How Can a Computer Make Music?

Researchers at Bell Labs pioneered the use of the computer for musical purposes back in 1957. They discovered that the electrical voltage which drives a loudspeaker can be stored as a series of numbers in the memory of the computer. In the same way, the voltage produced by a microphone can be represented as numbers. This is essentially the technology used in the compact disk player. The difference is that once a sound is stored in the computer's memory it can be transformed in any way imaginable (and many that are not).

Although today's digital musical instruments are most often called "synthesizers," they are capable of much more than the synthesis of sounds by purely electronic means. Through a process known as sampling, electronic instruments can also Sound like traditional instruments. The operator makes a digital recording of, for example, a violin note, and places it on a keyboard. The sampled note could just as easily be that of an entire string section. By playing a keyboard, a musician can duplicate the sound of many violins playing together.

The most sophisticated digital musical instruments supplant multitrack tape recorders and offer superior editing capabilities. When connected to a printer, these same computerized keyboards produce in standard music notation anything that the composer plays.