Seeger an Instantaneus Music Notator

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An Instantaneous Music NotatorAuthor(s): Charles SeegerSource: Journal of the International Folk Music Council, Vol. 3 (1951), pp. 103-106Published by: International Council for Traditional MusicStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/835791 .

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AN INSTANTANEOUS MUSIC NOTATOR I03

AN INSTANTANEOUS MUSIC NOTATOR*by

CHARLES SEEGER (Washington, D.C.)

THE Conference of Experts in the Notation of Folk and Primitive Music of the Inter-national Commission of Folk Arts and Folklore (CIAP) reports that at its meeting inGeneva, July 4th-7th, 1949, "the participants agreed . . . the staff should be main-tained . . . combined with appropriate signs to make good its inadequacies ..."fIt was recommended that where intonation differs from the norms

symbolised bythe

staff, indication of exact physical measurements should be made. On succeedingpages, it is stated that M. Giorgio Nataletti offered to investigate the possibility ofprecise mensuration of both pitch and time with the help of electrical instruments ofthe Italian Broadcasting Company.

It is my purpose here to felicitate the members of the Conference upon thedecisions of their meeting-with which I am in complete accord-and to make knownto them and to others working in this field the nature of a project that may be ofinterest to them, initiated, but, alas, currently blocked, here in the United States, forlack of funds.

The aim of the project is to develop an electronic device that will record instan-taneously, for reading by musicians rather than by physicists, a single melodic lineled into it by a wire from a phonograph or microphone. The minimum requirementis to show the functions of pitch and time by means of a single curve traced uponsuitable graph paper. It is expected that dynamics can be shown, if desired, upon aseparate graph-also by a sinigle ine-curve. The maximum requirement is to shownot only pitch, time and dynamics (which last could also in part indicate accent)but also timbre, probably by some other medium than by an oscillographic recorder.

Metfessel'sgraphs+ gave me an idea of what I wanted, but his technique was too

time-consuming and costly.

Talking over the project with Eric von Hornbostel, who was giving a course at theNew School for Social Research in New York, 1933-4, he introduced me to' his friend,Weigl of the Bell Telephone Laboratories. Mr. Weigl told me that the Laboratorieswere already working along related lines in the study of speech and referred me to theElectrical Products Corporation, an engineering affiliate. At that time I was inter-ested not only in the recorder but also in a reader that would re-create the recording.The engineers were certain that both units--even with polyphonic resources-werefeasible but at that time enormously costly, and advised waiting until the research ofthe Bell Laboratories could be completed.

* This paper was presented to the Conference but was not read. Mr. Seeger also presented andread a paper on "Oral Tradition in Music." This has since been published in extended form inthe Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend, Vol. 2 (Funk & Wagnalls Co., NewYork, 1950).

t CIAP INFORMATION. Paris, Commission Internationale des Arts et Traditions Populaires,No. 15-16, Novembre-Decembre, 1949, pp. 1-3.$ Metfessel, Milton E., Phonophotography in Folk Music, Chapel Hill, University of North

Carolina Press, 1928.

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104 INTERNATIONAL FOLK MUSIC JOURNAL

In due time these were published.* Early in 1946, I talked over the project ofthe instantaneous notating machine with my friend Dr. Richard A. Waterman ofNorth-western University, who volunteered to enlist the services of some engineering

companiesin

Chicago.Buehler and Co.

providedthe

followingblock

diagramand

LINEAR AMPLITUDEINPUT--+ AMPLIFIER > RECORDING

OSCILLOGRAPH

CONSTANTOUTPUTAMPLIFIER

FREQUENCYDYNAMIC METERANDCUT-OFF - RECORDINGAMPLIFIER OSCILLOGRAPH

DIAGRAM

kindly gave us permission to make the best of it for, unfortunately, the cost of$3,500 for the design, plus that of construction of a model, was still excessive.

There was no further progress until the summer of 1949 when my son Charles L.

Seeger,then

professorat Cornell

Universityand in

chargeof the

radar-astronomylaboratory, assembled some available units and connected them as follows:

INPUT------I AMPLIFIER RECTIFIER

LIMITER

_ lF EDUAL HANNEL

FREQUENCY --- RECORDINGNET OSCILLOGRAPH

DIAGRAM I

The response of amplitude was linear: that of frequency, logarithmic. The recorderwas a Brush Development Corporation Double Channel Magnetic Oscillograph,BL-2o2. Each arm had a swing of 4o0mm. The paper could be fed out left-to-rightat any one of 3 speeds-5, 25 and 125 mm. per second. The pens could move up to120 cycles per second.

* Potter, Ralph K., "Visible Patterns of Sound," In Science, Vol. 102, No. 2654, Nov. 7,1945, PP. 463-470. "Techniques for automatically recording the wave forms of sounds have beenvery highly

developed;but there has remained unsolved, until recently, the problem of recording

sounds in a manner permitting their ready visual interpretation and correlation with the auditorysense. An outstanding difficulty with the interpretation of the records of wave forms is theeffect of phase relationship between fundamentals and harmonics. . . The facts are that wavetraces contain too much information." The apparatus designed by the Bell Laboratories especiallyso that deaf persons could read telephone conversations was called the "sound spectrograph."It is linear in response. See also: Potter, Ralph K., Kopp, George A. and Green, Harriet C.,Visible Speech, New York: D. Van Nostrand Inc., 1947.









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AN INSTANTANEOUS MUSIC NOTATOR 105

At our first and only trial, the limiter lacked the elements to produce a sharpenough cut off in graphing melodies that were sung or played on a guitar. But atthe very close of the session Graph I (facing this page) was made of the whistlingof a variant of the well-known British American ballad Barbara Allen. The

graphfor amplitude is omitted here. The conventional staff notation is of the sounds Iintended to produce. Never having had good control of intonation in whistling,discrepancies exist and can easily be located on the graph, for the equipmentwas found extremely accurate in tests with scientifically controlled pitch sources.The jagged peaks at the ends of phrases are breaths which the amplitude graphshowed were almost inaudible.

Thus the matter rests as of November Ist, 1950.Experience up to this point seems to suggest the following considerations for

further investigations along these general lines:

(I)Pitch.-Calibration

maybe

expectedto be varied

accordingto the idiom

represented and the degree of accuracy required. For a good traditional singer ofthe British-American ballad, I would be satisfied, I think, with a norm of 3 mm. persecond (ca. J in.) per semitone of Ioo cents. For special studies of pitch variation,5-10 mm. p.s. might be expected for preliminary trials. Even 5 mm. p.s. would allowa range of an octave and a fifth on paper

1o.2cm. (ca. 4 in.) wide-a commercially

produced article in the United States.(2) Time.-Calibration might not be so flexibly controlled, depending, as it does

upon the speed of the paper under the pen rather than the mere mechanical adjust-ment of the sweep of the pen itself. The above graph of Barbara Allen was made at

25 mm.p.s. (ca. I in.)and

appearsto be a little slow. The

125 mm.p.s. (almost 5 in.)speed of the Brush Recorder was, however, too fast. Ideally, the paper should bemoved by a variable speed motor, but these are notoriously inaccurate. As in graph-ing of pitch, the calibration might be expected to vary with the idiom and the degreeof accuracy required. Perhaps a first experiment might be with a motor havingspeeds of 20, 40 and 60 mm.p.s.

(3) Pen.-I cannot see why the pen need move much faster than the fastestarticulated tones we can perceive-about 16 p.s. It was the high sensitivity of theBrush machine that rendered almost meaningless our dynamic (amplitude) curve, inGraph I above. A slower response would have levelled it off to a point where itwould

representmusical, not

physical, reality.I would be inclined

anyway,for the

present, to concentrate on the pitch-time graph. Later, amplitude and timbre (nowcapable of representation by commercially produced units) could be integrated.

(4) Paper.-Ruled paper for such graphs is very expensive. It might be wise toconduct initial experiments with plain paper. The curves could be read througheasily designed masks of transparent plastic, marked with the various lines-hori-zontal, for pitch, vertical (curved to match the swing of the pen) for time. It wouldbe by all means desirable to have the two sets of lines symmetrically arranged so asto make squares (with two sides curved, of course). The decimal system of cents, forpitch, suggests adoption of a decimal system for time as well. A paper or mask ruledhorizontally for 3-5 mm. per

Ioocents could be horizontally divided

by lightlines for

every 20 cents, and vertically for every 2oths of a second, even at 20omm.p.s. speedof the paper. To facilitate reading by persons accustomed to conventional notationthe design might be as Graph II, reading, of course, from left to right (see next page).

Perhaps in closing I should repeat my agreement with the Conference hat graphtechniques should not be expected to supplant conventional notation, at least for the









io6 INTERNATIONAL FOLK MUSIC JOURNAL

present. They should, however, prove useful as supplementing it. Transcription ofmusic for scholarly purposes might very well place the one above the other. Or, thenote-heads, stems, beams, rests, accidentals and other symbols could be superimposed

(perhapsin a

differentlycoloured

ink) uponthe

graphline itself.

It is worth considering the fact, however, that our conventional notation isalready a development half-way toward the graph. Multiplication of symbols toincrease its accuracy can still be made; but only at the expense of clarity and ease inreading. I have a feeling that before a hundred years are passed our present notationwill look more like a graphic than a symbolic method of writing. The transition neednot be abrupt, but gradual. The combined use of the two methods seems reasonable,then-not too cumbersome and in the right direction.

An added value of the graph may eventually turn out to be to archival processingof sound-recordings. When, for example, a new deposit is received and given a firstplaying, a connection to the instantaneous notator would produce a card of the"business machine type" which could be read by a clerk with comparatively ele-mentary musical training, punched in some such a manner as that devised by Bron-son,* filed for basic reference purposes and mechanically located at any time.

Finally, let me remind the reader that the instantaneous notator, if designed foruse by the musician rather than by the physicist and if kept in good operating order,can give us an objective record as much better than the hand-transcription of asound-recording as that sound-recording s better than the hand-notation at dictationin the field. It can serve as a check upon the bias each and every one of us trained inthe European fine art of music must inevitably carry with us when we write or readthe notation of that art. Indeed, one might go so far as to predict that the time willcome when the science of Comparative Musicology (hopefully renamed ) will beregarded as having become a science in two great steps-first, by the use of mechanicaland electronic sound-recording n the field, and second, by the use of mechanical andelectronic sound-writing in the laboratory.

GRAPHI* Bronson, Bertrand H., "Mechanical Help in the Study of Folk Song." In Journal of

American Folklore, Vol. 62, No. 244, April-June, 1949, pp. 81-86.




Seeger an Instantaneus Music Notator

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