Collateral Damage: Mark Fell

The Wire January 2013

Back in the early 1980s, the synth pop guru Thomas Dolby was asked on British television
to describe his ideal synthesizer. Although I cant fnd any evidence of this on YouTube, I
have a vague recollection that his reply was something like: "I sit at the synthesizer, I
imagine any sound, the synthesizer makes the sound and then I play it."
According to Dolbys model, the sound begins its life in his head, the technology then
converts that imagined sound, as accurately as possible, into a tangible form. This method
sounds quite appealing, and I know of at least one university that set up a research
programme to do just that. It is, however, entirely unlike any synthesizer I have
encountered. Furthermore, its an ideal I fnd very problematic.
Lets skip forward a few years to 1987, to the arrival of Acid House, and another interview
on British TV, which tells a very different story. Here, Earl Smith Junior (aka Spanky) and
Nathaniel Pierre Jones (aka DJ Pierre), collectively known as Phuture, describe the
making of "Acid Tracks", widely regarded as the frst Acid House record. The story goes
that neither of them knew how to use the Roland TB303, which was in those days a more
or less ignored little synthesizer known for its astonishingly bad imitation of the bass guitar.
Pierre explains how he couldnt fgure out how to work the 303 it didnt come with a
manual so he just started to turn the knobs.
The result became the sonic signature of Acid House not just the familiar squelchy Acid
sound (which often steals the limelight in the Acid House story) but also to the repeating
musical sequence, the use of accents, portamento and varying note lengths. When Pierre
talks about "not being able to fgure out the thing", I think hes referring primarily to the
303s convoluted step time sequencer, which is much less familiar than the flter and
envelope controls common to many synths of that era.
If Phuture had rented a studio containing Dolbys synthesizer, we wouldnt have got the
Acid House we are all so familiar with. And this is precisely because they did something
with the 303 that they had not previously imagined. The music was not an expression of an
idea starting in their heads.
In his 2008 paper "Putting A Glitch In The Field", sociologist Nick Prior suggests, "The
history of music bulges with cases that point to the unpredictable, productive and
unstable", referring to a "slippage" between "prescriptions" encoded into the machine and
the unforeseen uses that these technologies end up affording through breakdown, error
and misuse". He cites the making of "Acid Tracks" as a case in point, describing
"monophonic bassline generators such as the 303 misprogrammed to beget Acid House".
Although I can agree that the history of music production offers many examples of
technology used in unforeseen and unpredictable ways, there are parts of his account that
I feel uncomfortable with. Firstly, what is it about this particular recording session, or the
technology itself, that strikes Prior as unstable? Is it because there is no identifable sonic
forethought driving the process in a specifc direction? Im not sure how this makes an
activity unstable. For example, I often go to the supermarket without knowing exactly what
Im going to cook that evening. Is my shopping methodology unstable?
Secondly, what is it about this particular recording session that demonstrates
misprogramming? What is misprogramming? What test could we apply to ascertain the
incidence of misprogramming? Could we say "if Spanky asked Pierre to make sound x and
he instead made sound y, then Pierre misprogrammed the machine"? But if Spanky asks
Pierre to make any sound, the only way the 303 could feasibly be misprogrammed is if it
made no sound at all. Why, then, categorise this as a case of misprogramming?

Finally, how did Phuture invoke error, breakdown or misuse to transgress the prescriptions
encoded within the machine? Where is the error, breakdown or misuse in the recording of
"Acid Tracks"?
The machine was not malfunctioning; the group did not misuse it. Although both Spanky
and Pierre had limited technical understanding of the 303, their exploration of it, and the
resultant recording, could equally constitute discovery rather than error. And if we agree
that there are prescriptions encoded in the 303, how were these actually transgressed?
Did Phuture manage to turn a dial further than it was intended to go? Was there a
message on the front of the machine saying, "If you have the flters resonance turned up
to maximum, please do not wiggle its frequency control, as you might inadvertently
discover a new musical vocabulary"? Was this caution somehow hardwired into the
construction of the machine at a physical rather than symbolic level for example a bit of
very strong plastic inside the machine designed to prevent rapid manually induced
changes in a flters cut-off frequency when the resonance was set beyond a certain point,
as this was deemed non-representative of real bass playing?
Although the music made by Phuture that day was undeniably remarkable, I do not see
anything remarkable about the role of technology here. Their hands-on exploration is a
very common way of working, and I suspect if we could travel back in time and observe
Thomas Dolby in his studio, he might have behaved in much the same way, and only
occasionally used his hypothetical synth.
The German philosopher Martin Heidegger thought that this absorbed, non-theoretical
mode of activity offers a way of understanding the world that is more fundamental than
detached and theoretical analysis. Heidegger argues that the privileging of detached
theoretical refection over absorbed activity is a fundamental error at the origin of Western
thought, one that casts a shadow over Western society and culture.
The comparison of Thomas Dolbys hypothetical synthesizer with Phutures use of the 303
demonstrates this hierarchy. The difference between the two is this: the function of Dolbys
system is to more or less accurately express a predefned musical proposition; Phuture, by
contrast, enacted a previously undefned musical proposition.
This difference between technology as a means of construction and as a means of
expression is important when considering the relationship between musicians, technical
systems and music. It means we can redefne technology, not as a tool subservient to
creativity or an obstacle to it, but as part of a wider context within which creative activity
happens. Recently, the artist Ernest Edmonds brought together several pioneers of
computer art for an event at Sheffelds Site Gallery at which Manfred Mohr described his
creative process as "a dialogue between me and the programming language" not merely
a one-way journey from imagination to implementation. I would go one step further. Recent
studies in cognitive science refer to this dialogue as "coupling", where the human agent
and the technological environment become an integrated cognitive mechanism.
I suspect Prior would approve of this description. In his paper, he considers the work of
French theorist Bruno Latour in the context of glitch musics (a subject uncomfortably close
to my heart). Latour promotes the idea that technologies play an active role within
networks containing both humans and non-humans. Decisions are constructed within
these networks, and not imposed on them by an isolated human agent. If we accept
Latours position, and in the light of Heideggers standpoint, we can see Phutures
encounter with the 303 not as one driven by error, confusion or breakdown, but as an
absorbed exploration, and a series of 'what if?' questions that lead to a non-theoretical
understanding of the system. Here, decisions are not made in resistance to what is
encountered, but in response to it.

For this column I was originally asked to consider how musicians alter the technologies
they work with principally thinking about programming environments and circuit bending.
I like to believe that all uses of a technology alter and defne that technology. Any tool is
subject to redefnition through its uses, and dependent on its placement within wider social
and cultural contexts; for example, my Dads use of a screwdriver to open a tin of paint, or
a friends use of a shoelace to commit suicide. Some musicians deliberately alter and
defne technologies to produce unexpected sound or music, such as Matthew Herberts
use of a perpetually boiling kettle as a sound source, or Yasunao Tones foregrounding of
a specifc CD players error correction system. Both are alterations and redefnitions of
technical systems.
In his paper "The Folk Music Of Chance Electronics", Qubais Reed Ghazala, a founder of
the circuit bending movement, describes his working method: after opening the
equipments shell, he places a length of wire between different points on the circuit board
if the results are pleasing, these connections can be hardwired later. He calls a circuit-bent
device an "out-of-theory" instrument that is "chance wired". The circuit board is
transformed into an "immediate canvas". Ghazalas account suggests processes of
intuitive, in-the-moment discovery, principally directed towards the non-expert.
I think the circuit bending movement shows an emphasis on absorbed activity over
detached theoretical refection, and a preference for active, perhaps unpredictable
systems, not the subservient machines dreamt of by Thomas Dolby.
Lets consider what might happen if Ghazala got hold of one of Dolbys synthesizers.
Imagine he added an extra dial to the front with nothing on it but a large question mark. So
Dolby turns up at his studio, goes to his synth, imagines a sound and starts to play. After a
few moments, he notices the question mark. We tell Dolby that the question mark dial
induces a different, unpredictable and unplanned transformation to the sound each time he
turns it. Do you think Dolby would feel upset or cheated if we told him he could not touch
this dial? Do you think he would want to twiddle it? Im pretty sure he would, even though it
directly contradicts the ideal he described all those years ago on TV.

Software environments such as Max/MSP, Pure Data and Supercollider share some
commonalities with Ghazalas description of circuit bending. Although the background
knowledge necessary to make the frst steps in Max/MSP is still quite considerable, it
allows the user to engage in what Ghazala would call immediate and intuitive non-theorydriven exploration, functioning in real time without the need to stop the process, compile
and rerun.
It is often suggested that environments like Max/MSP are open systems. These are unlike
closed systems such as audio editors or software synthesizers, which have narrowly
defned functions. Open systems, by contrast, offer the user a sort of blank canvas.
But for me, this distinction shares a conceptual kinship with Dolbys only limited by your
imagination synthesis model: all technical limitations, internal characteristics and
boundaries removed. And despite the rhetoric of open-endedness, the frst thing people do
when they encounter these allegedly open environments is to develop variations on
extremely limited systems. I did this myself in Max/MSP: frst using a few simple objects,
then, as I got more profcient, attempting to emulate machines like the TR808. Presented
with hypothetically infnite openness, we start to construct systems with an inbuilt
closedness. Users of these software packages may say they are drawn to openness, yet
the same users demonstrate a much more signifcant interest in the narrower systems that
can be built with them.

If we follow the paradigm promoted by Dolbys example, a systems structural logic would
only cramp our creative activity. But if we follow a paradigm like Phutures encounter with
the 303, or theorised by Latour, we see those structures actually facilitating such activity.
Imagine, for example, that we could change the rules of football midway through a match.
Would this lead to a better game? Would fans cheer as much if a player randomly decided
that stuffng the ball up his shirt and walking into the net constituted a goal? No. In football,
the laws of physics, the rules of the game, the technologies, their size, shape, weight, etc,
combine to keep the system in a state of equilibrium and give it signifcance.
I met a sports scientist who was working on tennis balls that travelled more slowly
responding to the concern that, as people get better and better at serving, tennis could
become reduced to a series of unreturnable serves. I wish I could visualise the musical
equivalent of an unreturnable serve, but if we want to carry on believing in a thing called
creativity, lets not assume that technical limits equate to creative limits.
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