny, Oscar Peterson and Michael Jackson.
Originally designed as a studio instrument, the Synclavier enabled the sounds of almost any instrument to come from a single keyboard. While it has been replaced over time by similar products, there are still over 100 of the devices, which cost up to $200,000 apiece, in use. Perhaps the most exhaustive use of the instrument came from composer Frank Zappa, who traveled to Dartmouth to consult Appleton on his invention. Zappa's all-Synclavier album "Jazz From Hell" won a Grammy in 1986.
Such experiments demonstrate the adventurousness of both the composers of electroacoustic music and the sounds themselves. These musicians are rebels from the radio, taking traditional concepts of music and traditional sounds and ignoring them, or even destroying them to produce something new.
If you are able to attend either the main SEAMUS concert on Saturday, or the smaller shows (today in Brace Commons and tomorrow in the Loew Theater, both days at 11 a.m. and 4 p.m.), do so, as the sounds you'll hear there will be unlike anything you've heard before. That sounds trite, but it's true; this is a truly "new" form of music.
In addition, while walking around the Hopkins Center, you may be accosted by an odd-looking, music-playing half sculpture, half robot. These are "sonic installations," combinations of sound and sculpture that are usually designed to be interacted with. So go ahead and play with them. Appleton described electroacoustic music as "a medium, not a style," and in this case, the medium truly is the message.
