A Conversation With Curtis Roads

By Nathan Park, November 26, 2023

Curtis Roads is an American composer, computer programmer, and author. Composing electronic and electroacoustic music, Professor Roads specializes in granular and pulsar synthesis. Former chair of the Media Arts and Technology Program at UC Santa Barbara, Professor Roads has taught at many universities worldwide, such as Harvard University and the University of Naples, and has published many essential music textbooks, such as The Computer Music Tutorial (1996). He has won many awards for his compositional achievements, such as the Giga-Hertz Prize in 2016.

Interview conducted and condensed by Nathan Park

Q. How did you first learn digital music production and music theory? Do you have any resources you could recommend to young people who want to learn these skills?

A. My study of music theory began at the age of 10 when I had lessons in percussion and started learning to read music notation. We had a piano at home and I began to learn about basic harmony. This was 1961 so the only digital music production was happening at the University of Illinois and Bell Laboratories. Years later I would compose in the Experimental Music Studio at Illinois (1970-1971). It was there that I first saw a computer. It was love at first sight.

I had worked as a session musician in recording studios but I did not understand what the recording engineer was doing. I began to learn about mixing and recording in the studios at CalArts. It was learning by doing. I was also taking courses in mathematics and computer programming from Leonard Cottrell. But the computer at CalArts lacked the technology to produce sound. I transferred to the University of California, San Diego because they had a large computer and technology to make sound. In the early 1970s generating sound was a difficult process, due to the state of the input and output technologies at the time.

I was invited to work at the MIT Experimental Music Studio in 1980. It was an advanced studio in some ways but in other ways it was mediocre. They had a very poor sound mixing console for example. It had a terrible sound quality and was noisy. Despite the fact that real-time digital reverberators were available as products, they did reverberation on the computer, which took hours of computation time. To be honest, I did not agree with the direction of the studio. So I began to set up a home studio in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I have had a home studio since then.

 

Road’s first home studio, 1984. From left to right: Otari four-track tape recorder, JBL studio monitor (black rectangle), turntable, preamplifier, Lexicon 200 digital reverberator, Amek TAC mixer, two Studer Revox stereo tape recorders.

 

Road’s home studio, 1990. From left to right: Korg M1 synthesizer, Apple Macintosh computer with color display, Studer Revox tape recorder, Sony PCM-701 digital recorder, Amek TAC mixer.

I bought my first home computer in 1988, an Apple Macintosh II. This could interface to one of the first digital audio workstations (DAWs), the Studer Dyaxis. I started using Pro Tools when it was first introduced. One resource that I can recommend to young people is my book The Computer Music Tutorial, Second Edition (2023 The MIT Press). It has chapters on all the tools of digital music production.

Q. How did your background in music theory influence your approach to computer music and electronic music composition?

A. Traditional note-based music theory with its emphasis on harmony and chord progressions is only of limited aid in composing electronic music.

Electronic music: • Opens the door to any sound possible in composition, an unlimited universe of heterogeneous sound objects • Exploits the specific capabilities of electronic music technology • Composes all time scales down to the micro and even the sample level • Accepts spatialization as an integral aspect of composition • Focuses on sound transformation as a core structural strategy • Organizes flowing meso structures (sound masses, clouds, streams) that emerge as consequences of new materials and tools • Integrates the possibility of sounds that can coalesce, evaporate, and mutate in identity on multiple time scales • Plays with zones of morphosis–thresholds where quantitative changes in sound parameters result in qualitative changes to the listener • Treats pitch as a flowing and ephemeral substance that can be bent, modulated, or dissolved into noise. • Encourages microtonality but also free intonation • Treats time as a plastic medium that can be generated, modulated, reversed, bent, granulated, and scrambled–not merely as a fixed duration subdivided by ratios • Weaves the undulation of envelopes and modulations into the fiber of musical structure • Applies the power tools of algorithmic methods, but allows the freedom to edit and rearrange their results • Addresses the issue of narrative in composition • Considers human perception/cognition as a baseline for theory and practice

Taken together, these tenets constitute game-changing possibilities. In my book Composing Electronic Music: A New Aesthetic (2015 Oxford university Press) I have written chapters on pitch and rhythm that explain the enormous potential for innovative approaches to these domains beyond the canon of traditional music theory. For example, microtonality opens up a vast world of musical possibilities.

Q. How do you balance the exploration of new music technologies with maintaining a connection to the expressive and emotional aspects of music?

A. When I was a student I was very interested in algorithmic composition. I wrote programs that generated pieces. Ultimately, however, I found this very limiting. I decided that I was more interested in beautiful sounds than I was in beautiful algorithms. So I left the world of strict algorithmic composition for a more intuitive phrase-based approach.

Q. What motivated you to write “The Computer Music Tutorial,” and how did you approach the task of making complex concepts accessible to a broad audience?

A. A subtitle for the book could be: “Everything I ever wanted to know about computer music that no one ever taught me.” I was motivated to write a textbook to teach with to give the kind of introduction I never had.

Q. Can you share your approach to developing music software like Emission Control 2 and Pulsar Generator? What inspired these innovations, and how did you integrate your expertise in music composition with other software developers and programmers? Could you discuss any challenges in their development and your vision for their impact on electronic music production and composition?

A. Both Pulsar Generator and EmissionControl2 were model projects. I am very proud of both the human process and the result. I managed these collaborations. Basically I was the lead designer and my collaborators were the coders. In my youth I wrote code for many years so I understand the process. You meet regularly and set weekly goals. You keep the goals minimal.It is a step by step process over a long period of one or two years. My motivation for both projects was to use these apps in my own compositions. If they have an impact beyond that I am pleased.

I know that Pulsar Generator (2000) had an impact because Marcin Pietruszewski wrote NuPG as a modern version of it (https://www.marcinpietruszewski.com/the-new-pulsar-generator).