Salvatore Martirano

and the


yahaSalmaMac
Midi Orchestra

The yahaSALmaMAC MIDI Orchestra is a real-time answering service consisting of a Macintosh II computer (Dove upgrade), a Yamaha "music engine", 25 synthesizers and a percussion unit, (DX7 (E upgrade), TX8-16, REV7, 2 TX81Z's, RX5), a Zeta Violin and a program, Sound and Logic (SAL). The SAL program was first designed by Sal Martirano and implemented by David Tcheng in Le Lisp. Later SAL was rewritten and revised in Smalltalk 80 by William Walker and named Sound and Logic 80 (SAL).


Sound And Logic (SAL)

Designed by Sal Martirano
Implemented by David Tcheng

Sound and Logic (SAL) is an expert system for real time, interactive, music improvisation. The musicians interact with the computer system via a MIDI instrument. Sal (Martirano) played MIDI keyboard while Sal's wife (Dorothy) played the Zeta violin.

SAL would listen to the MIDI musicians, identify phrases by rest analysis, select phrases, transform them, and play them back orchestrated across a bank of MIDI synthesizers. The delay time between hearing original and hearing transformed phrase is about 30 seconds, but is adjustable based on the length of the extracted phrase.

The SAL algorithm is based on a number of rules defined by Sal for taking one musical phrase and transforming it into another. Some of these rules included: transposition, inversion, reversal, note dropping and doubling, chord permutation, and multi instrument orchestration. The rules are selected randomly based on probabilities defined by Sal. Recursion is also possible where a transformed phrase is used as the source for creating another transformed phrase. The system could improvise indefinitely given a single phrase input (see figure 1).

When one listens to Sal interacting with SAL, it sounds like many musicians playing and improvising simultaneously. Given that transformed phrases are played back the moment they are created with no regard for the current musical context, the system was limited. This limitation was overcome by the performer's own improvisation and adaptation skills. Sal was superb at this because of his background in composition and jazz improvisation. After playing with the system for some time, Sal became familiar with the style of improvisations SAL produced. Knowing this he adapted to whatever SAL played in real time, thus covering for the SAL's lack of real time adaptation.


SAL was rewritten in Smalltalk 80 by Salvatore Martirano and William Walker and named Sound and Logic 80. In Sound and Logic 80 (1994), a set of phrase transformations are created (e.g., contour inversion of a sorted list of notes played, cyclical permutation, retrograde, transposition, chord voicing, note skipping, and orchestration by random selection within a network of windows bounded by probability ladders with min and max values. The system applies these transformations to phrases extracted from streams of notes from up to two synthesizers that generate MIDI data and from functions that are called from the terminal keyboard during a performance. In Sound and Logic, a history of about 30-60 seconds was considered. Phrases extracted from the past 30-60 second duet are transformed to become the accompaniment for the current 30-60 second duet.

Phleu

Phleu program notes:
Take a composer with a jazz predilection, add an extraordinary command of state-of-the-art live electronics, and you get a "yahaSalmaMAC MIDI orchestra" ---phew! (or rather, "phleu"!) The improvised character of this piece, the strong rhythmic pulse(especially in the second movement, which boasts a lightning-swift "patter-bass " line) gives us a jazzy exuberance stretched into a sonorous electronic sound-world.

The second movement at one point bursts into a fragment of "Oh I wish I had wings of an angel, o'er these prison walls I would fly"-- in an expansive setting that creates the feeling that we have done exactly that.

The first, third and fourth parts of Phleu are the edited output from selected improvs with the SAL program. The second part results from a computer program simulation of a SAL-MAR CONSTRUCTION algorithm that produces number sequences.

the cue tape was recorded using the Sony Beta Max video cassette recorder SL-2700.
Phleu was commissioned by flutists Wendy Rolfe, Harvey Sollberger, Patricia Spencer and Robert Willoughby, with a Consortium Commissioning Award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Kyma and the Capybara

Sal used Kyma and the Capybara to do MeAndHer, performed in New York at Merkin Hall. He was using the MIDI keyboard and controllers to move between sections of the piece and also to perform the different sections. And Kyma/Capybara was to have been a big part of the middle movement for Isabela--He was working on live processing for the baritone soloist and there was to have been some live processing of soloists from each section of the orchestra as well.

I think that the technology of Kyma was just beginning to catch up with his vision for what live computer music could be--the next step in what he had been doing with the SALMAR and later the yahaSALmaMac--being able to improvise with the timbre itself, using the same algorithms that he had developed for improvising with notes.

He was right there at the leading edge--still exploring and still taking calculated risks in order be able to do something new.

-Carla Scaletti
designer of the Kyma language and President of Symbolic Sound

Articles & Reviews of the yahaSALmaMAC Midi Orchestra

  • Illinois' famous unknown master of electronic music An interview and article by Kyle Gann, printed in the Chicago Reader.
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