1-Bit Symphony: An Interview With Tristan Perich

1-Bit Symphony is your second project exploring the “performance” of music in a self-contained object, or jewel case. What prompted you to create the first electronic composition, 1-Bit Music?

Tristan Perich: 1-Bit Music was my excited response to finally being able to create electronic music. I say "being able" because, while I had always dabbled personally in electronica, it never had the same formality and rigor that my classical compositions had. I grew up on minimalist music and minimalist art and their conceptual completeness kept me away from using electronics in my own formal work. The computer could always do too much; it didn't really have an identity like a violin did, for example. That all changed when I began working with microchip-based art and music, learning it from Douglas Repetto, the founder of dorkbot. I started working with them with the goal of creating kinetic art, inspired by Danny Rozin's Wooden Mirror [video below], but became consumed with sound after I found out I could create simple digital tones with the chips themselves. I was inspired by the fact that the system was conceptually interesting, to create sound with the most primitive digital information, binary data. And it gave a physical meaning to electronics that laptops didn't offer, the direct controlling of on and off pulses of electricity, routed from microchip to headphone speaker, to create sound. The CD case packaging brought it all together, allowing the audience to witness the process first-hand, instead of mediated through a recording.

 How does 1-Bit Symphony compare to 1-Bit Music? How has the piece evolved?

Four years separated the two albums, during which I wrote a lot of music for traditional classical ensembles accompanied by 1-bit music. These compositions allowed me to explore the primitive electronic square waves against what I considered primitive acoustic instruments. Violins, creating tone by a vibrating string, exercise one of the most basic ways of creating sound. Speakers are similar, turning electronic impulse into the movement of air with an electromagnet. Sending 1-bit waveforms to them allowed me to focus on the sound of the speakers themselves, turning on and off. I wanted the audience to be aware of the speakers, instead of having the speakers transparently tracing a recorded waveform in perfect emulative fidelity. All of this provoked returning to the original CD case format to essentially create a response to the first album. I rewrote the software in Assembly, to get even closer to the hardware and have more processing power for greater polyphony. And I treated the new album as a long composition instead of a collection of songs, an examination of what a symphony could mean when written for such minimal hardware.

How do you write the music for these compositions? Do you start on an instrument, write the music on paper, or start in the 1-bit medium from the very beginning?

They're 1-bit from the beginning, in a way. I wrote a special version of the software that takes input from the computer so I can work in other audio software to sketch out ideas. Ultimately, I rewrite everything as sequences of numbers that represent pitches, melodies, different voices, and the structure of the music. It's interesting how the music and the software are stored the same way in the chip's memory. When Alan Turing first described his abstract model of the "universal computer," its universality came from the fact that the computer hardware and the software were separate. The computer was a set mechanism, and the software a series of symbols on an infinite tape. In this way, the computer interpreted the software step-by-step, and both the software and the data that the software manipulated were stored in the same space. My music is influenced a lot by this way of thinking, which is not so far off from how musicians read sheet music, itself a kind of early programming language. From start to finish, how long does it take you to create these pieces? I've wanted to create a follow-up to my first album for years, but the specific idea of the Symphony came in early 2009, along with its more minimal layout of components and wires. I then spent a month rewriting the code and then the next four or so writing the music. The next year was spent tracking down the right parts and planning the production of the units themselves. I have around four assistants in New York who laboriously realize the idea with drills, adhesives, soldering irons and compressed air.

What is it about these contraptions, with movable parts, headphone jacks and working wires, that moves us? Why are people drawn to this artifact in a way in which they are not to, say, a regular CD, digital file, or cassette tape? 

We aren't privy to the inner workings of electronics much these days. A while has passed since televisions could be fixed by the guy on the corner, due to obscene yet entirely rationalized miniaturization. We have no ideas how our laptops work, and while we take for granted that there is science in there, most of us are as close to understanding it as magic. Circuit benders—who create music and art by opening up consumer electronics, manipulating and repurposing them to do things they weren't designed to do—are working to empower us to understand these things we use every day. My own response is an attempt at transparency, visually tracing the path electricity takes from the battery, through the power switch to the microchip, then through the volume knob to the headphone jack. Ultimately, these are simple things. I print the source code in the liner notes to communicate the side of the circuit you don't see: what happens inside that little black computer chip.

Condensing the complexities of a symphony into a 1-bit audio file creates a special kind of unlikely marriage… it’s nearly unsettling in this confined space. Without letting the cat out of the bag, so to speak, what do you feel this says about our notions or predispositions for orchestral compositions, digital music, and where and how each is made suitable for our tastes?

Until relatively recently, the history of composition has been writing music for instruments, growing bolder and larger towards the symphony orchestra and the opera. Composers, myself included, still write for these ensembles because we feel they offer us something meaningful, like how painting is still an artistic medium. There will always be more to say for these media. Their identities change with us. Many electronic musicians consider electronics their instrument, and this is how I see my work too. My own goal is to try to understand the mechanism in the electronics, and to look at how the abstract world of logic and code interfaces with our own physical world, via speakers in my music, or pen-on-paper drawings or cathode-ray televisions in my visual work. Writing for orchestra today need not be antiquated, and I imagine audiences will continue to seek out live music in the face of a more thoroughly digitally mediated lifestyle. Classical music has a fragility that is especially appealing as a rare, live experience.

When listening to music, what is your preferred mode of consumption? Headphones with an iPod? A CD stereo system in your apartment? A record player in a room with hard wood floors? Do you know why?

Perhaps a little hypocritical of me, I consume most of my music digitally, through an iPod with closed ear headphones or a way overpowered sound system in my studio. Strangely, the sound system makes me hyper aware of the playback because the speakers never break a sweat. I think music sounds best when played at a volume that just supersedes the output capacity of the speakers themselves, which is maybe why 80s boom boxes were so visceral an experience. I don't own a record player. I'm not an acoustic audiophile, though I insist on lossless audio compression when I can. I think this pile of contradictions is a result of the schizophrenia of growing up in the 90s, witnessing the transition from physical media (CDs) to ephemeral media (mp3s), coupled perhaps with the transition from dialup to broadband. I used to love the crappy mono compression of MySpace tracks and I cherish my corrupted mp3s from the early days of Napster. I love it all.

Who are your favorite composers? Classical, pop, contemporary or otherwise.

Early Philip Glass and Steve Reich are canonical and were part of my childhood listening on account of my parents' adventurous listening. Later on, composers like David Lang, Henryk Gorecki, Morton Feldman, John Cage of course. On the non-scored side: minimal electronic artists like Ryoji Ikeda, Carsten Nicolai, SND. And of course, artists like DJ Shadow, Underworld, Stereolab and Portishead were extremely influential early on.

What are you working on presently? What’s consuming your time these days?

I have a number of audio sculptures I'm working on that break down sound in various ways. The first that I finished, Interval Studies, are aluminum panels with around 50 to 100 speakers on each that each emit a single 1-bit tone. Cumulatively their pitches micro-tonally span musical intervals, like a half step, dividing it into dozens of slivers and presenting them at individual points in space, like a window on the spectrum of frequency. There are a few other versions, like one with around 1,500 speakers that was commissioned by Rhizome, which I'm working to finish this Fall.

Last question: Is there anything you would like to say about 1-Bit Symphony that you haven’t been asked thus far? What excites you most about the project?

What excited me most was getting a fresh opportunity to write 1-bit music. Aside from all the conceptual reasons for it, I'm ultimately really inspired by the primitive, gritty, electronic sound. I just wanted to take some time to thoroughly explore that. F