John Chowning - Stria (1977)
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN cites it as an example of early academic FM synthesis composition and the Golden Mean in music.
What it is
John Chowning's 1977 computer music piece Stria, composed with FM synthesis, which he discovered in 1967. It unifies timbre and scale structure around the Golden Mean.
Recommended by 0 HN commenters across 0 different months, 2018 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Cites diydsp · 2018-03 · on “Making music using new sounds generated with machine learning”
There is a tendency to judge and predict the commercial success of this (and every) music project. As a long-time player and designer of digital music instruments in academic laboratory and underground contexts, i can say it's almost impossible to produce a hit directly from a laboratory. It has to go through a commercial layer first. Then an artistic layer. That's not a dig at anyone or anything. Music is a projection of life's experiences into sound... A lab can inject some tech into the music world, but we won't know for approximately 1-2 decades whether any instrument or technique is a hit or it. FM Synthesis, formalized by Chowning at Stanford ,comes to mind. His initial implementations
Cites TheOtherHobbes · 2021-12 · on “Yamaha DX7 chip reverse-engineering, part 4: how algorithms are implemented”
The early FM pieces weren't very pop. [this video] You may think it sounds crude, but pieces like these took hours of expensive mainframe (PDP-10) time. There wasn't a lot of opportunity for careful sculpting of fine details. You could easily synthesize something like this in real time now. But not many people do, which I think is a shame. If you can read French, there's more background here: [LINK]
Cites waffletower · 2024-09 · on “Generalized Carlos Scales”
John Chowning's ( [LINK] ) work Stria ( [this video] ) unifies timbre and scale structure about the Golden Mean as a musical interval. It's completion predates this work by Carlos by nearly a decade (1977) and the composition process apparently began as early as 1972 ( [LINK] ). There are many academic papers available which analyze this work: [LINK]