Post #2579775

History of computer music keynote Computers were slow in the 1970s. Composers then started with a blank screen, without even instruments predefined. Oliveros said, "you have to build your own instrument." Everything was new and exciting. Their computers were built for the military industrial complex. Special hardware for audio was needed. They were big and expensive machines. This is why FM was exciting - it was cheaper. DAC were also expensive and not made for music. But CDs had high quality DACs, which was new. The mac came out. The DX7 came out. It was multiphonic. The laser printer also came out that year, kicking off desktop publishing. Now, we can synthesise more sounds in real time than we can hope to manually control. The complexity makes composing slower. In 1976 it was time to start thinking about automated control with "musical intelligence". Will neural nets save us, the speaker wonders?