Yiorgos Vassilandonakis
University of Virginia
McIntire Department of Music
112 Old Cabell Hall
Charlottesville, Virginia 22903 USA
yiorgos@earthlink.net
Trevor Wishart (see Figures 1 and 2) has carved
a distinct niche as a composer, author, educator,
vocal improviser, software designer, and practitioner
of sonic art and digital music creation. Born in
1946 in Leeds, England, Mr. Wishart studied at
Oxford, the University of Nottingham, and the
University of York, where he earned his doctorate
in composition in 1973. He became involved in
the early stages of electronic music, which he
has actively researched and developed ever since,
creating an impressive body of works that have
been commissioned by l’Institut de Recherche
et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM), the
Paris Biennale, and the BBC Promenade Concerts.
(See Table 1.) He has also been awarded prizes such as
the Giga-Herz Grand Prize at Zentrum für Kunst und
Medientechnologie (ZKM), the Golden Nica at the
Linz Ars Electronica, the Gaudeamus Award, and the
Euphonie d’Or at the Bourges Festival. Mr. Wishart
is also known for his works involving the human
voice, including improvisations using extended
vocal techniques, as well as his musical theater
pieces. Specializing in sound metamorphosis, he is
a principal contributor to the Composers’ Desktop
Project (CDP), a set of software tools for multi-
faceted sound transformation. Mr. Wishart has
developed and maintained Sound Loom, a user
interface for CDP, since 2000.
Further contributions include his books On Sonic
Art and Audible Design, as well as his Sounds
Fun books of educational games, which have been
translated into Japanese. (See Table 2.) Mr. Wishart
has held residencies in Australia, Canada, Holland,
Germany, and the United States, and at the Univer-
sities of York, Cambridge, and Birmingham. He is an
honorary Visiting Professor at the University of York.
I first met Trevor Wishart in June 2003 while
attending a summer program in Electronic Music
at the Centre de Création Musicale, Iannis Xenakis
(CCMIX), in Paris. I was struck by his knowledge of
Computer Music Journal, 33:2, pp. 8–23, Summer 2009
c
⃝2009 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
8 Computer Music Journal
An Interview with Trevor
Wishart
sound properties, his philosophy, and his wit, as well
as his programming abilities, having watched him
tweak or rewrite software on the spot to improve
or update functionality. I met him again in Paris
a few years later, when I got the chance to work
closely with CDP. This interview took place in three
separate sessions, the first of which was conducted
live in Paris in June 2006, over a meal between Mr.
Wishart’s teaching sessions at CCMIX; the remain-
ing sessions were concluded over telephone and
electronic mail during the summer and fall of 2008.
Early Years and Socio-Political Context
Vassilandonakis: Most of your work has been as an
independent composer. How have you managed to
pursue a career without the support of a teaching
post or even a major research institution?
Wishart: There seem to be ways for a performer
of contemporary music to make a living in big
metropolises like London, Paris, or Berlin. But these
venues and their audiences seemed remote from
the world I grew up in. And anyway, it seemed
that composers who were not performers needed an
academic post to financially support their work.
Vassilandonakis: They still do. . .
Wishart: Absolutely, though it also depends on
where you are. There are still places with remnants
of financial resources for independent composers,
though not many. At the time I was starting out,
the Arts Officer for our local region (Yorkshire) was
a great supporter of the new medium known as
“performance-art,” and many well-known perform-
ing groups moved to the region to live and work.
Much of their experimental visual work happened in
the street or in small-town, small-scale venues (the
now-defunct “Arts Labs”). I worked with several
of these artists while I was still a doctoral student
at York, and I was inspired by the idea of making
your way in life by taking work out “on the road”
Figure 1. Trevor Wishart
performing at the Krikri
Festival in Ghent (2006).
and being judged in front of a real audience. So I
was lucky to find a niche for myself staging what I
called “environmental events” (we’d probably call
these “site-specific events” today), and multimedia
shows like Son et Lumière Domestic, which were
given Arts Council support as “performance art.”
I should also be honest and say that, without my
wife’s support, the first ten years of my independent
career would have been impossible, as I came from
a poor family with no resources to back me up.
Vassilandonakis: You have an academic composer’s
background, and yet your career has focused mainly
on electronic music. Was there a point at which you
consciously renounced or gravitated away from the
traditional academic path? How did you make the
transition to electronic music?
Wishart: I was a student during the ferment of the
late 1960s and early 1970s when lots of alternative
ideas were in the air. My friend and roommate went
off to found Uncareers, an alternative approach to
entering the “real world” of employment. I became
Figure 2. Presenting a
seminar at the Trieste
Music Conservatory in
Trieste, Italy.
committed, in a youthfully idealistic way, to ideas
of taking art out of the usual contexts and into the
community, without any realistic notion of how
this might be achieved. In particular, the death
of my father while I was still a student made me
reconsider what I was doing as a composer. The
post-Xenakis type orchestral work I was writing
(based on seven intervallically distinct tone-rows
and random number tables) seemed irrelevant to his
life, working in a factory in an industrial town, and
this is what first inspired me to buy a tape recorder
and go out recording the sounds of industry around
the region with some vague idea of making a piece
of music out of it.
Vassilandonakis: How familiar were you with the
electronic genre of the times as you went in to
manipulate those recordings? Was that project
completed successfully?
Wishart: Most of my university training had been
focused on composers in the instrumental tradition,
Vassilandonakis 9
so although I had come across the electronic works
of Xenakis, Stockhausen, and Berio, and I knew of
the existence of musique concrète, I had no existing
models to relate to when I began my studio work.
I eventually generated the piece Machine . . . an
Electronically-Preserved Dream, which combined
those industrial recordings with semi-improvised
sound materials for singers or speaking voices and
cutups of media clips and of my own voice in a
radical ad hoc approach I called “music montage.”
Vassilandonakis: How did it feel to have access to
all these new studio tools back then?
Wishart: Working with sound in the studio was
a revelatory experience for me. With my strong
academic background in composing, and a particular
interest in musical form, it was shocking to discover
that sounds had their own agenda; one couldn’t just
transfer idealized notions of proportions to the pre-
recorded sound-materials one had collected. They
seemed to have a life and demands of their own. I
have to admit that I find mathematics beautiful, and
I read mathematics books for entertainment, but
musical beauty is more than mathematical form,
as it also has to function effectively in time, unlike
a mathematical argument. I’m always concerned
therefore with shaping materials in a way consistent
with their particular nature.
Vassilandonakis: . . . a fact that can throw out all
pre-composition calculations at times.
Wishart: Absolutely. An obvious example I often
use is that a sound-morph usually has to take a
certain minimum time to register with the listener.
There’s time required to recognize the initial sound,
time to recognize the final sound, and time to accept
that a morphing (rather than an edit-switch or a
crossfade) has taken place. You can’t demand, for
some grand aesthetic reason, that such an event take
up less time. In general, all the time proportions
in my work are “calculated” by listening; a typical
experience is to create a musical phrase which feels
(after continued listening, reworking, etc.) just the
right length, only to have to cut it down (or even
reject it altogether) when it is placed in its musical
context in a piece I’m building. I sometimes describe
this process as “slow improvisation,” as I don’t
10
see this unbridgeable gulf between improvisers and
composers (especially studio composers) that some
musicians seem to want to erect.
Vassilandonakis: Yet there are some fundamental
differences in these two ways of musical creation.
Since you have also been active as an improviser,
how does one inform the other in your own thinking?
Wishart: It’s good to improvise (I still do live
vocal performances with no more electronics than
a microphone and amplifier), but it’s also good
to spend time working over materials in a very
intensive way, making decisions about long time-
scale relationships which are not so accessible in
the heat of a live performance. I’ve done some
pretty exciting live vocal performances, but I
would never have come up with the “ocean”
sound transformations in Imago in a live situation.
Curiously, it can be the unpredictability of the
studio work that leads to discoveries that are not
going to happen in the live situation: A complex
patch applied to a complex source often leads to
sound results which can’t have been foreseen. Many
of them are average (or just plain uninteresting), but
you can take the best of the unforeseen results and
apply a new, unpredictable process, leading to new
sounds from which you can make a choice, and so
on. This process of progressive selection (weeding
out) and development is not easily applied in a live
situation.
Vassilandonakis: It must have been hard to follow
this approach of “slow improvisation” in the analog
studio with tape machines and filters, in the sense
that it takes so much physical work to realize these
processes, and it is a long time before you can listen
to what you’ve done. Was your approach then less
improvisatory? I’m sure it must have honed your
skills a great deal.
Wishart: It’s just that the improvisation took place
at a different place in the compositional chain. In
the analog studio, the improvisation lay mainly in
generating the material, which for me was done
through controlled-improvised live performances,
always ending up being much more than I would
finally use. I would then select from the recorded
materials to work on for a piece. In Red Bird,
Computer Music Journal
for example, I asked two performers to speak the
phrases “reasonable” and “listen to reason” in a
host of different ways. (I provided a very, very long
list of adverbs describing speech or emotional states
and insisted on recording every version.) I then
selected and classified the materials according to
how they sounded (not how they were necessarily
intended to sound). All these sounds existed as
physical bits of tape, separated by colored plastic
splicing tape on numerous plastic reels. In the
computer studio, a lot of the “improvisation”
takes place in the transformation process, where
I am experimenting with transformations (and
transformations of transformations) of the original
materials, with my existing software instruments,
or new instruments I develop as I compose. Now
that I mention it—this approach of generating
lots of possibilities and carefully cataloguing the
materials—is something I’ve actually carried over
into the digital domain, where these kinds of
management tasks are much easier.
Vassilandonakis: Did you ever feel that this new
electronic genre was more in touch with the times
and the current socio-political situation?
Wishart: Ever since this early work in the studio,
part of the attraction of sonic art has been the
connection with the “real world.” I know this
is an odd idea for many musicians, as studio
composers seem a detached bunch compared with
instrumentalists or laptop performers who are doing
their thing out there in public. But this standoff
between live/real-time and studio composition is
not a real issue. No one thinks novelists are sad
because, unlike standup comics or stage actors, they
don’t do it live. It’s simply a different way of working
with materials.
Vassilandonakis: You also worked on educational
projects and music for the community at that time.
Wishart: The leap into sonic art was just part of a
larger picture for me, and I became involved with
other groups with a more direct approach. I worked
for some time with Interplay, a Leeds-based offshoot
of Ed Berman’s Interaction, which was taking
alternative theatre and creative play into local
deprived communities. I also became involved in
free improvisation, which perhaps explains why the
sound materials for many of my earlier pieces were
recorded from improvisation sessions with voices or
found objects. The work with Interplay spawned the
creative musical games I later published as Sounds
Fun, and this and related work fed into the Schools
Council Music Project run by John Paynter, which
sought to make composing the center of classroom
activities in school music in the UK. At the time,
this was a radical new idea. As a result, I found
myself devising workshop projects for teachers and
for classroom situations. Twenty years on, all these
activities have become standard practice in British
schools, but at that time they were a completely
new way for a composer to make a living.
Vassilandonakis: There are several direct references
to socio-political issues in your work, though. For
example, when you use the recorded voices of
Margaret Thatcher and Lady Di (in Two Women) as
source material, you cannot avoid the connection
between the sonic material itself and the public
persona delivering the material.
Wishart: I’ve tended to select sound materials with
some extra-musical idea in mind, particularly in,
say, Red Bird (sounds of birds, animals, words,
and machines in a kind of mythic sound-drama) or
The Division of Labour (a text from Adam Smith’s
The Wealth of Nations). But there are two caveats.
First, the materials themselves have to be sonically
interesting. One reason I’ve worked a great deal with
the human speaking voice is because the speech
stream is spectrally complex and varying rapidly in
time. It’s always a rich mine of data from a purely
sonic point of view. Some “political” works I’ve
heard tend to rely too much on the content or
“meaning” of the sounds they use, forgetting that
these have also to be malleable as sound objects
if you’re to do exciting musical work with them.
Secondly, once I’ve got my extra-musical bearings,
so to speak, I want to build a formal structure that
works as music. I feel that music (you could say
this about mathematics too) is a separate universe
of discourse from language. You have to understand
how to navigate this particular universe to build
pieces, even where you’re using representational
materials. So any extra-musical agenda I may have
Vassilandonakis 11
usually just sets a frame or context for the musical
thinking that follows. A simple example is The
Division of Labour, where the Adam Smith text
(about the production of a pin, divided into 18
distinct operations, the classic description of the
advantages of the factory system) provides the
stimulus for the musical idea (sonic variations of
the text-material), while the eventual degradation of
the text (in the penultimate variation, and the tail
of the piece) is the closest the form comes to direct
political comment.
Compositional Process
Vassilandonakis: You seem to work with material
that undergoes a continuous transformation and
sonic development.
Wishart: In my first studio piece, Machine . . . an
Electronically-Preserved Dream, I set up an improvi-
sation situation for a choir with eight “conductors.”
The choir imitated tape loops of machine sounds
I’d recorded, and then, using some pretty general-
ized instructions, were asked to transform these,
gradually, into something “more human.” (Okay,
I’d want to be more specific these days . . . ) So the
idea of transformation grew out of some fairly naive
socio-political ideas. But, by the time I got to Red
Bird, I’d refined the notion of transformation (and
of sound representation) and was looking at an alto-
gether more sophisticated way of structuring a piece
of sonic art. Red Bird is interesting partly because
it still (I think) succeeds, even though many of the
desired transformations either proved impossible (in
the analog studio), or were only semi-successful, but
mainly because it predates my access to computers
for music making. Having struggled with the analog
possibilities for four years to make that piece, I
instantly recognized that computers should make
sound transformation a truly practical proposition.
So the idea of working with sound transforma-
tion in music for me predates the digital tools I
later used (and very largely made) for achieving
this.
VOX5 took the transformational idea into the
digital world. But a more important step, from
12
a theoretical point of view, was to see sound
transformation as the sonic equivalent of motivic or
harmonic development, enabling standard notions
of musical form to be generalized into the sonic
domain.
Vassilandonakis: What are some of the approaches
you follow to generate material? Is there a conscious
work process you follow?
Wishart: The way I work falls into three main
stages. The first stage is the idea itself. To start
a piece, I need to link together a set of sounds (it
could be just one sound, as in Imago, or over 8,000
sounds, as in Globalalia) and some general over-
arching idea (in these cases, respectively, surprising
metamorphosis, and the universality of the sounds
of human discourse). This is often the hardest part
of composing for me. It’s not so much a problem to
work with sounds, and to make successful or even
spectacular sound events. The main problem is why
start on a piece at all?
The second stage is to transform the sounds. With
pieces like Tongues of Fire and Imago, I subject the
source material to transformation using all the tools
in the CDP armory. From these transformations,
I select the most interesting or potentially useful
sounds, and then I transform those sounds further.
In this way, I build up a tree of related sounds. A
sound may be “useful,” for example, if a harmonic
(pitched) sound comes to be strongly inharmonic,
or a strongly attacked sound loses those attack
characteristics. This means that it will develop
in some completely new direction when further
transformations are applied. (It’s like modulating
to some distant key in traditional pitch space.)
Some sounds also need to be retained because they
establish an audible link between (say) a harmonic
and an inharmonic variant. These linking sounds
are important in the structure of the piece to
ensure the sonic coherence of the materials. Some
of these materials will become long enough (e.g.,
via time-stretching, or creating textures of many
individual events, or “zig-zag,” or “drunken-walk
reading”) to become the basis of musical phrases
in their own right. Combining these with other
events, I’ll work up materials into phrase-length
structures.
Computer Music Journal
 The third stage is to determine the structure of
the piece. Eventually, I will make some phrases
that are particularly striking and select these as
the nodal events of the entire piece to be placed at
particular points in time in the whole structure.
This also implies that the sounds from which they
evolve can be placed somewhere in that structure to
prepare for the nodal events, or to act as memories
of them (perhaps codas). As this process continues,
the options for placing further materials become
more and more restricted until the large-scale form
of the piece almost “crystallizes out.” It’s at this
stage that materials that seemed ideal when they
were first made get trimmed, occasionally extended,
or entirely rejected, because of the surrounding
context. I want to end up with a formal structure
that has the feeling (as I’m listening to it) of some
kind of musical “necessity” in the way it moves
from one section to the next.
However, with a multi-source piece like
Globalalia, there was a long pre-composition phase
where I edited my materials (speaking voices from
radio or TV in many languages) into syllables, clean-
ing them up as best I could, and entering them into
a database facility (which I wrote for Sound Loom).
The database enabled me to select sounds for their
pitch, pitch-motion, consonant-vowel-(motion),
gender, language, etc. for subsequent compositional
work. The piece is in the form of a frame tale (a story
used for telling stories, like Sheherazade (or The
Arabian Nights)), so it has a theme that “repeats” at
various points and a set of variations on particular
syllable-groups taken from the theme. Here, the ma-
terials were worked in a slightly different way: Spe-
cific items were selected (using the database) with
particular properties, and a section was developed
around the particular properties of those materials—
for example, the syllable “ma” can be time-stretched
(as “m” still sounds like “m” when stretched) in
a way that “ka” cannot (as “k” is destroyed as a
“k” if it’s time-stretched). However, “r” (of the
Scottish or Dutch variety) has to be time-extended
in a completely different way, leading to different
sonic possibilities (a good “water” transformation
for example). This all sounds terribly rational, but
there’s a good deal of pure “play” involved in finding
out what works best for each set of sounds.
Use of Voice and Instruments
Vassilandonakis: Let’s talk more about your long
relationship with the voice and vocal improvisation.
Wishart: I first became interested in new vocal
possibilities in the very early 1970s when Richard
Orton introduced me to the singing of harmonics in
Stockhausen’s Stimmung. In my struggle to make
Red Bird in the analog studio, I found the most
useful tool I had was my voice. Without computer
analysis and transformation, I was forced to rely on
the malleability of the voice to achieve many of the
sound transformations I wanted. I also met Warren
Burt, who’d been working with extended vocal
techniques groups in California, and we exchanged
vocal sounds.
Vassilandonakis: You obviously like the sonic
possibilities of the voice. What about the extra layer
of language and meaning that is attached to vocal
sound?
Wishart: I’m not so interested in conventional
linguistics, as my focus is on the sonic objects in
speech, and their sonic relations, rather than their
meaning-based combinations. But the speaking
voice provides an interesting model for sonic art,
as speech is primarily the detailed articulation of
timbre, whereas traditional music relies on the
detailed articulation of pitch or rhythm. The mere
existence of speech demonstrates that an articulate
music-of-sound can exist.
Vassilandonakis: Have you ever gone back to
composing for instrumental ensembles, applying
your knowledge of sound from the electronic
medium? Or does it seem less satisfying to you?
Wishart: I think it’s more a matter of how I want
to work with sounds. Roughly speaking, musical
instruments present you with a take-it-or-leave-it set
of available “timbres,” as they are designed with this
in mind, i.e., to hold timbre constant while they play
skillfully with pitch and duration. Of course you can
explore a vast range of extended possibilities on any
instrument (key tapping, slapping the body of hollow
string instruments, etc.), but in this way you get a
slightly arbitrary bag of spectra for each instrument,
Vassilandonakis 13
rather than having that complete control of the
spectral space one has in the studio. And, in a sense,
you’re fighting against the grain—against what the
instrument has been designed for. With the voice,
timbral flexibility is intrinsic to human speaking, so
working seamlessly in the timbral domain is not a
problem. The sounds in our everyday environment
are, similarly, not honed to some pre-ordained
musical purpose, and for that reason they may be
sonically rich and internally evolving in ways we
often try to avoid when designing a pitch-playing
instrument. But even more importantly, musical
instruments have been specifically designed to
function in the traditional musics of their cultures;
they are machines for making music. The reason
I continue to do non-electronic extended vocal
improvisation is that the voice has that spectral
flexibility I’ve tried to develop and master in the
world of recorded sound. The voice predates music,
and we use it constantly when we’re not making
music at all; it’s more like a sound recorded from
our natural environment. And it’s this link with the
larger world, the world of sound beyond what we
traditionally think of as music, which also interests
me. In a studio work, as in a film, you can generate
a whole new imaginary world, or parse the real
world in unexpected or surreal ways. I particularly
like the collision of this semi-cinematic view with
pure musical thinking. However, I’m certainly not
ruling out composing pieces for instruments in the
future.
Perception and Cognition
Vassilandonakis: Your music is very aware of,
and, I’d dare argue, even dependent at times upon,
principles and issues in perception and cognition.
How did that aspect of your work develop, and how
do you approach it?
Wishart: When I attended the IRCAM induction
course in 1981 the most interesting lectures were
those on psychoacoustics by Steve McAdams. As a
lapsed scientist (I started my university days study-
ing chemistry), I shared his scientific perspective
on musical perception—most importantly, that
14
musical formal relations must be based on what can
be heard, and not merely on what composers say
ought to be heard. This was a big issue at the time, as
the “New Complexity” school was quite dominant,
and some composers were prone to the “intellectual
terrorism” approach that Sokal lambasted in his
famous attack on post-modernism (i.e., if you can’t
hear what’s written in the score, that’s due to
either your lack of musical ability or that of the
performers).
Vassilandonakis: Sounds like a creed from a distant
musical past, yet it’s not really that long ago.
Most composers today consciously try to engage
the listener, even if that doesn’t mean flattering
the listener. They at least seem to “care if you
listen.”
Wishart: I think so, too. My own approach is simply
that if a reasonably competent musical listener can’t
hear a purported musical event or relationship, then
it doesn’t exist as a musical entity. No amount
of special pleading from the composer makes any
difference. I apply this strictly in my own work.
Even though there are often three (but rarely more
than three) threads developing at the same time in
my music, they must all be audible. (Sometimes you
may need several playbacks to hear everything.) And
what you hear is what you get; music is concrete,
not abstract.
Vassilandonakis: You talk about the importance of
the perceived physicality of sound, and the constant
tendency of the ear to attach a perceived source to
any sound. Could you share your views on this?
Wishart: Unfortunately, here I have no scientific
evidence to back up my case, but long experience
suggests to me that we have listening templates,
similar to those in the visual field where certain
cells are sensitive to edges, or parallel lines; we
don’t just see an array of pixels. I would propose
that we tend to recognize or construct the physi-
cality and causality of sounds, even where those
sounds are produced entirely synthetically. We
will subconsciously classify sounds as struck or
stroked (causality); as solid-resonant, rigid, elastic,
granular, etc. (physicality); and these pre-conscious
Computer Music Journal
categorizations inform the way we listen and
whether we hear sounds as related to one another.
Vassilandonakis: I don’t think you need to go too
far to find evidence to support this argument. Isn’t
it a survival skill to be able to identify the identity
and spatial location of a (potentially threatening)
sound very quickly? Hence the importance of attack
characteristics in identifying any sound.
Wishart: We can defeat these preconceptions of
course, but we have to work hard to do it. There
are some very interesting features of natural sounds
related to their variability. For example, if you take
a single tongue-flap from a rolled “r” and make a
regular-timed loop with the same repetition rate
as the original, the new sound sounds not even
remotely like the original. The brain seems to
pick up a whole qualitative “aura” from “natural
variability” that the reconstituted regular loop does
not possess.
Electronic Techniques
Vassilandonakis: Who were your influences when
it comes to computer music?
Wishart: That’s a difficult question to answer, as I
tend to plough my own furrow, particularly since
getting into the recorded-sound medium. I’ve had
lots of help from formal teachers (like Richard Orton
in York) and expert friends like Martin Atkins and
Miller Puckette (brushing up against their expertise
has helped hone my much less accomplished
programming skills). Also, I never thought of myself
as getting into “computer music.” It was just that
computers came along and made what I’d been
attempting to do in the analog studio a lot easier,
as well as vastly expanding the possibilities. My
concerns have always been to make music with
sounds from the real world, and to devise (software)
instruments to make that possible in a detailed
and sophisticated manner, treating complex sounds
with the rigor a traditional composer might apply to
motivic development or harmonic structure.
Vassilandonakis: Could you talk more about your
electronic techniques? There seem to be some
tape-style techniques, and also waveform-related,
and time-varying spectrum processes. How did you
discover and develop things like waveset distortion,
brassage, end-synced delay, and others?
Wishart: While I’m composing, I develop new in-
struments [Interviewer’s note: in CDP, several tools
or processes can be combined into an “instrument”
that automates a series of actions into one]—though
less and less these days. Sometimes, I create high-
level tools, like the Interpolation Workshop in Sound
Loom (see Figure 3) that make it easier to use an
existing tool (in this case, CDP’s “mix in-between,”
which creates interpolated mixes)—usually when I
notice that I’m using some procedure a great deal but
I could be using it more efficiently. In some cases, I
decide to extend the possibilities of existing instru-
ments. For example, the Varibank Filter (see Figure 4)
uses the existing CDP filter routines to build a bank
of filters on pitches specified by the user, as well as
the harmonics of those pitches, where the pitches
(and the filter Q) can all vary continuously through
time. I developed this instrument while working on
Fabulous Paris, starting by extending the existing
filterbank, then rationalizing the approach.
The whole collection derives from a single band,
non-time-variable filter module. Part of the develop-
ment is rational (“I would like this”) and part spec-
ulative (“I wonder what would happen if . . . ”). The
rr-extend program (see Figure 5), one of the most re-
cent programs, fits the first category, and is the result
of many years thought about how to time-stretch
iterative sounds (like a rolled “r”). Once the program
is created, one can start to do crazy things with the
parameters to produce results one wouldn’t have
dreamed of. Waveset Distortion fits completely the
second category. I was speculating about ways to pro-
duce ugly digital sounds (there were too many “beau-
tiful” digital bells around at the time, and I felt the
need for a little grit in the system). I simply decided
to try out a procedure that was rational in one sense
(it produces a continuous waveform with no clicks)
but physically irrational (it ignores the positioning
of wave cycles in the source), and listen to the result.
Having made one version of a procedure, it is
not difficult to make many related versions, so
“waveset repetition” led to “waveset averaging”
Vassilandonakis 15
Figure 3. Interpolation
Workshop in Sound Loom.

16 Computer Music Journal

Figure 4. Varibank Filter.
to “waveset enveloping” to “waveset omission.”
And these are interesting processes because they
are highly source-dependent (i.e., unpredictable
with complex sources); they are ideal for studio
composing, as you can apply them, listen to the
surprising results you get, select anything that is
interesting, and reject everything else.
In my musical composition, I normally use lots
of sound-transformation tools, rather than to focus
on any particular one, though the occasional piece
(e.g., the second movement of Two Women) is more
process-focused. I am interested in the sonic/musical
outcome of what I do, not in the means I use
to achieve it. I will often explore materials by
applying different transformations to discover the
most fruitful processes for that particular sound.
I also tend to combine many processes to shape
a sound. For example, I am currently working on
a piece that extends the pitch characteristics of
short vocal utterances. Each utterance is treated
differently, depending on what I discover works
best. One particular phrase consists of repetitions of
an utterance in which the language-like character
dissolves away.
Vassilandonakis 17
Figure 5. The rr-extend
program.
This was made in several stages. At the first stage,
the pitch of the spoken phrase was extracted, quan-
tized onto the tempered scale, and then corrected
by hand. (I’m listening for a best fit on the tempered
scale.) These data were used to create two sine tones
that track the pitch—one at the original pitch, the
other an octave higher. These were then cross-faded
in a way that related to the brightness of the vowels
used in the original voice. The resulting sound was
then given the loudness envelope of the original
speech; it was then mixed, at a low level, with
the original speech, underlining the “focused-on”
pitches. At the second stage, the same pitch-line
18
data was used to construct a pitch-changing filter
that follows the extracted pitch of the source. This
was applied, with various Q-values (and various
numbers of harmonics), to the previous sound,
so that the output sounds became “focused” on
these tempered-scale pitches. (The consonants get
“swallowed up.”)
These various variants were then used to make a
texture (irregular repetitions of these events, of a spe-
cific time “density”) that passes from the more rec-
ognizable variants to the less recognizable. (Hence,
the consonants gradually dissolve.) This texture
was then (fourth stage) sound-shredded to produce
Computer Music Journal
material with a slightly plucked feel. Using the
“grain repetition” process on each channel of the
new sound (this recognizes attacked events within
a stream and treats them each separately), each
attack was repeated with a short rhythmic pattern.
The original texture was then made to slowly
cross-fade into the plucked texture. At the fifth
stage, progressive spectral blurring was applied
to the end of the texture, so the event-detail was
lost, and the sound smeared out. The pre-treated
texture was then cross-faded into the blurred
version. The sixth stage involves an octave-higher
version (brassage transposition, in this case) of this
whole event, which was made without changing
the timing. This was then slowly faded into the
non-transposed version. Next (seventh stage), the
resulting event was passed through another filter
tuned to all of the tempered pitches. The pre-filtered
sound was made to slowly cross-fade to the filtered
version. Finally, the resultant sound was given a
long dovetail, fading slowly to zero level at its end.
In this way, I produce an event in which the
pitch characteristics of the original are preserved in
a texture where the original vocal phrase dissolves
away. I select these particular processes by trial and
error (informed by experience). Often my choice of
process does not work, or I have to fine-tune the
parameters to get a musically worthwhile result. The
final event is no more than 30 seconds long, of which
perhaps 20 seconds will be heard in the final piece.
Vassilandonakis: You create mainly fixed-media
music. Have you tried real-time processes?
Wishart: I’ll make a distinction between real-time
processes and real-time pieces: if one is making
a fixed-media piece, then the advantage of using
real-time processes is that you can explore the
output of a process through physical gesture before
deciding what you want to use. I’ve not worked in
this way simply because I never got into real-time
programming. Most of the processes I use work
faster than real time, and I don’t have a problem
with drawing graphs or typing tables, so I don’t
miss this. However, for a real-time piece, one has to
use real-time processes, and I’ve been working on a
real-time piece with voices for the past 2–3 years,
with varying degrees of success.
One question I have to ask in this case is, “Why
are the voices being transformed?” In a studio
piece, we are already in an imaginary world where
anything is possible. In the real-time situation, we
have the contrast between the physical presence
of the performers on the stage and the possible
disembodiment of their voices. What is the theatrical
or symbolic significance of this? I’ve tried to deal
with this issue a few times.
Vassilandonakis: Your tools are very refined, per-
sonal, and continuously evolving.
Wishart: I don’t regard my tools as personal. My
aim has always been to make the tools as available
as possible so anyone can use them. The main
motivation behind this is to enable other people
to participate fully in the new music making. My
lucky break in life was to be born into a house with
a piano in it. This was a family heirloom; there was
no way my family could have bought a piano. But
this magical object launched me on my career as a
composer. I later got into writing software because I
simply couldn’t afford the endless train of updated
black boxes that university and commercial studios
could buy out of their equipment budgets. (Writing
software takes time, but once written, it’s free, and
you can upgrade it without asking.) So I’m deeply
committed to access!
Vassilandonakis: By “personal,” I meant they’re
created to solve a specific problem or fill a need you
were facing while creating a specific piece. In that
sense, you can’t deny that your personal method
of working is reflected upon them. Consequently,
you do influence the way other composers will
work, even if there are limitless possibilities. What
I’m leading to is the fact that all the CDP tools
I’ve played with are extremely composer-oriented,
and they yield very musical results right away. I
think it’s really important that they’re created out
of necessity by a composer working on a piece, not
a software engineer trying to satisfy the marketing
department of a company that is geared toward the
amateur songwriter.
Wishart: Yes, that’s true. In particular, I hone my
instruments through the experience of using them—
I usually start with a basic design and then improve
Vassilandonakis 19
on it as I continue to use it and discover the best
way to use it, or discover its limitations, and see
how it can be extended. I have a number of ways of
approaching the development of new instruments:
In some cases, I become aware while composing
that a particular instrument could be developed
further, or that it has limitations that are not
necessary, or that I am very often using particular
processes in combination, or in slow succession. For
example, the “varibank” filter, which allows you
to define filterbanks of time-changing harmonies
(without restricting you to the tempered scale),
was developed after I’d been using individual static
filter banks in sequence, in Fabulous Paris. In other
cases, I speculate that a certain process might be
interesting and just go for it and try it out. I might
even develop an initial instrument into a family
of related processes (like the “distort” family of
waveset distortion instruments).
Like many composers, I also have slightly obses-
sive tendencies, so I try to think of every possible
way a process might be developed. This can lead to
strange problems, like CDP users asking my advice
about some process I wrote a long time ago but have
never used!
The Composers’ Desktop Project
Vassilandonakis: Could you talk a little more about
how CDP came about?
Wishart: The Composers’ Desktop Project grew out
of a group of studio composers based in York in
the early 1980s. We had all worked in the analog
studio, and understood the potential of computers,
which were, at the time, largely inaccessible for
musical use. There was a minicomputer running
Csound at the University, but this was difficult
to use and to share (students clearly had to take
precedence). With the arrival of the Atari ST in
1986, we calculated that we could run the software
on this desktop machine with a little technical help
(getting data out of the ROM port, and building a
buffering device). We proceeded to port Cmusic, and
later Csound, and then we wrote our own code in C.
20
When multitasking machines came about, we
graduated to the PC platform in 1994, which
was cheaper and more available in the UK than the
Macintosh. The group was a composers’ cooperative,
and it expanded and contracted at various times,
morphed into a small business, then back into a
cooperative. It struggled financially for many years
as it was not viewed primarily as a commercial
enterprise but a resource for composers, and, being
PC-based until recently, it was largely spurned by
the academy (who opted to use Macintosh). By now,
however, the CDP is a vast collection of non-real-
time signal processing software. It’s difficult to
think of anything you can’t do with the CDP.
I wrote the Sound Loom graphic interface (using
Tcl/Tk) in Berlin in 1998. (There’s also an alternative
graphic interface, SoundShaper.) More recently
(2005), the software and interface have been ported
to the Macintosh, and there are several other CDP
outputs (real-time plug-ins, algorithmic composition
tools, etc.). And the CDP is responsive to its
users as we are using it too, so if another user
has a problem, we need to fix it. The Sound
Loom interface, available for free on my Web site
(www.trevorwishart.co.uk) is updated about every
2–3 weeks, and the signal-processing software is
updated approximately each six months.
Vassilandonakis: What’s the CDP community like?
Wishart: One important aspect of the CDP’s phi-
losophy is the availability of these tools. There’s a
natural tendency in large institutions to compete
to have the best, the biggest, the fastest, the most
advanced technical system. But music is by nature
a social activity. Not everyone can afford or access
these advanced systems, so we run the risk of creat-
ing a “ghetto” of superheroes showing off a technical
prowess to which no one else can aspire. To ensure
that the music itself develops, we need to share
the tools and the knowledge about how to work
with sounds. In this way, the musical language will
develop, and the music itself (rather than merely
the machinery) will evolve. At the same time, I’ve
never regarded CDP/Sound Loom as a commercial
exercise. I’m not trying to sell anything, so there are
no flashy graphics to make the tools “attractive”
in some marketing sense. The CDP is just very
Computer Music Journal
powerful. You may take some time to get to grips
with all its possibilities, but we’ve gone to great
lengths to make everything as clear and accessible
as possible.
Books
Vassilandonakis: Although you never held a long-
term academic post, you have lectured widely and
you have published two books that deal with sound
composition, each from a different perspective. First
came On Sonic Art (Wishart 1985).
Wishart: I had proposed the piece that became
VOX5 as a project to IRCAM in 1979. I was invited
onto their course in 1981, and at the end of the
course I was offered the opportunity to realize
my piece. But then, the entire hardware setup
was changed, and it was five years before I got
back to IRCAM. In the intervening years, I began
writing the VOX cycle. Without access to IRCAM’s
spectacular technology, I ended up writing On Sonic
Art on the assumption that I would never be able
to realize the ideas I had imagined. This book deals
with the aesthetic implications of recording and
sound analysis technology for the future of music
and ranges over many aspects of music making,
including sound in space and the possibilities of the
human voice.
Vassilandonakis: . . . a very interesting text, with
ideas that are still very valid today, despite the in-
termediate advance of technology. I would compare
it to Xenakis’s Formalized Music, in the sense that
it manifests a visionary approach—if I may say so—
and it is inspired by science and technology, applied
to art in new ways. Your second book, Audible
Design, is a more specialized textbook of sorts on
how to work on sound with a computer, regardless
of what tools (software/hardware) one may have
access to (Wishart 1994). How did it come about?
Wishart: Audible Design was written some years
later as a craft text, so to speak—a how-to book,
explaining all the then-existing signal processing
processes using diagrams (rather than mathematics),
and discussing, with musical examples, what
processes might be used with what sounds—for
example, how you can time-extend a sound, and
the advantages or drawbacks (artifacts) of different
procedures. It also deals with more general issues,
like the perception of “physicality” and “causality”
of sounds, the nature of pitch (for example, does a
portamento sound have a pitch in the traditional
sense, even if it has a harmonic spectrum?), or the
limits of temporal complexity in music.
Vassilandonakis: It has a highly stylized presen-
tation, with hand-drawn diagrams—a very useful
reference, and great sound examples.
Wishart: Incidentally, after parodying the cover
and title of Thomas Morley’s 16th-century treatise
for this book, I discovered that he, in turn, had
borrowed it from an earlier book of John Dowland.
I’m currently putting together a third book, which
will deal with formal procedures in my sound-art
pieces. I’ve been lecturing about these for some
years, but this seems a good moment to assemble all
this information between two covers. I don’t have
a title for it yet (Sound Form is all I have come up
with so far, which is much too boring), but I have
much of the material for the book already written,
and the sound examples prepared. I need a space
when I’m not composing or performing in which to
put it all together.
Next Steps
Vassilandonakis: Where do you see computer music
heading? Is there a future outside institutional
support?
Wishart: I don’t think of computer music as a
category separate from music, so I have to answer
the question “Where is music heading?” And I
certainly can’t claim to predict the future. Technical
advances will make many new things possible,
particularly in the sphere of live interaction with
sounds and performers, and more realistic capture
of real-world sound environments. So long as there
are strong musical ideas to match these technical
developments, I welcome this, but I’m not so
interested in technical development for its own
Vassilandonakis 21
sake. Computers made possible for me certain the quality of their speech). However, this meant
musical possibilities I was already interested in. that year two was taken up partly with detailed
The musical ideas should always lead the technical cleaning of these recorded sources.
realizations, or music becomes merely a kind of The aim is to produce a work of around one
demo-medium for technical innovation. Where hour (probably in four separate “acts”) representing
music goes depends on where composers decide to (and abstracting) the unique qualities of individual
take it. It’s even possible, though highly unlikely,
that composers and performers could decide that Table 1. Trevor Wishart’s Works with Electronics
electronics in music is a dead end. However, I hope
that the idea of sound transformation as a means of Year of Composition Work Notes
structuring musical form will become part of the
repertoire of composers’ tools in the future. Mixed-Media Works (Voice or Instruments with
Electronics)
I also think one legacy of the development of
2000 Machine 2 choir and machine sounds
the personal computer, the recordable CD, and the 1990 Dance Music orchestra with click tracks
Internet has been to democratize access to com- 1989 VOX 6 four amplified voices and
posing with sound. The CDP philosophy of making tape
powerful tools available as cheaply as possible has, 1988 VOX 4 four amplified voices and
I hope, contributed to this democratization process; computer-generated click
one can compose the music without being attached tracks
to an institution, though support from other musi- 1985 VOX 3 four amplified voices and
cians is still important if you want to really develop quad click-track tape
your skills, rather than just engage in solipsistic 1984 VOX 2 four amplified voices and
sound-doodling. Membership-led organizations, like stereo tape
1982 VOX 1 four amplified voices and
the Sonic Arts Network in the UK, should allow
quadraphonic tape
good music to see the light of day, wherever it is 1979 Pastorale Walden-2 flute, tuba, props, and stereo
produced. tape
Vassilandonakis: What is next for you, composi- Fixed-Media Works
tionally? 2007 Angel stereo
2004 Globalalia stereo
Wishart: I’m in the middle of a long-range project, 2002 Imago stereo
part of a three-year residency, based at the University 2001 The Division of stereo
of Durham, and supported by the Arts Council of Labour
England, in which I’m combining my community- 2000 American Triptych stereo
arts and workshop skills with children and amateur 1997 Fabulous Paris stereo
1994 Blue Tulips stereo
musicians, with location recording and software de-
1994 Tongues of Fire stereo
velopment to make a large piece reflecting the com- 1988 Two Women stereo
munity and environment of Northeast England—the 1986 VOX 5 quadraphonic
area stretching from Stockton and Darlington (of 1982 Anna’s Magic Garden stereo
railway fame) on the Tees, to the Scottish border. In 1980 Beach Double stereo
the first year, I went out making contacts, meeting 1977 Red Bird stereo
people and making recordings of individuals of 1976 Fanfare & stereo
that region in schools, old-people’s meeting-places, Contrapunctus
homes, and pubs. Because I am interested in natural 1976 Menagerie stereo
speech (not staged or professional speech), I tried to 1972 Journey-into-Space stereo
record people in relaxed settings, rather than in a 1970 Machine . . . an stereo
Electronically
recording studio where people often feel they have
Preserved Dream
to present themselves in a particular way (altering

22 Computer Music Journal

speaking voices, but also organizing the collective
of voices in many different ways. So the second
very time-consuming task has been dividing
the recorded speech into musically manageable
phrases, and then cataloguing these in ways that
capture their sonic characteristics (e.g., tempo
Table 2. List of Recordings and Publications by
Trevor Wishart
Commercially Available Recordings
Wishart, T. Forthcoming. Metafonie: Cinquanta anni di
musica elettroacustica. DVD. Milan: LIMEN
DVD01-AV001.
Wishart, T. 2008. Machine. London: Paradigm Records
PD 25.
Wishart, T. 2008. Composition 3. Audio compact disc.
Osaka: Flying Swimming fs 00005.
Wishart, T. 2007. Fabulous Paris—A Virtual Oratorio.
Audio compact disc. Albany, New York: Electronic
Music Foundation OT 103.
Wishart, T. 2006. Cultures Électroniques: Bourges 2006.
Audio compact disc. Bourges, France: GMEB LDC
2781131/32.
Wishart, T. 2004. 50 Years Studio TU Berlin. Audio
compact disc. Albany, New York: Electronic Music
Foundation EM159.
Wishart, T. 2003. Das Dreidimensionale Möbiusband.
Audio compact disc. Osaka: Flying Swimming fs
00001.
Wishart, T. 2002. ETC. Audio compact disc. Albany,
New York: Electronic Music Foundation EM153.
Wishart, T. 2002. Journey-into-Space. Audio compact
disc. London: Paradigm Records PD 18.
Wishart, T. 1999. Or Some Computer Music. Audio
compact disc. London: Or Records.
Wishart, T. 1999. Voiceprints. Audio compact disc.
Albany, New York: Electronic Music Foundation EM
129.
Wishart, T. 1992. Red Bird / Anticredos. Audio compact
disc. Albany, New York: Electronic Music Foundation
EM 122.
Wishart, T. 1990. Vox Cycle. Audio compact disc.
London: Virgin Classics VC 7 91108-2.
Wishart, T. 1980. Miniatures. Audio compact disc.
London: Cherry Red Records.
Wishart, T. 1979. Beach Singularity / Menagerie. Audio
compact disc. London: Paradigm Records PD 03.
Table 2. Continued
Publications
Gottstein, B., ed. 2006. Musik Als Scientia: The Edgard
Varèse DAAD Guest Professors at the TU Berlin
studio. Berlin: Pfau-Verlag Saarbrücken.
Wishart, T. 1994. Audible Design. York, UK: Orpheus
the Pantomime.
Wishart, T. 1985. On Sonic Art. London: Hardwood.
Shepherd, J., et al. 1980. Whose Music: A Sociology of
Musical Languages. New Brunswick, New Jersey:
Transaction Publishers.
Wishart, T. 1977. Sounds Fun Book 2. London:
Universal Edition.
Wishart, T. 1975. Sounds Fun: A Book of Musical
Games. York, UK: Schools Council.
Wishart, T. 1974. Sun, A Creative Philosophy. London:
Universal Edition.
Wishart, T. 1974. Sun, Creativity and Environment.
London: Universal Edition.
Note: Compact discs are self-published by the composer (in
some cases in collaboration with the Electronic Music
Foundation, or EMF) and distributed via EMF, DMA, Integrated
Circuit Records.
and rhythm, pitch contour, vocal quality). I’ve
also written various new “meta-programs” that
combine existing CDP signal-processing tools to
do more specialized tasks (e.g., emphasizing or
replacing accentuation in a vocal phrase). I’m also
thinking of producing a multi-channel work, but
this must be portable to the schools and other
places where I made the original recordings so the
local community can hear the results of my efforts.
At the same time, the piece must be musically
comprehensible to people who speak not a word
of English, and performable in grand venues with
sophisticated sound-spatialization facilities. I’ve not
fully resolved this issue yet. Problem solving is part
of the excitement of composing for me.
References
Wishart, T. 1994. Audible Design. York, UK: Orpheus the
Pantomime.
Wishart, T. 1985. On Sonic Art. London: Hardwood.
Vassilandonakis 23