Motivation: Computer Music

Intuition, insight, curiosity, discovery are qualities which help enhancing a lifestyle around various activities that keep CCRMA alive. Spirit of an explorer, to get around and finding out about the unknown, as well as artist intuition for knowing what is looking good, might be sound advice in order to be able expressing ideas as freely and as good as possible on the knoll surroundings but also within a established Computer Music community. The field of this subject matter is so dynamic that even meanings of what Computer Music might be are being changed as we speak. Perhaps Bill Schottstaedt's vision relating Computer Music as the production of expressive music by means of computational tools, systems or devices can be a bit too generalized these days however for most purposes outlines most goals pertaining research and composition, scientific or artistic, of work done at CCRMA for most part. Computers are just tools for creation and knowledge production. At CCRMA they are essential for most activities and needs. Here we present a guide with elements that hopefully will assist users getting around a myriad of technologies that help ideas, hypotheses or, whatever the goal is, to materialize and become realities. Linux world at CCRMA might be a path to great discoveries.

Curtis Roads (1985) points out about the following quote from Edgar Varèse (circa 1939), on his vision and quest for electronic musical instruments that well pertains as further motivation for Computer Music:

Here are the advantages I anticipate from such a machine: liberation from the arbitrary, paralyzing tempered system; the possibility of obtaining any number of cycles or, if still desired, subdivisions of the octave, consequently the formation of any desired scale; unsuspected range in low and high registers; new harmonic splendors obtainable from the use of sub harmonic combinations now impossible; the possibility of obtaining any differentiation of timbre, of sound combinations; new dynamics far beyond the present human-powered orchestra; a sense of sound-projection in space by means of the emission of sound in any part or in as many parts of the hall as may be required by the score; cross rhythms unrelated to each other, treated simultaneously... all of these in a given unit of measure or time which is humanly impossible to obtain. (Varèse 1966)