An Instantaneous Music Notator Author(s): Charles Seeger Source: Journal of the International Folk Music Council, Vol.

3 (1951), pp. 103-106 Published by: International Council for Traditional Music Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/835791 . Accessed: 24/05/2013 05:52
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AN INSTANTANEOUS MUSIC NOTATOR

I03

AN INSTANTANEOUS MUSIC NOTATOR* by

CHARLES SEEGER (Washington, D.C.) THEConferenceof Experts in the Notation of Folk and Primitive Music of the International Commissionof Folk Arts and Folklore (CIAP) reports that at its meeting in

symbolised by the staff, indication of exact physical measurements should be made. On succeeding pages, it is stated that M. Giorgio Nataletti offered to investigate the possibility of precise mensuration of both pitch and time with the help of electrical instruments of the Italian Broadcasting Company. It is my purpose here to felicitate the members of the Conference upon the decisions of their meeting-with which I am in complete accord-and to make known to them and to others working in this field the nature of a project that may be of interest to them, initiated, but, alas, currently blocked, here in the United States, for lack of funds. The aim of the project is to develop an electronic device that will record instantaneously, for reading by musicians rather than by physicists, a single melodic line led into it by a wire from a phonograph or microphone. The minimum requirement is to show the functions of pitch and time by means of a single curve traced upon suitable graph paper. It is expected that dynamics can be shown, if desired, upon a separate graph-also by a sinigleline-curve. The maximum requirement is to show not 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's gave me an idea of what I wanted, but his technique was too graphs+ and costly. time-consuming Talking over the project with Eric von Hornbostel, who was giving a course at the New 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 Laboratories were already working along related lines in the study of speech and referredme to the Electrical Products Corporation, an engineering affiliate. At that time I was interested not only in the recorderbut also in a reader that would re-create the recording. The engineers were certain that both units--even with polyphonic resources-were feasible but at that time enormously costly, and advised waiting until the research of the Bell Laboratories could be completed.
* This paper was presented to the Conference but was not read. Mr. Seeger also presented and read a paper on "Oral Tradition in Music." This has since been published in extended form in the Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend, Vol. 2 (Funk & Wagnalls Co., New
York, 1950). CIAP INFORMATION. Paris, Commission Internationale des Arts et Traditions Populaires, No. 15-16, Novembre-Decembre, 1949, pp. 1-3.

Geneva, July 4th-7th, 1949, "the participants agreed . . . the staff should be maintained . . . combined with appropriate signs to make good its inadequacies ..."f It was recommended that where intonation differs from the norms

Carolina

$ Metfessel,

Press, 1928.

Milton E., Phonophotography in Folk Music, Chapel Hill, University of North

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104

INTERNATIONAL FOLK MUSIC JOURNAL

In due time these were published.* Early in 1946, I talked over the project of the instantaneous notating machine with my friend Dr. Richard A. Waterman of North-western University, who volunteered to enlist the services of some engineering companies in Chicago. Buehler and Co. provided the following block diagram and
INPUT--+ LINEAR AMPLIFIER AMPLITUDE

> RECORDING

OSCILLOGRAPH

CONSTANT OUTPUT AMPLIFIER FREQUENCY METER AND RECORDING OSCILLOGRAPH

DYNAMIC CUT-OFF AMPLIFIER

DIAGRAMI

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 CharlesL. Seeger, then professor at Cornell University and in charge of the radar-astronomy laboratory, assembled some available units and connected them as follows: INPUT------I AMPLIFIER
LIMITER

RECTIFIER

_
FREQUENCY NET

CHANNEL F EDUAL --RECORDING OSCILLOGRAPH

DIAGRAMII

The response of amplitude was linear: that of frequency, logarithmic. The recorder was 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-right at any one of 3 speeds-5, 25 and 125 mm. per second. The pens could move up to 120 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 been very 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 auditory sense. An outstanding difficulty with the interpretation of the records of wave forms is the effect of phase relationship between fundamentals and harmonics. . . The facts are that wave traces contain too much information." The apparatus designed by the Bell Laboratories especially so 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 sharp enough cut off in graphing melodies that were sung or played on a guitar. But at the very close of the session Graph I (facing this page) was made of the whistling of a variant of the well-known British American ballad Barbara Allen. The graph for amplitude is omitted here. The conventional staff notation is of the sounds I intended to produce. Never having had good control of intonation in whistling, discrepancies exist and can easily be located on the graph, for the equipment was found extremely accurate in tests with scientifically controlled pitch sources. The jagged peaks at the ends of phrases are breaths which the amplitude graph showed 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 may be expected to be varied according to the idiom represented and the degree of accuracy required. For a good traditional singer of the British-American ballad, I would be satisfied, I think, with a norm of 3 mm. per second (ca. J in.) per semitone of Ioo cents. For special studies of pitch variation, 5-10 mm. p.s. might be expected for preliminarytrials. Even 5 mm. p.s. would allow a range of an octave and a fifth on paper cm. (ca. 4 in.) wide-a commercially 1o.2 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 adjustment of the sweep of the pen itself. The above graph of Barbara Allen was made at 25 mm.p.s. (ca. I in.) and appears to 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 be moved by a variable speed motor, but these are notoriously inaccurate. As in graphing of pitch, the calibration might be expected to vary with the idiom and the degree of accuracy required. Perhaps a first experiment might be with a motor having
speeds of 20, 40 and 60 mm.p.s.

(3) Pen.-I cannot see why the pen need move much faster than the fastest articulated tones we can perceive-about 16 p.s. It was the high sensitivity of the Brush machine that rendered almost meaningless our dynamic (amplitude) curve, in Graph I above. A slower response would have levelled it off to a point where it would represent musical, not physical, reality. I would be inclined anyway, for the present, to concentrate on the pitch-time graph. Later, amplitude and timbre (now capable of representation by commercially produced units) could be integrated. (4) Paper.-Ruled paper for such graphs is very expensive. It might be wise to conduct initial experiments with plain paper. The curves could be read through easily designed masks of transparent plastic, marked with the various lines-horizontal, for pitch, vertical (curved to match the swing of the pen) for time. It would be by all means desirable to have the two sets of lines symmetrically arranged so as to make squares (with two sides curved, of course). The decimal system of cents, for pitch, suggests adoption of a decimal system for time as well. A paper or mask ruled horizontally for 3-5 mm. per Ioo cents could be horizontally divided by light lines for every 20 cents, and vertically for every 2oths of a second, even at 20o mm.p.s. speed of the paper. To facilitate reading by persons accustomed to conventional notation the 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 Conferencethat graph techniques should not be expected to supplant conventional notation, at least for the

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io6

INTERNATIONAL FOLK MUSIC JOURNAL

present. They should, however, prove useful as supplementing it. Transcription of music for scholarly purposes might very well place the one above the other. Or, the note-heads, stems, beams, rests, accidentals and other symbols could be superimposed (perhaps in a differently coloured ink) upon the graph line itself. It is worth considering the fact, however, that our conventional notation is already a development half-way toward the graph. Multiplication of symbols to increase its accuracy can still be made; but only at the expense of clarity and ease in reading. I have a feeling that before a hundred years are passed our present notation will look more like a graphic than a symbolic method of writing. The transition need not 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 processing of sound-recordings. When, for example, a new deposit is received and given a first playing, a connection to the instantaneous notator would produce a card of the "business machine type" which could be read by a clerk with comparatively elementary musical training, punched in some such a manner as that devised by Bronson,* filed for basic reference purposes and mechanically located at any time. Finally, let me remind the reader that the instantaneous notator, if designed for use 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 a sound-recordingas that sound-recordingis better than the hand-notation at dictation in the field. It can serve as a check upon the bias each and every one of us trained in the European fine art of music must inevitably carry with us when we write or read the notation of that art. Indeed, one might go so far as to predict that the time will come when the science of Comparative Musicology (hopefully renamed!) will be regardedas having become a science in two great steps-first, by the use of mechanical in thefield, and second, by the use of mechanical and and electronic sound-recording
electronic sound-writing in the laboratory.

II GRAPH
* Bronson, Bertrand H., "Mechanical Help in the Study of Folk Song." American Folklore, Vol. 62, No. 244, April-June, 1949, pp. 81-86. In Journal of

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