Color Music, Then and Now by Wayne Slawson

CD YGM-04
Published by Yank Gulch Music
Copyright © 2007. All rights reserved.

Notes on the Music.

This recording combines works from the 1980s with recent compositions. Colors and Greetings were composed and realized at the University of Pittsburgh with computer-controlled, analog synthesizers (an ARP and a Buchla). The recent music was composed and synthesized using a software synthesis system called SYNTAL, which incorporates a version of the Klatt speech synthesizer (see J. Acoust. Soc. Amer. 87, 1990, 820-857), and is available as freeware for computers with UNIX-type operating systems, such as Mac OSX, Linex, etc. Please email us for information.

Colors (1985) [17m 38s].

While doing research for the book Sound Color during a sabbatical year at the Stanford Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (1978--1979), I began planning a composition that would represent a musical "application" of the concepts I was developing. The first version was completed in late 1980 and was presented at a number of concerts in 1981. In Colors, only nine colors (from color classes EE, AE, AA, AW, OO, UU, OE, II plus the neutral color class; see explanation below) are included. The stereo version presented here was slightly revised in 1985 and digitized in 2007.

An extensive discussion of the piece appears in Sound Color, Chapter Seven. Here are quotations from program notes for a presentation in Lund, Sweden:

Colors is in the form of eleven variations, the main unifying feature of which is a structure of sound colors. The structure is presented straightforwardly in the first three variations---"The Landscape"---as a combination of seven contrapuntal lines of vowel-like sounds. The pattern of pitched and noise excitation is varied from one variation to the next while the sound-color structure remains the same.

In variations four through seven---"Motions"---the same color structure is expressed, but now with continuously changing, glissando-like sound colors. Once more the variability throughout these variations is in the excitation, which becomes gradually harsher and louder from variations four through six. The tempo also quickens dramatically over these variations from a very slow variation four to a highly compressed variation six. The seventh variation, very fast like variation six, has distinct pitches that refer back to the first three variations.

The sound-color structure in variations eight through ten---"Events and Continuities"---is excited by percussive, pulsing sounds along with a pattern of noise and pitched sounds that become increasingly prominent. The pitches that emerge are transformations of those of the first three variations. The colors are fixed in some contrapuntal lines, continuously varying in others.

The final variation---"A Return"---presents the sound-color structure of the first group of variations, now excited by pitches anticipated in part by variations eight through ten.

Here's an excerpt from Variation 1:

Here's an excerpt from Variations 6, 7, and the beginning of 8:

Greetings (1985) [11m 2s].

Greetings, a tribute to Ross Lee Finney on the occasion of his 80th birthday, was composed and realized in the hybrid, computer-controlled analog studio used for Colors earlier. The piece's nine large sections are clearly set off by means of a kind of typology of sources. The sources in the first, third, fifth, seventh and final sections are pitched buzzes that are deformed slowly by frequency modulation. All eight colors sound in continuous sweeps during each gesture of these sections. The sections in between are themselves sectionalized, with quick passages alternating with slow. Pitched, noise, and click sources excite color structures that are steady-state or with brief initial transients that imitate those in consonants.

From time-to-time throughout the piece, the contrapuntal voices sound a sequence of colors from classes AW, II, neutral, II--- the vowels in the name of this distinguished American composer.

Here's an excerpt starting in the middle of the first section:

Water Colors (2006) [4m 8s].

Instigated by the theme "eau", which the Bourges festival chose in 2006 for its "Open Work Project", Water Colors is, in effect, a new variation on the color structure from Colors---now with an added collection of sounds recorded from the creek that runs through our farm in southern Oregon. A prolog and epilog frame the variation itself in which the sound colors seem to emerge from and recede into the water. The water sounds themselves are familiar; the way they interact with the voice-like filter may seem just a little mysterious.

Here's an excerpt, starting a little after the beginning:

Here in Silence (2007) [5m 42s].

The Honor Roll of military deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan that appears from time-to-time at the end of NPR's Newshour is as impressive a reminder of the costs of war as we are likely to get on our national media. Photographs of the men and women are shown in a kind of silent liturgy for about six seconds each. And silence is exactly the right accompaniment. For this composer, nevertheless, a musical response is called for, and this piece is that response. A six-second grid underlies---without strictly controlling---the timing of events. Within restrictions of overall mood and tempo, I have tried to compose with a range of event densities that reflect, for me, something of the variety of the photographs---serious young marines in dress uniforms, smiling sergeants in casual dress, officers in fatigues---each with an undeniable individuality.

Here is the beginning of the piece:

Winter Rounds (2007) [11m 17s].

Completed early in 2007, Winter Rounds, is the latest installment in my series of ``crooked rounds''. The idea is simple. A tune is repeated over and over---as in, say, ``Row, row, row your boat''---by each of four voices, with the entrances offset in time. The rounds are called ``crooked'' because in each voice the tempo changes with each repetition of the tune and each voice starts at one of five different tempos. Also, the ``tune'' changes somewhat in each of the different tempos; the rhythms are the same, but the pitches, and colors are different---closely related, but different. Impossible---or at least fiendishly difficult---if they were to be scored for singers, crooked rounds can be synthesized quite straightforwardly by computer. In Winter Rounds, the rounds themselves are framed by busy, patter-like passages whose strands seem to argue among themselves about what is to come or what has just been heard. A variety of moods are embodied in the rounds: slow and stately, quick and soft, raucous, contemplative, changing from soft to raucus, etc. The last round unwinds excerpts from previous rounds and an extended final frame closes the piece. Here's an excerpt from near the end of Round 1 through Round 2:

Notes on Color Music in General

In all "color music", substantial compositional attention is devoted to an aspect of sound derived from speech called sound color. The concept of sound color is introduced and extensively developed in the composer's 1985 book, Sound Color, which has been reissued by Yank Gulch Music in 2007 in paperback. A recent article, "Color-Class and Pitch-Class Isomorphisms: Composition and Phenomenology" in Perspectives of New Music 43:1 (Winter 2005), discusses several compositions of color music (some of which are available on the CD Color Music 1999-2003), recasts and extends concepts from the 1985 book, and examines additional perceptual and compositional issues.

Briefly, each sound color in the music on this CD belongs to one of twelve "color classes", which include real or modified vowels drawn mainly from European languages. The color-class names (coded as two upper-case letters) along with words containing representative vowels, and their conventional base-12 color-class numbers, are as follows:

Name	Representative Vowel	Number
EE	"hay'd" (before diphthong)	0
EH	"head"	1
AE	"had"	2
AA	"hod" (Northeast U.S.)	3
AH	"hod" (British)	4
AW	"haw'd"	5
OO	"hoed" (before diphthong)	6
UU	"who'd"	7
UE	very dark "über" (German)	8
OE	"höchst" (German)	9
YY	"fyr" (Swedish)	t (10)
II	"heed"	e (11)

Note: Certain English vowels are diphthongized: vowels in EE slide toward II; vowels in OO, toward UU. The initial colors in "hay'd" and "hoed"---before the diphthongization starts---are representative. The vowel in Swedish "fyr" may be produced by rounding II; the vowel in French "tu" also falls within color class YY. Colors in UE may be approximated by exaggerated rounding of vowels from UU or by darkening the initial vowel in über. To my knowledge UE is not represented by vowels in European languages.

Listeners who wish to get a perceptual handle on the color patterns in this music should first speak or sing the representative vowels of the color classes. They may then practice identifying the colors in a simple musical context, such as the beginning of Snow. Finally, they can attempt to perceive color-class intervals in that same simple context. This process is discussed at the beginning of the Perspectives of New Music article cited above.

The source-filter model of speech---which undergirds much of the highly productive research over the last half century on the acoustics of speech---is central to the concept of sound color. The source is some kind of acoustic energy that "excites" the filter, which is a passive resonance system. Necessarily the sources---there can be more than one---and the filter must interact, but a key assumption of the model is that this interdependence is weak; within limits the sources and the filter are assumed to act independently.

In speech, the sources include the pitched buzzing of the vocal folds, continuous noise produced by turbulence, and a variety of clicks and pops produced by quick movements of the structures of the vocal tract: the tongue, lips, jaw, etc. The filter, which models properties of the vocal tract as a whole, is characterized by resonances---hill-like peaks in the spectrum envelope called "formants", numbered F1, F2, F3, etc.---that can be understood by treating the vocal tract as a tube open at the lips and closed at the glottis. When the tube is uniform in cross-section, the center frequencies of the resonances are regularly spaced in proportion to the odd numbers, 1, 3, 5, etc. If the uniform tube is about 17 cm. long---the length of a typical adult male's vocal tract---the successive formants are at frequencies of 500 Hz, 1500 Hz, 2500 Hz, etc. The acoustic result is a "neutral" vowel---the rather vague color toward which unstressed syllables approach, as in unstressed "the". When the tube departs from uniformity in various ways---by lowering or raising the tongue, rounding the lips, lowering the jaw, etc.---the regular pattern of resonance frequencies is changed and more distinctive vowels result, such as the representatives of the sound-color classes discussed above. When accomplished singers adjust vowels in order to project a particular pitch, they are exploiting the interaction of source and filter. The weakness of that interaction is demonstrated by the mundane fact that we speak or sing different vowels at the same pitch and also the same vowel at different pitches.

These concepts are developed more fully, in largely non-technical language, in Chapter Two of Sound Color.

About the Composer

Wayne Slawson has served on the faculties of Yale University, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of California, Davis, and now teaches part-time at Southern Oregon University. Born in Detroit in 1932, he attended Cass Technical High School and earned a B.A. in Mathematics and a M.A. in Music Composition at the University of Michigan. He was introduced to computer technology while in the U. S. Air Force in the late 1950s and was employed as a computer programmer at the Mitre Corporation. Studies at Harvard University in the early 1960s led to a PhD. in Psychology with a specialty in psychoacoustics. He was granted post-doctoral fellowships in computer music at MIT and in acoustic phonetics and speech perception at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. He has published in the fields of music theory, psychoacoustics, acoustic phonetics, and computer music. His computer system, SYNTAL, has been used by him and others for specifying and synthesizing speech-derived music. In addition to his electroacoustic ``color music'', his compositions include works for orchestra, a variety of instrumental ensembles, solo instruments, and vocal ensembles.

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