While studying in Paris from 1959 to 1962 and attending concerts at the Domaine musical, John Chowning developed an interest in the contemporary repertoire and, in particular, electronic music. The works of Luciano Berio and Karlheinz Stockhausen left a lasting impression on him, especially Berio’s deconstruction of the voice in Circles and Stockhausen’s spatialization of sound in Kontakte. Back in the United States, Chowning enrolled for a doctorate in composition at Stanford University and discovered Gesang der Jünglinge, as well as Visage and Omaggio a Joyce. The university, however, lacked the necessary equipment for producing electronic music.

In reading an article by Max Mathews in Science magazine, Chowning discovered computer sound synthesis techniques. By 1964, he had a copy of the Music IV software Mathews designed at Bell Telephone Laboratories, and he had become familiar with the work Mathews carried out with James Tenney, Jean-Claude Risset, and Pierre Ruiz. In 1966, with David Poole at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Chowning created his own version, Music 6, for the Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-6 computer, and a few years later, Music 10 for the PDP-10. He dedicated his first computer-made compositions to the movement of sound in space. In 1967, he invented a method for synthesizing sounds through frequency modulation, since simulating motion required sounds with a sufficiently rich spectrum. His mathematically elegant, acoustically efficient, and resource-saving technique made a major contribution to the popularization of synthesized sound in the 1980s and to realistic spatialization in sound broadcasting.

Also in 1967, Chowning showed his laboratory and explained his work to Stockhausen, then on tour. The following year, he discovered the music of György Ligeti in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001, A Space Odyssey, and in 1972 he secured a guest professorship for Ligeti in his music department at Stanford. Impressed by his host’s early works Sabelithe and Turenas (Ligeti attended the premiere of this work), Ligeti invited Chowning to Darmstadt and proposed that he helped start a center for computer music in Hamburg — a project that never materialized. Over 1972 to 1973, Chowning took a year-long sabbatical in Europe, where he wrote and published his famous article “The Synthesis of Complex Audio Spectra by Means of Frequency Modulation,” laid the groundwork for his piece Stria, and presented his research to other electronic music experts: in Paris at the Groupe de recherches musicales, in Utrecht at the Institute of Sonology, in Stockholm at the Elektronmusikstudion, in Milan at the Studio di fonologia musicale, and in London with Pierre Boulez — who was then preparing to found IRCAM. In the following summers of 1973 and 1974, Chowning participated in planning sessions for IRCAM at the Abbey de Sénanque, along with Gerald Bennett, Vinko Globokar, Ligeti, and Risset.

In 1974, Chowning and his collaborators John Grey, James Andy Moorer, and Loren Rush began studying how to analyze and synthesize complex signals and simulate moving sound sources in reverberant spaces. In 1975, they were awarded major grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Science Foundation; they gained additional funding when Yamaha licensed the patent for frequency modulation synthesis (and used the patent in the design of the DX7 synthesizer, which they began to market in 1983). Chowning then founded the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford and equipped it with the tools for his research, ordering a signal processor from engineer Peter Samson of System Concepts. Operational in 1977, it would become known as the “Samson Box.”

In October 1974 at the Théâtre d’Orsay, at the first concert organized by IRCAM, Chowning played Turenas, alongside computer music by Risset, Emmanuel Ghent, Jonathan Harvey, and John Rogers, and films by Lillian Schwartz. Michaël Levinas and Hugues Dufourt, member and future member of the Itinéraire, were in attendance. The next year, in 1975, the CCRMA organized a computer music course for the IRCAM team, in which Boulez participated. Shortly thereafter, Berio commissioned, on IRCAM’s behalf, what would become Chowning’s Stria. This electroacoustic masterpiece premiered in 1977 during the Passage du XX^e siècle concerts, marking the inauguration of the Center Pompidou and IRCAM.

Over 1978 to 1979, Chowning was invited to IRCAM to study the synthesis of the sung voice. To existing techniques, Chowning added his own algorithms involving frequency modulation. He applied them in Phonē, an IRCAM commission that premiered in 1981 at the Espace de projection, during the closing concert of the seminar Le compositeur et l’ordinateur, organized by Boulez.

Between writing Phonē and Voices, Chowning developed hearing problems that hampered his ability to compose. He turned his attention instead to expanding the CCRMA and to university teaching, until he retired in 1996. He also promoted his work through conferences, publications, concerts, and broadcasts. He returned to composition only in 2004, when Évelyne Gayou commissioned him to write for the Groupe de recherches musicales. On the basis of his previous processes, he mixed and interacted electroacoustics (in Max/MSP) and acoustic voice in his work Voices (2005). The same year, the Groupe de recherches musicales published a book on Chowning’s life and work, released in their “Portraits polychromes” collection. In 2007, the Computer Music Journal, published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, honored him with an entire issue marking the thirtieth anniversary of Stria. Since 2008, Chowning has been involved in an Archaeological Acoustics Project linking the CCRMA and Stanford University’s Departments of Archaeology and Anthropology, on the Peruvian site of Chavín de Huántar.

By and large, Chowning’s compositions incorporate three main elements: simulated movement of the sound source in a quadraphonic system, frequency modulation synthesis, and structures induced by computer programming languages. These elements are at play, to varying degrees, in the pieces briefly described below, structured within forms that suggest an academic musical background.

Sabelithe features an ABA arch form. The A sections contain motifs that share melody and rhythm, with a randomly generated initial motif and octatonic motifs in a melodically and rhythmically strict canon. The B section features simple figures that create spatial effects of swirling, approach, and departure. Chowning’s skills are fully expressed in this lively piece, which plays on a variety of sonic and musical transformations.

Turenas employs the same procedures within a loose ABCBA arch form. It also features timbre mutations and a prolation canon on an octatonic theme. The spatial interplay, as well, is more elaborate than in the previous piece. Chowning at first used a pointer — an ancestor of the mouse, recently installed at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory — to trace sound trajectories on the screen, until an engineer told him that these resembled Lissajous curves; Chowning then applied this type of trajectory to a granular line in the first and last sections of the work.

Together Sabelithe and Turenas demonstrate Chowning’s sensitivity to play, effect, and experimentation, as well as his use of instrumental-like melodic motifs, percussive sounds, juxtaposition, and spatialization.

Stria differs significantly from these first two pieces in its rigorous and fully determined composition. Chowning entirely controlled the work’s distribution of sound elements and frequency modulation synthesis data. In this way, “parent” sounds could be superimposed with “child” sounds possessing similar characteristics. The piece is structured as a long, continuously evolving sheet of sound, giving way to a profoundly meditative character. The piece is masterful in its display of exceptional inventiveness, ingenuity, and virtuosity.

Phonēsynthesizes the sung voice using an adapted frequency modulation model developed by Chowning at IRCAM. Long passages are reminiscent of the sonic continuum ofStria, but now “humanized” by the vocal character and the presence of numerous silences and temporal markers. In fact,Phonē, likeStria, uses a scale based on the golden ratio. Chowning also drew inspiration from the pitch-timbre continuum at the start of Risset’s piece Mutations, to morph between bell-like and voice-like timbres. Despite its proximity toStria, this piece stands out aesthetically for its airiness and its privileging of vocal naturalness at the expense of technical artifice. It heralds Chowning’s new style to come inVoices.

Unlike its predecessors, Voices is a mixed-media, interactive work, composed with Max/MSP. Its text is based on the oracles of the Pythia at Delphi and includes an ode to the mother goddess Gaia compiled from fragments of texts by ancient authors.¹ The pitches of the soprano part — written in staff notation above a graphic representation of the sound accompaniment — are tracked in real time by a computer to trigger successive sequences. The scale — whose pitches the performer approximates in Sprechgesang — is again based on the golden ratio. In this work, the sung voice and musical gesture regain their rightful place, set against a technical device that is sufficiently flexible to serve as accompaniment.

Chowning is a major figure among the pioneers of computer music. His works are limited in number but remarkable for their technical ingenuity and compositional skill. He made important scientific discoveries in the field of acoustics, as well as contributed to the formation of a community of interest around digital sound. As a composer-turned-scientist, Chowning was able to link what he saw as the trends in musical composition of his time — in Stockhausen, Berio, Ligeti, and others — to the revolution brought about by computer technology.

Translated from the French by Jerome Reese.

^{1. Chowning’s interest in antiquity came to be reflected in his work after he began working at the Chavín de Huántar archaeological site in 2008. His work there is based on the rituals and acoustics specific to the site. ↩}