Edgar Berdahl on creating new electronic instruments
Have you ever heard sixty metronomes slowly going out of sync? What about a line the size of a telephone wire being plucked like a string? Listen to how Edgar Berdahl, Assistant Professor of Experimental Music and Digital Media in the LSU School of Music and the Center for Computation & Technology, takes seemingly impossible ideas and make them a musical reality. Additional works can be heard at Experimental Music & Digital Media, including upcoming performances and projects. (Transcript below)
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Transcript
Becky Carmichael
[0:00] This is Experimental, where we explore exciting research occurring at Louisiana State University and learn about the individuals posing the questions. I'm Becky Carmichael. Today, we hear from Dr. Edgar Berdahl from the Digital Media Center, where he explores the science of music and making new instruments with computers that shape the human experience.
Edgar Berdahl
[0:21] Does your favorite music have the ability to rouse your spirits, take your mind to another place, make you remember something that you had forgotten, or enhance your workout, make you drive faster or provoke an emotional response? Music plays an invaluable role in shaping the human experience and making it more joyful. For this reason music is also a fascinating field to study. Here at LSU, we are studying the science of music. The engineering of music technology and how this is informed by and informs the practice of music. Do you play an instrument, or are you close to someone who does? Have you ever stopped to think about how an acoustic musical instrument works? For thousands of years researchers have been studying musical instruments. My work explores the taxonomy, that is the scientific classification of musical instruments. In other words, I compare musical instruments with each other and study how they can be logically grouped into categories. I look for holes in the taxonomy and tried to discover new musical instruments to fill in those holes and to make new music. Often it is easier to use computers to simulate the sound of these new instruments rather than to build them. Let me explain using a few examples. A mechanical metronome is a simple percussion instrument, which is formerly classified as an idiophone. It generates a ticking sound over and over again. What about an instrument that is comprised of many metronomes all ticking at the same time? I studied this by simulating a percussion instrument made of 62 metronomes that all start at the same time and gradually go out of sync. Consider how you would perceive this sound. It's quite different from a normal metronome. Can you understand why it is easier to simulate this with a computer than to play it yourself or to build it. But imagine how challenging it would be in the real world if you tried to manually start 62 metronomes all at the same time. Many different chordophone instruments have strings, such as pianos, violins, guitars, etc. However, the tension on these stringed instruments cannot be rapidly adjusted in real time, but I wanted to hear what that would sound like if I could do it. So instead of building it manually, I created a virtual harp of strings whose tension can be rapidly varied in order to discover what this instrument would sound like if we were to build it. Here is the sound of the instruments pitches gradually wavering up and down. Or if the pitches are wavered really, really fast the sound of the string starts to melt into something completely different each time one of the tension modulated strings is plucked. It sounds like an explosion, but it can nonetheless sound high or low, like normal notes on strings. Here it is. Finally, here's one more example with the same instrument, but used in a different way. Imagine a string whose frequency gets reduced so far, that it starts to sound rhythmic instead of like a specific note. This would be like imagine plucking a guitar string and then having it gradually become as long as the cable on a bridge and what it would sound like then if it had the same energy in it that was there when you plucked it when it was a guitar string. Now you can hear what that would sound like. Here it is. Well, there you have it. Those are some examples of what we do in the Experimental Music and Digital Media Program. We are also developing very precise instrumentation for playing these virtual instruments so that we can use them for live performance. Imagining hearing these instruments played live in a concert hall with 82 loudspeakers, all playing at the same time, with sound coming from all directions. To the left. To the right. In front. Behind and above. If you come to one of our concerts, you'll discover what we mean.
Mark DiTusa
[4:44] So this is Dr. Edgar Berdahl. So you're in the Electronic Media and Digital Music, or do I have that backwards?
Edgar Berdahl
[4:51] I'm an assistant professor of Experimental Music and Digital Media.
Mark DiTusa
[4:55] Okay.
Edgar Berdahl
[4:55] Which is hosted in the School of Music. But I also spent half of my time working at the Center for Computation and Technology, which is an interdisciplinary computer science center on campus.
Mark DiTusa
[5:07] What is your journey to becoming who you are today? Like, for example, what did you go to college for? Like, as a major? Like, were you a music major or you a science major?
Edgar Berdahl
[5:16] I was an electrical engineering major.
Mark DiTusa
[5:18] Okay
Edgar Berdahl
[5:19] But I took as many music courses as I could all along the way all the way through my PhD and my postdoc.
Mark DiTusa
[5:26] Okay. So yeah, so you kept music a part of you for your life? And so well, then how did you from electrical engineering get to using your electrical engineer prowess in a musical setting?
Edgar Berdahl
[5:38] Experimental music is the way of the future.
Mark DiTusa
[5:41] Okay.
Edgar Berdahl
[5:42] Everything was experimental before it became typical. And so what we're doing right now here on campus is what everyone else is going to be doing 20-30 years from now.
Mark DiTusa
[5:51] Bold statement! Probably true, though. As an electrical engineer like did you see yourself going and doing what a typical electrical engineer would do?
Edgar Berdahl
[6:00] I certainly enjoy working in those areas as well. But when I was in college, I got very inspired by a course I took in programming computers for making sound and making music.
Mark DiTusa
[6:09] Okay.
Edgar Berdahl
[6:09] And in that course, I discovered that there was an entire universe of possibilities that I could reach just by learning a few programming tricks that had been completely inaccessible to me from before then. And as soon as I discovered that, I also learned how to listen to Experimental music.
Mark DiTusa
[6:25] So how does one listen to Experimental music?
Edgar Berdahl
[6:28] There are many different ways to listen to Experimental music. You can focus very closely on it, trying to hear all of the details, and that's really what I recommend. Other kinds of experimental music, particularly minimal music, lend themselves to more meditative kinds of listening. You can also listen to experimental music by engaging with it in an interactive way, such as encountering a sound art installation in a museum. And in order to hear the sounds you have to interact with it and so it's an ongoing process.
Mark DiTusa
[6:54] Okay. Okay. I'll try that next time I'm encountering Experimental music. So yeah, so you had this class and you kind of were exposed to experimental music, and that with your skill set, you could do that. So what did you do as a postdoc or where were you?
Edgar Berdahl
[7:08] From my postdoc, I took some of the techniques that I studied in my PhD, and I tried to make them more accessible for other musicians.
Mark DiTusa
[7:16] Okay, so what did you do as a Ph.D., I guess then.
Edgar Berdahl
[7:20] Well let's just say, as a postdoc, my focus was really on designing software that a lot of people could use and that could be deployed onto many different kinds of platforms. So I developed these... These physical model simulations that I developed, they can be compiled into over 50 different audio targets, meaning you can use them in your typical audio mixing software, you can use them in specialized computer music software, you can access them from web browsers, you can access them from embedded devices that you might install inside a building, you can access them from smartphones, tablets, etc.
Mark DiTusa
[7:51] So I guess in the end, you really did approach electrical engineering from a music standpoint, even in your PhD, right? And then from your postdoc, you kind of kind of went forward in that as well.
Edgar Berdahl
[8:01] Yes and what I'm trying to do is to do the programming in a way so that I never have to do it again for the rest of my career. So the idea is I develop a sound synthesizer, and then for the next 50-60 years, I can run it on whatever platform I want and adapt it so that I can focus more on higher level abstract aesthetic concerns when I want to rather than always being distracted by technical...
Mark DiTusa
[8:22] Well you make that sound like cheating, but really I think most computer scientists would hope that, you know, whatever they're working on, they can take their previous code and apply it there. But yeah, that's really cool and so you're LSU and I mean, I personally attended the Science Café at Chelsea's. And I remember seeing that you had this instrument where you had a slider. A mechanical slider, which is... It gives you mechanical feedback is what the mechanical slider is, right? And you had it set up so that it felt like you were plucking a string as you went through the center of this mechanical slider just like the one you could see in KLSU studio right here, in fact. I don't know if that's really a mechanical slider, but a slider all the same. And so what inspired you to make something like this?
Edgar Berdahl
[9:04] We perceive the world using many different senses, such as our ears and our eyes. We can use our body to feel objects in many different ways. There are many different receptors. We can smell things using our nose. And in my opinion, we've already had the revolutions for our eyes and our ears. In other words, we've had the audio revolution in terms of technology. We've had or we are having, right now, the video revolution in terms of technology. And I think that the next revolution that's going to come is going to have to do with the sense of touch as these technologies become more and more accessible. So my goal with this project was to be using these physical models for exciting the eyes, exciting the ears, but also for exciting the sense of touch.
Mark DiTusa
[9:48] I guess from a performative standpoint, and kind of thinking this through, it's very easy to be like... To give a visual and audio kind of component. Like when you play this, or when you make a video and, you know... Let's say we're having a show, you know, that's very easy to kind of convey to an audience. Tactile, as far as I understand, is very much a composer... Or not composer... A performance sort of experience. And so I guess that doesn't exactly translate to a show sort of format. But do you see somehow incorporating music that has a tactile element which the crowd can experience? Have you thought about that at all?
Edgar Berdahl
[10:23] Yes. Let me answer that question in two ways. One of them is that I think we need to be designing technology that is suited to what artists need. And so I think that providing a technology that enables artists to perform music more accurately, or to play notes faster, for example, or to play music in a different and more exciting way is a very important application because I don't think we should let industry tell us what technology we should be using for making music. I think we as musicians should be selecting this technology ourselves to meet our needs and our future needs. Secondly, we can also provide tactile stimulation to audiences using a variety of technologies that you probably have experienced at some time or other in the movie theater and or through your mobile device, the vibrational technology that's in your mobile devices that allows you to receive information without your eyes or ears, such as if your phone is in silent mode, is completely in its infancy. These transducers, these motors that vibrate your phone, are very simple and very cheap and very low fidelity. But we will soon be seeing the arrival of new motors that have much higher fidelity so that we can feel vibrations with a much more pristine quality. And so I could imagine going to a movie theater and having your chair rumble or the armrests rumble as well as having your phone vibrate because it's networked with the video system.
Mark DiTusa
[11:45] So you are an electrical engineer, but obviously you had a love for music.
Edgar Berdahl
[11:48] I'm an electrical engineer, and I'm a musician. I'm both.
Mark DiTusa
[11:51] Yeah. And you you keep both those identities, obviously. You didn't even say, oh, well, I'm an electrical engineer, but I'm a musician on the side. You said, no, I'm an electrical engineer and I incorporate my music in my work. And so my question is, like... I guess how did you get started on music? Like, what instrument did you learn or are you primarily just, "Oh, I love music" and then eventually picked up an instrument later?
Edgar Berdahl
[12:11] I learned how to play piano relatively early and then migrated to the guitar, and then from there to several other instruments. And since, since then, I've been very interested in learning new instruments and learning how they work and making music with them.
Mark DiTusa
[12:23] How skilled of a musician would you feel when you were getting your... I guess, when you were in college and becoming an electrical engineer? Because like, obviously, you had to kind of go, Oh, wow, you know, let's take this class on making sounds using computing and then eventually you kind of synthesized these ideas together to become an electrical engineer musician, you know?
Edgar Berdahl
[12:41] I think the important thing is to do both of them to the best of my abilities. Absolutely. Because I think they inform each other in a way that's entirely unique. And that's supported by the Center for Computation and Technology, here at LSU. In a manner, these kinds of interdisciplinary works are supported very widely and strongly throughout Europe, but in the United States are not supported as widely, but at LSU we're very lucky to have this center here, which enables us to do these works and invent the future.
Mark DiTusa
[13:11] For example, I'm a physics and chemistry double major, and I kind of did this not because, well, physics and chemistry, I want to combine them. You know? I didn't go into it thinking this. I just kind of went, oh well like physics, and I like chemistry. And then eventually I went, oh, well. And it's easier for me because the disciplines are closer to each other, but I kind of went, oh, well I really love these two majors. and I want to do research that combines these two. And a lot of the grad schools I've applied to... In fact, the personal statements I made were very much like, Look, I've done projects and physics. I've done projects and chemistry. In fact, there's evidence of me bringing experiences in both these places and kind of mixing them. And I really want to do that in grad school, because I feel like there are people that are much better at physics than me, but I don't feel like there's a lot of people who have my sort of training in both fields. And so it kind of just happened, you know? It kind of just synthesized on its own. I'm like, Oh, well, I'm good at these two things. Sure. And for the science radio, I kind of went, Oh, well, I do radio, and I like science. Oh, let's make a science radio thing. You know, it just kind of... It wasn't something I was actively thinking about. And so I guess what I'm trying to probe at is... I mean, what happened, you know? Did you just go, well, I'm an electrical engineer. Oh ,and I like music. Oh, there's you know, there's audio engineers. There's all these different things like, I know... What kind of clicked for you that you went, I can make these two passions into one passion?
Edgar Berdahl
[14:25] Really, I wanted to discover the future, and I think the future lies in places that we are still discovering, and many of those areas are going to be interdisciplinary areas, as you've observed. And in fact, it's very easy to calculate that because if you assume that there are in-disciplines that you can study, the interdisciplinary areas will include at least n squared divided by two approximately. But if you incorporate three different subjects into one particular study, then suddenly you have something that has an n to the third power in it. And so you can see that there are many more opportunities for discovery in these interdisciplinary, or even transdisciplinary areas, than there are in the traditional disciplines. As you will probably well know, if you imagine getting a PhD in particle physics, you could imagine spending seven years preparing an experiment. A single experiment that you run in one day, and then publish about on a paper with... I don't... Actually I'm not familiar enough, but I guess maybe 40 other authors potentially.
Mark DiTusa
[15:27] Sure, yeah.
Edgar Berdahl
[15:29] It's much more challenging, at least in my opinion, to discover something new if you're working within the confines of a field that has existed for a while. But of course, remember back when people were making a lot of advances in physics, it was very new, and probably a lot of the people who are engaging in that inquiry consider themselves to be scientists, because the area of physics wasn't something you could major in at that time, for example.
Mark DiTusa
[15:53] How did you like figure out that engineering plus music was for you? You know, maybe it wasn't exact moment that you just kind of went. Did you even realize it was happening? I'm just curious.
Edgar Berdahl
[16:04] It was the course that I took when I was an undergraduate.
Mark DiTusa
[16:05] It was really the course?
Edgar Berdahl
[16:07] It's an amazing course, and I'm very lucky to be teaching a similar course here, which is Music 4745, which is a music course, but it's visited by about half in part by students from other departments across the campus, through the Avatar Digital Media minor.
Mark DiTusa
[16:22] Okay, that's really cool. So like you, you were like, this really inspired me. And then he went ahead, and you made something hopefully just as inspiring for other students. That's, that's amazing. And I really hope that, you know, something like a talk like this could also tell people that, I mean, at the very least well one, maybe you like music, and maybe you like science. And you know what? The two may seem far apart, but you can find a way to combine the two in a very interesting and revelatory way, you know? It can even be your job, as Dr. Berdahl has shown here. And I hope that your class, in specific, has taught people that, you know, you really can straddle the line between engineering and music. I guess as an anecdote, I remember seeing at conference once somebody looked at DNA, and I think they assigned some sort of like musical values to, you know, the four different sugars that make up DNA, and they went, I'm gonna make a song out of this. And I don't think that's particularly, you know, very deep, but I still think that's an interesting way to be like, I can make art a science, you know?
Edgar Berdahl
[17:17] People call that field tonification, by the way.
Mark DiTusa
[17:20] Oh okay
Edgar Berdahl
[17:20] And there are a lot of commercial applications of it that are still emerging. One of them being electric cars, which makes it a little noise, you might, for instance, walk backwards right in front of them, and get run over if you don't hear that. So we're thinking about ways to install speakers on cars, and how to design the sound of these cars, which otherwise are very, very silent in order to promote safety and an enjoyable audio atmosphere.
Mark DiTusa
[17:44] That's, that's awesome. So I guess a good question to ask is what kind of instruments or what kind of work are you doing right now, just like research wise?
Edgar Berdahl
[17:52] A lot of my research right now is on exploring this taxonomy of new musical instruments that are simulated through virtual physics emulations. That's a big part and then providing access to people is another big part. So designing technology so that you can not only hear these models and see them, but you can also feel them.
Mark DiTusa
[18:11] How would I feel one of the instruments that you would make, for example?
Edgar Berdahl
[18:14] You would feel it by exerting a force on it. And that's literally what happens with these force feedback devices, which is they exert the force on you that you would feel if you were actually touching these simulated objects. So you are... You're feeling the force. The force be with you.
Mark DiTusa
[18:31] Yes. Very topical. What's an instrument that you're working on right now? I mean, I don't know how long it takes you.
Edgar Berdahl
[18:37] I just finished the 62 metronomes was a week ago.
Mark DiTusa
[18:39] Oh Okay.
Edgar Berdahl
[18:40] Which is for a piece of music that is to be played out of 62 different loudspeakers at the concert on January 25 here in the Digital Media Center at 7:30pm.
Mark DiTusa
[18:51] So are they all around you? So you hear tick, tick all the way around you? Is that how that works?
Edgar Berdahl
[18:55] That's right. That's right. I think that 300 years from now, we're going to have speakers everywhere be able to hear sounds coming from all sorts of different angles and sides. And so we're discovering right now how to mix sound so that it sounds good. And so many speakers.
Mark DiTusa
[19:10] I mean, I hope sounds sound good or pleasant. Or I mean, maybe... Well, that's the thing, like, for example, in horror games, you know, and you have surround sound that's... Well one, it's immersive. And then two, because it's immersive that's even scarier. If you hear a sound... If you heard a sound, left, right, you know, or maybe let's say it's mono like, okay, I heard a scary sound. That's one thing. If you heard the scary sound is coming from specifically the back room to the right, you're gonna start running from the front to the left, you know? That sort of thing. And so more speakers are more, I guess, directed sounds can only bring someone even deeper into the music or experience that you're having, right? Yeah and I totally agree with you that... I want to go to this concert, and I want to hear what 62 Metronomes sound like, not from the speakers I just heard them from but from all around. So let's say that you're interested in a stem discipline, whatever it may be. Maybe it'd be engineering, mathematics, or science in some way, shape, or form. But you really like music, or you really like, I don't know, you like social science or something like this? What kind of advice do you have for those people who want to find maybe something interdisciplinary? How does somebody chase their dreams?
Edgar Berdahl
[20:15] Make it happen.
Mark DiTusa
[20:15] Make it happen.
Edgar Berdahl
[20:16] Forge a path. I mean, find your way?
Mark DiTusa
[20:18] Yes, find your way?
Edgar Berdahl
[20:19] Discover opportunities that inspire you and follow them through to your fullest ability.
Mark DiTusa
[20:25] Yeah, I mean, it's... It may seem difficult and especially if it's a, you know, an unforged path. You really have to do, you know, a lot of resource gathering yourself. But if you're determined enough, if you are, you know, if you feel like you're good enough for these two things that you really can find your way to doing EMDM and the CCT at LSU and making your own instruments. Like 62 metronomes or, you know, a string that turns into a cable and sounds like it's thrumming at a very specific period. You can actually hear it like Edgar Berdahl.
Edgar Berdahl
[20:56] If people are interested in discovering their own new interdisciplinary possibilities, I recommend coming down to Cultural Computing at the Center for computation and technology. That's the group I work in. But we have... You can just walk along the hall where we all have our offices and check out what everyone is doing. And you'll see that there are many different new emerging possibilities that involve not only computer science and music and electrical engineering, but also other disciplines such as digital art, business, and journalism. There's a space for other emerging possibilities. Yes.
Mark DiTusa
[21:28] Yes. There you go. For those of you who are interested in music and technology...
Edgar Berdahl
[21:34] emdm.music.lsu.edu
Mark DiTusa
[21:37] Well Dr. Berdahl, it's been a pleasure to talk to you and and pick your brain about emerging technologies in music.
Edgar Berdahl
[21:43] Thank you very much for having me. It's been a pleasure.
Becky Carmichael
[21:44] Experimental was recorded and produced in the KLSU Studios here on the campus of Louisiana State University and is supported by LSU's communication across the curriculum and the College of Science. Today's interview was conducted by Mark DiTusa and edited by David Wilder. To learn more about today's episode, subscribe to the podcast, ask questions, and recommend future investigators visit cxc.lsu.edu/experimental