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FIRST AUDITION FOR

“ORCHESTRA 80”

 

from Software Affair, 858 Rubis Drive, Sunnyvale, CA, 94087
TRS-80 hardware/software package. Sug­gested retail price: $80.

 

Reviewed by Robb Murray.  October, 1981

 

Editor’s Note: At press time, SoftSide discovered
an expanded version of the “Orchestra 80” had been made available.
Watch for a review of “Or­chestra 85” in our November issue.

 

Overture

 

“ORCHESTRA 80” allows the TRS-80 user to both code and play first-rate music. Its appearance on the market is part of what is unquestionably a major ad­vance in the democratization of com­posing.

The precision and reliability of com­puter processing have never been more justifiably or nobly invoked than in the performance of music by the com­puter. Until recently, however, computer-produced music has only been possible through the use of very expensive equipment and complex pro­gramming routines.

Here’s how this simple product works:  First, the user loads a compiler program into main storage. This step sets up the system both for playing pre-existing code and for receiving new, or changing old, code. If the user wishes to play music, he runs a file of coded symbols through the processor. As this happens, output from the job is produced in the form of electrical signals. The signals flow through a digital/analog converter at­tached to the side port on the expan­sion interface (or, on the 16K S-80, to the port in back of the keyboard).

The attachable converter changes the raw electrical signals it receives into electrical frequencies that, in turn, are amplified and drive a speaker (both the amp and speaker system are user-supplied). If the user wants to code music, he goes into edit mode and begins to write a new file of code, or to change a file already present. When finished, he compiles and stores the result, ready for playing.

What does “Orchestra 80” sound like? Well, for openers, the system does produce good musical sounds; surprisingly good ones in fact. Timing is precise, and tone color is pleasing. “Orchestra 80” will play up to four simultaneous voices over a six-octave range.

 

Fanfare

 

The value of “Orchestra 80” will de­pend on the user’s motivation and musical background, but several uses for the system are apparent.

First, “Orchestra 80” allows you to play pre-coded music. Over a hundred musical renditions for “Orchestra 80” are already available, ranging from Bach to Stevie Wonder. Many bulletin boards offer local contributions; a board in Connecticut presented Christmas tunes a year ago.

Used in this way, “Orchestra 80” functions like a digital player piano. If this were all it could do, “Orchestra 80” would be a fabulous novelty item (player pianos are fun!); but it offers more --

Because the code that is played can actually be seen and edited by the user, even the non-composer can make experimental changes to “canned” music. This feature makes it possible to play with coded music as though it were silly putty — bending, stretching, compressing, and molding it into a custom-made version of the musical work in hand. Just imagine a sixty-second Mahler’s First Symphony, or a two-hour Minute Waltz. Learn “Or­chestra 80” coding and imagine no more!

“Orchestra 80” enables you to transcribe standard music to computer-playable format. This process may of­fer untold rewards to the person who can’t play an instrument (or can’t play well), yet still longs to “play” favorite pieces for himself.

“Orchestra 80” can function as a working tool for the composer. It allows music to be tested, changed, and played at any speed. It is more than a compositional aid; it is also a mind-bending new performance medium, which offers new freedoms and strengths to the composer. The limita­tions of traditional performance technique, such as keyboard reach,  vocal range, or ease of bowing, are no longer at issue. If you can code it, the computer can play it; it’s as simple as that.

To an admirable degree, “Orchestra 80” has set the standard of perfor­mance for its inevitable successors. Its music is always played nimbly, regardless of speed. When it comes to pace and precision, this system easily outperforms any keyboard musician. It never hesitates, stumbles, or tires.

As many as four voices may sound at the same time. Most of the previous music systems for the TRS-80 could play one or sometimes two layers of musical sound at once.  Multiple-voice effects, such as Walter Carlos showcased in his popular “Switched-On Bach” albums of analog synthesis, had to be achieved with the aid of a tape recorder and multitracking or overdubbing. “Or­chestra 80,” however, plays up to four voices together, in real time. This represents a fundamental advance over previous systems, and its musical im­plications are obvious. With the new possibility of four-part counterpoint and harmony, most contemporary music, not to mention a large part of traditional music, has become sud­denly and astonishingly accessible to the computer musician.

The coding scheme is simple and logical. I learned it in half an hour and, in person, could explain it to another user in ten minutes (it does help to learn it with a friend). To begin a piece, the user first writes a few lines of set-up code that specify the key, speed of per­formance and timbres of the four voice-lines to be used. Then the piece of music is coded, one measure at a time, and within each measure, one voice at a time.

Each note is given a time value and pitch value (which may include no­tation for accidentals). For example, “Q0#” means that a quarter note (“Q”) is to be played at the pitch of C-sharp (“0” equals middle C; “0#”, therefore, equals middle C, sharped). The time values of notes may range from tied whole notes to sixty-fourth notes (the latter may also serve as grace notes). Triplets, happily, may be coded, and at any speed.

When all measures have been coded, a four-character dummy measure signifies the conclusion of the piece or movement.

“Orchestra 80’s” music is easy to test. For the composer, this feature is invaluable. Even before a piece is played, it is automatically screened by the compiler for certain common coding errors. Messages to the user show errors and where in the file they occur. The user can then correct them and go on.

During listening sessions, playback need not commence at the beginning of a piece, but instead can start at any chosen point; thus a change made mid­way through a long piece can be test-played immediately without having to suffer through a replay of all prior passages.

Similarly, playing may be inter­rupted at any point simply by touching the BREAK key. However, once stop­ped in mid-play, a piece cannot con­tinue automatically from that point unless a break-point has been pre­viously set there.

Another valuable feature is the abili­ty to slow playback to a crawl, allow­ing one to check the audio output against a musical score.

Tempos are easy to change. The user can speed or slow the tempos of entire pieces, or of sections, either by chang­ing the tempo parameters in the set-up code or by pressing certain keys during performance. Thus, tempo acceler­ations, retardations, and “rubato” (combinations of the two foregoing which are used to convey interpretative feeling) may be either coded into the music itself, or created at will during playback. Tempo settings are accomplished by using tempo-dedicated keys and a chart in the in­struction manual that relates combin­ations of keys to set-up code.

Transposition from one key to another is automatic. It may be directed up or down, and applied to en­tire pieces or only sections of them. This is achieved by specifying, in the set-up code, the number of steps up or down needed to reach the pitch level at which the music is desired to sound. Major/minor transpositions are also possible by changing the coded key signature according to standard musical rules. Each of the four possible voices may be individually transposed. This allows easy coding, directly from the staff, of music written in the special clefs (alto, tenor, etc.) for scorings of band or orchestral instruments.

“Repeats” save coding time and space, much as they do in traditionally notated music. Repeats of notes, phrases, passages, and entire pieces are readily codable.

Articulation is adjustable. Four special symbols paired with designated notes allow the user to separate con­secutive notes to a greater or lesser degree. Normal note-separation is “legato” (a somewhat joined sound), but the special symbols provide dif­ferent qualities of “staccato,” in which notes are sounded with sharper attacks and quicker decays than usual.

One more nice feature of the system is its price. Other music systems I have heard about cost from two to four hun­dred dollars. They give you more, but they aren’t designed for the TRS-80.

     Blues Tempo

Accompanying the nice features are some disappointments. First, the coding scheme doesn’t resemble writ­ten music. And there is usually no vertical alignment of notes that sound together. This makes it impossible to see harmonic relationships. Even sim­ple mop-up work on one’s composi­tions, such as checking for parallel fourths, fifths, and octaves, and scan­ning for similar (versus contrary) mo­tion, is virtually impossible to do while working in computer code. Composing “at the tube” is out of the question.

The transcription of music similarly requires a painful intermediary step: writing out the code by hand before entering it into the machine.

A number of systems now on the market make use of a light pen that writes directly onto a musical staff displayed on the monitor. This feature gives these systems a vital advantage —almost without regard to what else they may or may not do. However, as far as I know, such an advanced graphics capability is not yet available for the TRS-80.

Dynamic (loud/soft) changes cannot be coded. They can only be imposed from the outside, by adjusting the volume level of the auxiliary speaker system. This means that no accenting of notes is possible with “Orchestra 80,” nor are crescendos, decrescendos, or relatively loud and soft parts or passages. No doubt about it; that’s bad.

Conspicuous overtone distortion oc­curs in the highest octave, though it is not unbearable. And, distributed over the remaining octaves, there is a faint, fuzzy quality that puts the un­mistakable stamp of COMPUTER on these sounds.

The codable octave range is limited to four octaves. Even though “Orchestra 80” plays six octaves, one can actually code only within four. Transposition can expand the playing range, but, though the user may have access to all playable notes during an extended performance, only four oc­taves are available at any given mo­ment.

Note separations in one part may distort the flow of other parts. True splitting may not be occurring from an engineering standpoint, but the effect of voice motion in an inner part (alto or tenor, for example) may cause a distracting break in the flow of soprano and bass sounds.

Harmonic moments cannot be sus­tained during playback. When testing code, the user can slow performance to a very low speed, but can never quite freeze it. “Freezing” would sustain the notes being played together indefinite­ly, and would be useful for the careful scrutiny of coded harmonies. This problem is almost the only regard in which “Orchestra 80” is not an ideal system for testing musical code. A choir or orchestra, by contrast, fre­quently does hold a sustained note or chord during practice so that the close analysis of a particular musical mo­ment can be made.

The system cannot be tuned. If a user wishes to code an accompaniment to a record album or to play a guitar along with the computer, it would be delightful to be able to tune the com­puter up or down a fraction of a step to bring it into accord with the other in­strument. Alas, this is not a real option with “Orchestra 80.”

As is true with so much program documentation, the accompanying user’s manual for “Orchestra 80” is long (39 pages) and a little frightening at first glance. To make matters worse, it is organized from a computer-technical, not a musical, standpoint. The section that actually teaches how to code comes last — the worst place for it — and even then it is too long, chatty and familiar in style to be conve­niently referenced later. More and bet­ter headings would begin to improve this section.

Back to Refrain

I am a Baroque music aficionado who likes to write music. My problem has always been getting my work played. I am a slow sight reader who can’t do justice to good music on the keyboard, even to my own compo­sitions. In the past I have gone so far as to try to recruit musicians from a chamber orchestra who would play numbers I have written, but with no luck.

Now I’m using “Orchestra 80,” and finding musicians is no longer a major concern to me. The computer is the most precise and untiring of per­formers. It is true that once coded, digital computer music is “fossilized,” i.e., neither computer nor user can subsequently add any feeling to it. But, unlike most musicians, the computer won’t add any mistakes to it, either; and the computer never needs to prac­tice. For me, that’s a better-than-even trade-off, especially where contrapun­tal music is concerned.

The first time I heard a Bach fugue played on “Orchestra 80,” I kept waiting instinctively for the music to bog down, or for a mistake of some kind. But, no matter how tightly the fugal mesh was woven, every note came in right on cue, sharp as a pin­point. No doubt Bach himself would have appreciated the kind of relentless, unerring stream of musical sounds that “Orchestra 80” can produce. For my part, I’m delighted!

I have a number of friends who, knowing a little about music, have tried writing it, and have gave up. They liked the idea of composing and thought they could do it, but lacked of keyboard abili­ty always kept them from perfecting their musical ideas. “Orchestra 80” could have helped them. If you are such a person, it might help you.

Finale

I want to encourage amateur com­posers to take advantage of the peculiar structures and freedoms of­fered by “Orchestra 80.” If you com­pose, or would like to, give the system a try. If the results are good, publicize them on one of the bulletin boards.

While not the same as totally new composition, I would also like to hear some good, creative examples of altered compositions, that is, ar­rangements made by changing the coded versions of music composed by others. It would be especially nice to hear some good arrangements created by someone with no formal musical training. I’m curious to see what a grade-school student may one day produce that will as­tound everyone.

Quality standards are already being set by people such as Roy Niederhoffer, whose “Star Wars” is far and away the best thing on “Orchestra 80” yet released. There is also Bryan Eggers, whose transcriptions probe as well as anyone’s the new potentialities offered by note-processing via microcomputer.

But it is now time for users to go beyond nearly literal transcriptions from the standard pop, classical, and novelty repertoires — and on to new, original compositions. Personally, I have been so excited about “Orchestra 80” that I have coded a half-hour recital of some of my own work. The results have been good enough to con­vince two Chicago radio stations to air the selections. Still greater things are possible!

Computer music has been around for years, but never as accessibly. Microcomputers are creating historic days in music. If you love music, own an TRS-80 and want to make a little history, consider buying “Orchestra 80.”

 

 

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