Computer Music April 2019
Christal Rasband
A Computer Music magazine subscription is the complete guide to making music with a computer. There are millions of potential musicians out there and this magazine will help them get the right software and hardware and show them how to use it. Technology is now at a stage where computer users can complete virtually every musical task in the computer domain. Computer Music magazine subscription enables computer owners to develop their musical interest and expertise.
He joined the acoustics and behavioral research department of Bell Labs in New Jersey in 1955 (from 1962 to 1985, he was director of its Acoustical and Behavioral Research Center). At Bell, he and other researchers figured out how to digitize speech and, using a computer, turn the bits back into sound waves. Mathews thought of adapting this process to music and wrote a program making the technology available to nonscientists.
Visit the Jacobs School of Music to enjoy concerts of electronic music, including compositions for instrument and electronics, multichannel fixed media works, data-driven instrument performance, and audio-visual pieces. Concerts in Auer Hall are held every December and April. Other concerts happen earlier in the fall and spring semesters.
The symposium Unsung Stories: Women at Columbia's Computer Music Center focuses on women who have studied and worked at the renowned Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center (renamed the Computer Music Center in 1996). Unsung Stories highlights the work of women, including the work of BIPOC and LGBTQ+ composers and musicians at the Center, examining how institutional networks and intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, national origin, and other identifications impacted the daily work, modes of interaction, and visibility of women composers at the CPEMC/CMC and in the field more broadly. It features panels and roundtables with over thirty composers and scholars who will discuss the legacy, musical excellence, experience, and visibility of the diverse women who have worked at the Center from the 1950s to the present.
Unsung Stories also includes a podcast series with an initial five episodes released this spring, featuring women active at the CPEMC/CMC over the years. In Fall 2021, Unsung Stories will wrap up with a concert showcasing work by women affiliated with the Center.
For more information about Unsung Stories, please visit
Radiohead found touring stressful and took a break in January 1996.[11] They sought to move away from the introspective style of The Bends. The drummer, Philip Selway, said: "There was an awful lot of soul-searching [on The Bends]. To do that again on another album would be excruciatingly boring."[5] Yorke said he did not want to do "another miserable, morbid and negative record", and was "writing down all the positive things that I hear or see. I'm not able to put them into music yet and I don't want to just force it."[6]
The critical and commercial success of The Bends gave Radiohead the confidence to self-produce their third album.[8] Their label Parlophone gave them a 100,000 budget for recording equipment.[12][13] The lead guitarist, Jonny Greenwood, said "the only concept that we had for this album was that we wanted to record it away from the city and that we wanted to record it ourselves".[14] According to the guitarist Ed O'Brien, "Everyone said, 'You'll sell six or seven million if you bring out The Bends Pt 2,' and we're like, 'We'll kick against that and do the opposite'."[15] A number of producers were suggested, including major figures such as Scott Litt,[16] but Radiohead were encouraged by their sessions with Godrich.[17] They consulted him for advice on equipment,[18] and prepared for the sessions by buying their own, including a plate reverberator purchased from the songwriter Jona Lewie.[8] Although Godrich had sought to focus on electronic dance music,[19] he outgrew his role as advisor and became the album's co-producer.[18]
Yorke said that the starting point for the record was the "incredibly dense and terrifying sound" of Bitches Brew, the 1970 avant-garde jazz fusion album by Miles Davis.[43] He described the sound of Bitches Brew to Q: "It was building something up and watching it fall apart, that's the beauty of it. It was at the core of what we were trying to do with OK Computer."[39] Yorke identified "I'll Wear It Proudly" by Elvis Costello, "Fall on Me" by R.E.M., "Dress" by PJ Harvey and "A Day in the Life" by the Beatles as particularly influential on his songwriting.[8] Radiohead drew further inspiration from the recording style of film soundtrack composer Ennio Morricone and the krautrock band Can, musicians Yorke described as "abusing the recording process".[8] Jonny Greenwood described OK Computer as a product of being "in love with all these brilliant records ... trying to recreate them, and missing".[44]
Critics suggested a stylistic debt to 1970s progressive rock, an influence that Radiohead have disavowed.[47][48] According to Andy Greene in Rolling Stone, Radiohead "were collectively hostile to seventies progressive rock ... but that didn't stop them from reinventing prog from scratch on OK Computer, particularly on the six-and-a-half-minute 'Paranoid Android'."[30] Tom Hull believed the album was "still prog, but may just be because rock has so thoroughly enveloped musical storytelling that this sort of thing has become inevitable."[49] Writing in 2017, The New Yorker's Kelefa Sanneh said OK Computer "was profoundly prog: grand and dystopian, with a lead single that was more than six minutes long".[47]
The songs of OK Computer do not have a coherent narrative, and the album's lyrics are generally considered abstract or oblique. Nonetheless, many musical critics, journalists, and scholars consider the album to be a concept album or song cycle, or have analysed it as a concept album, noting its strong thematic cohesion, aesthetic unity, and the structural logic of the song sequencing.[nb 1] Although the songs share common themes, Radiohead have said they do not consider OK Computer a concept album and did not intend to link the songs through a narrative or unifying concept while it was being written.[34][56][57] Jonny Greenwood said: "I think one album title and one computer voice do not make a concept album. That's a bit of a red herring."[58] However, the band intended the album to be heard as a whole, and spent two weeks ordering the track list. O'Brien said: "The context of each song is really important ... It's not a concept album but there is a continuity there."[56]
The opening track, "Airbag", is underpinned by a beat built from a seconds-long recording of Selway's drumming. The band sampled the drum track with a sampler and edited it with a Macintosh computer, inspired by the music of DJ Shadow, but admitted to making approximations in emulating Shadow's style due to their programming inexperience.[59][60] The bassline stops and starts unexpectedly, achieving an effect similar to 1970s dub.[61] The original draft of the lyrics for "Airbag" were written inside a copy of William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience that Yorke had also annotated with his own notes; this personal copy was later auctioned off by Yorke in 2016 with proceeds going to Oxfam.[62] The song's references to automobile crashes and reincarnation were inspired by a magazine article titled "An Airbag Saved My Life" and The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Yorke wrote "Airbag" about the illusion of safety offered by modern transit, and "the idea that whenever you go out on the road you could be killed".[53] The BBC wrote about the influence of J. G. Ballard, especially his 1973 novel Crash, on the lyrics.[63] Music journalist Tim Footman noted that the song's technical innovations and lyrical concerns demonstrated the "key paradox" of the album: "The musicians and producer are delighting in the sonic possibilities of modern technology; the singer, meanwhile, is railing against its social, moral, and psychological impact ... It's a contradiction mirrored in the culture clash of the music, with the 'real' guitars negotiating an uneasy stand-off with the hacked-up, processed drums."[64]
Split into four sections with an overall running time of 6:23, "Paranoid Android" is among the band's longest songs. The unconventional structure was inspired by the Beatles' "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" and Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody", which also eschew a traditional verse-chorus-verse structure.[65] Its musical style was also inspired by the music of the Pixies.[66] The song was written by Yorke after an unpleasant night at a Los Angeles bar, where he saw a woman react violently after someone spilled a drink on her.[53] Its title and lyrics are a reference to Marvin the Paranoid Android from Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series.[66]
"Fitter Happier" is a short musique concrète track that consists of sampled musical and background sound and spoken-word lyrics recited by "Fred",[21] a synthesised voice from the Macintosh SimpleText application.[80] Yorke wrote the lyrics "in ten minutes" after a period of writer's block while the rest of the band were playing.[70] He described the words as a checklist of slogans for the 1990s; he considered it "the most upsetting thing I've ever written",[66] and said it was "liberating" to give the words to a neutral-sounding computer voice.[70] Among the samples in the background is a loop from the 1975 film Three Days of the Condor.[80] The band considered using "Fitter Happier" as the album's opening track, but decided the effect was off-putting.[36]
"No Surprises", recorded in a single take,[89] is arranged with electric guitar (inspired by the Beach Boys' "Wouldn't It Be Nice"),[90] acoustic guitar, glockenspiel and vocal harmonies.[91] The band strove to replicate the mood of Louis Armstrong's 1968 recording of "What a Wonderful World" and the soul music of Marvin Gaye.[31] Yorke identified the subject of the song as "someone who's trying hard to keep it together but can't".[8] The lyrics seem to portray a suicide[82] or an unfulfilling life, and dissatisfaction with contemporary social and political order.[92] Some lines refer to rural[93] or suburban imagery.[55] One of the key metaphors in the song is the opening line, "a heart that's full up like a landfill"; according to Yorke, the song is a "fucked-up nursery rhyme" that "stems from my unhealthy obsession of what to do with plastic boxes and plastic bottles ... All this stuff is getting buried, the debris of our lives. It doesn't rot, it just stays there. That's how we deal, that's how I deal with stuff, I bury it."[94] The song's gentle mood contrasts sharply with its harsh lyrics;[95][96] Steele said, "even when the subject is suicide ... O'Brien's guitar is as soothing as balm on a red-raw psyche, the song rendered like a bittersweet child's prayer."[82]
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