Tune in, turn on - Brief Article

Electronics Times, June 26, 2000

DJ Pierre

The TB303 was not much loved when Roland launched the little silver machine. Its combination of bass synth and sequencer was meant to appeal to hairy-chested rock bassists, who thought that enormous Moog bass pedals were the things to have. They just laughed at the 303's naff chrome paint job, and the synth/sequencer soon found its way into countless secondhand stores and pawn shops. From there, one of them found its way into the hands of an obscure Chicago DJ by the name of Pierre.

While figuring out how to use the machine, he tweaked one of the knobs to full and discovered the 303's hidden jewel: an angry squelching noise with the power to fill dance floors in seconds. Acid house was born.

Like most house acts, Pierre and his band Phuture did not last long. But there was no stopping the combination of a bass synth that sounds like it's being strangled and a relentless kick drum, supplied courtesy of Roland's other remaindered special, the TR909 drum machine. Fifteen years later, it's still going, whether it is driving the rhythms of deep house, handbag house or pebbledashed-with-ivy-round-the-door house.

Frank Zappa

Long before Clueless and Buffy, Frank Zappa introduced us to the delights of `Valleyspeak'. In between the jokes, Zappa emulated heroes such as Edgard Varese and Pierre Boulez in a mixture of rock and classical albums, right up to the Yellow Shark and his death in 1993. Zappa's biggest problem was that he was so prolific, it could take years to make sense of his output. He tried just about everything on record, sometimes on the same song.

A member of the `make it sound like a hyena sitting on a tin tack' school of guitar playing, Zappa later went on to experiment with New England Digital's massively expensive Synclavier synthesiser. Made about the same time as the Fairlight CMI popularised by the Art of Noise and Peter Gabriel, the Synclavier was a sequencer, sampler and synthesiser system rolled into one. The machine itself was not hugely successful, but the idea of an all-in-one workstation has become the driving force behind a generation of bedroom musicians.

Pierre Boulez

French composer Pierre Boulez has composed numerous modern pieces that involve electronic devices as well as conventional instruments. But he is best known for his work as head of the French research institute Ircam, which has been turning out all manner of novel software for creating noises and music.

Ircam has created software for techniques such as granular synthesis, which does weird things to samples to create completely new timbres, as well as interactive music.

One of Boulez's most famous pieces created at Ircam is Repons. This takes six musicians and dots them around the outside of a hall. Their playing is picked up by microphones and relayed to a set of speakers mounted at different points in the hall. An electronic system switches the outputs from the microphones and processes them in realtime. The 4X system developed by the team at Ircam can switch instruments to different speakers so that the sound from each seems to move around the hall.