Ivor Darreg's Progress Report December 1967

Note the new address since summer of 1966: Ivor Darreg, 3426 Winslow Drive, Los Angeles California 90026. You can keep the street number straight by noting that it ends in 26 just as the Zip number does. I still get mail addressed to Exposition Blvd., and while they are forwarding it, I don't think it wise to keep on imposing on the Postoffice Dept. more than a year, do you?

The postoffice's diligence in forwarding the mail here stands out all the more because of the faux pas by the Telephone Co., which reassigned the old number too soon, and did not refer calls, and did not notify the holder of the old number either. Almost a year went by before a new directory with the present number (664-8893) appeared. If you lost me somewhere along the phone line, that is the reason. To make things more intriguing, a roofing company has a very similar number to this one, so you can imagine how many calls I had to answer during the last rainstorm! (And this roof leaked in one corner.)

Among the advantages of moving here: less smog, because this is almost at the summit of a steep hill and the wind blows the smog away. The quiet up here is deeply appreciated after 20 years of Exposition Blvd. freight train and truck traffic, which went on 24 hours a day seven days a week. Somebbdy who lived here before, had excellent common sense: They removed the grass from the slope in front of the house and installed a creeping cover-plant, so no drudgery of mowing a hillside lawn. That is humanitarianism in action. The principal disadvantage of this place is its built-in chronic backache, from climbing the hill. It's so steep on Maltman avee, the next cross-street, that it's no fun running down it. Micheltorena street is interrupted at the corner of Winslow Drive, a short distance east of here, by a flight of 208 steps down to Sunset Blvd. (Who would climb that?---unless misinformed by the bus line information, of course.)

People driving here are advised to use Edgecliffe Drive, which runs South from Sunset Blvd., and fortunately does not live up to its name. Winslow, two blocks West of here, runs into it.

3426 is the lower floor of a duplex, considerably above the street, on the South side of the street.

Acoustics here are excellent, making this quite suitable as a music studio. The front room sounds much larger than it really is.

MUSIC: I am a composer first cf all, so let's put music first in this report. "Progress" here will have to refer to the field of music generally--during 1967 the status of electronic music has risen amazingly. New instruments are on the market, including some that I predicted 33 years ago, so I can enjoy the last laugh in this instance at least.

The guitar fad has blossomed into a boom, so I expect to become involved in various vays. Many changes can be rung on electric pickups for guitars, and it permits building bass instruments of smaller size. Hybrid guitars (partly acoustic, partly electric) have become popular. It would be stuffy smug snobbish of me to decline the opportunity to compose for these instruments!

Companion-piece to the new guitars would be the ew compact portable transistorized "combo" organs. These are not primarily pieces of furniture, as the previous models of "home-style electronic organs" and those "chord organs" have been; these new compacts mean business. They can go to small places as well as big halls and there are so many new makes and models of them that I am really amazed. Even if you haven't considored the organ before, take a look at these instruments--I sincerely believe this is the future of the keyboard in the home. WARNING: Accept nothing less than a full 5-octave keyboard.

Fortunately, I come well-preapred: I have written quite a number of compositions for such organs. Copies of some of these can be supplied to order: write for information.

Just the other day I wrote out my latest piece in this category: Study In Fifths, which stands between the traditional classical harmony and scale-system, and the atonality that has been a feature of the 20th century thus far. I also have a tape of it, and hope that I and others can make further tape of this composition on different kinds of organs. My present tape was made on my specially-built electronic orgran.

A word about this instrument: When one does not have to design an organ for mass-production and conventional manufacturing methods, there are many, many unexplored possibilities open. Now that tape recorders are ubiquitous, I can write for the hi-fi in the living room, and forget about the concert hall. Since I compose in a livingroom, I know just how it is going to sound for the average listenere Not only that: I can design and build new instruments expressly to be recorded. That is, I take seriously what is known among different kinds of engineers today as the Total System Approach.

I am a composer writing for a listener. So I have the right to control all the intervening steps between me and the hearer, provided that I be willing to assume the responsibility involved. I am not obligated to stop at the sheet-music stage, or the the writing for the given instrument with all its foibles and vagaries: I can consider the total communication channel as a whole and aim for a certain result in the listener's home.

In case you have wondered, why did I build my own organ from scratch, rather than taking some existing instrument for granted, now you have the reason. I have written for the conventional, traditional instruments, so now I am entitled to go on--only this is progress. If you don't want to go on with me, you don't have to. I have written for the piano, pages and pages.

For those who have not hoard it yet, this organ is one-third of the eventual instriunent. It represents the swell (upper) manual, with an emphasis on reedy qualities of tone. Each note of it is tunable over a wide range. This means that it can play in the ordinary l2-tone equal temperament (it can be played with other ordinary instruments) but it can also be re-tuned in half an hour or so to many other tuning-systems, such as just intonation, 17-tone, 19-tone, 22-tone, and 24-tone (quartertones). I have tapes in these different systems, so for the first time a really objective comparison is possible--the same instrument tuned differently, rather than different instruments of necessarily different timbres, which would influence one's opinions. Better yet, there is no financial investment in odd-ball tuning systems, and since I built the instrument myself from the parts, it can't be repossessed!

This organ has a special unique feature such that it does what an ensemble of string players does, or a chorus of a capella singers can do: the notes adjust to one another, communicate with one another; and instead of being al lidentical as peas in a pod, they are individualistic as the players in an orchestra are. Obviously, this state of affairs owuld not be practicable with a commercial, mass-produced instrument. Since this organ can be recorded, it does not have to be built in quantity for a large number of listeners to hear this effect.

This also means that if a commercial electronic organ is played along with it, the diversity of characteristics will be pleasing and useful. It does not mean I object to mass-produced instruments; only that I have the right to build at least one different organ. And as electronic music consultant I would design mass-produced instruments quite differently indeed from this special instrument of mine.

I wish I could report as great progress in another sector, but alas: my amplifying clavichord, which also is a very distinctive and unique instrument, was badly damaged moving here and was out in the weather six weeks because it could not be moved into the garage before that time. Two offers to restore it, however well-intentioned, fell through, so I must repeat my plea for facilities to rebuild it or replace it. Portunately, I do have three tapes of the clavichord when it was in good condition, and I have been able to play these this last year, with uniformly favorable responses. No doubt the current guitar boom has now conditioned the public to this kind of tone. My clavichord is not a slavish imitation of the classical clavichord, and has nothing to do with the piano either. I built it in l94O--now there would be a real demand for this kind of timbre. It is more flexible and expressive than the harpsichord. Can you, as a favor to me, make it widely known that this instrument should be restored?

I have had most heartening cooperation in what I call xenharmonics: the exploration of scales other than the conventional 12-tone. Ervin Wilson has provided me the opportunity to compose on guitars in the l7, 22, 31, and 41-tone systems; John Chalmers has provided computer tables pertaining to musical theory; and I have been presented with the Schafer Undevigintivox, a four-octave metal-bar instrument in the l9-tone system As my share, I have produced charts, diagrams and tables.

Just recently there has been a trend towards Oriental styling in rock-and-roll and other typees of music with which I have not been connected. Some people interested in this have been here in recent months, and are meeting me halfway. There seems to be a new younger generation that is not so hidebound and reactionary-conformist as the previous younger generation was, On my side, I am now promoting the idea of "Ultra-Oriential:" by this I mean that Los Angeles is East of Tokyo, Taiwan, Arabia, and other places; so I can be more oriental than they, and I should be, because they are Westernizing their music too much.

I was invited to give four recitals of my compositions in the past year, and Wedward Kneifel arranged a surprise recital here, which crowded the livingroom. I do not plan formal recitals nor treks to distant places; instead people can arrange to come here or to obtain copy-tapes. Electronic music should take advantage of the new way of bypassing the concert-hall so the listener can be relaxed at home.

I know, this seems heretical to some of you; but in the earlier times music was made at home, so there is tradition behind it after all. Nineteenth-Century Romantic music should be performed by symphony orchestras in concert halls, for that's the way it was intended--but this does not mean we can't change our way of doing things for the new music.

When the smog let up and there was ample sunshine, I produced many copies of music the last year---and besides this, a list of compositions with samples of some of them (enclosed with most copies of this Report). Also, new copies are available of my song Pilgrimage, words by Paul Nami, written 30 years ago.

LINGUISTICS: This last year, I have translated both from and into a number of languages, and have studied some new books that tell of startling breakthroughs. Linguists are finally coming around to a realization that spoken language is primary, and are paying more attention to phonetics/phonemics. I have had interesting correspondence with originators of artificial languages, and besides that have used Esperanto. The field of machine translation is going through a pessimistic phase just now, purging itself of too much science-fiction and cryptographic approach, and I hope eventually to be somewhat involved in this.

My composition on tape, "Endopsychic Quartet" is more linguistic than mucical: it is a superposition of several copies of my voice, where myselves get to arguing. The surprising discovery to come from it is that an effective International Language of the Subconscious can be made out of speech-sounds that don't mean anything--but most listeners say they do!

NUMAUDO: Happily I can announce real breakthroughs regarding the Numaudo System for spoken mathematics and Logic. I have made up many new charts and diagrams, and have produced some tapes which can be copied. I have an actual Numaudo-speaker, live and breathing, to prove that it is easy to learn the syllables and that they work. Copies of the Numaudo book oV 1960 are nearly all gone--only four left.

In recent weeks I have had a chance to observe a child who was learning arithmetic, and without revealing my purposes, to confirm what I had thought all along--that the ordinary-language translation of numbers and symbols is confusing and is & is a real learning-block. But the real breakthrough was the discovery thisummer of Translo and Scribberish. You can't vanquish villains and subdue the enemy if it remains nameless-- remember the savage tribes who guard their names, so they can't be conquered?

Instead of the awkward, longwinded circumlocution "The translation into ordiary language, such as English or German, of mathematical and logical numerals, signs, and symbols and letters," now I simply say "Translo" and have something short enough to deal with and expose as the culprit. I chose this word to imply that trying to read mathematics out loud in ordinary language compels you to translate it, and inacourately and confusingly at that.

Similarly, Scribberish' or "scribbled gibberish" means "the confusing and irrelevant and misleading mental pictures that you see in your mind when you utter or hear Translo."

I talked with several people and listened to some radio programs, and it dawned on me that I was making this harder for myself by calling a code. "Code," to most people, doesn't mean a system or scheme for communicating ideas, nor even something like the Morse Code; instead it means something dreadfully secret, abstruse, complicated, and perhaps unpleasantly military. Or something burdensome like the Moral Code or obnoxious like the Building Code or the Penal Code. Well, not too late to mend, so from now on it's the Numaudo SYSTEM of spoken mathematics.

Another breakthrough has been the creation of new labels for various consequences of Numauuo. Various phases or derivatives of it. Various concepts involved in using Numaudo. Translo and Scribberish I already mentioned.

The people interested in the Numaudo Systom have had quite a time making it clear to others that Numaudo is not a language and also that it is not a "computer programming language" like PL/I or Fortran. The more I try to explain, the hazier I make it. Any way out of this impasse?

I have found one at last: Numaudo now means the spoken syllables for mathematics and symbolic logic that I constructed in 1958. It means ONLY the SPOKEN syllables. Want to write Numaudo? You do so with the conventional mathematical symbols, letters, and numbers that you have always used. While not a language in and for itself, Numaudo converts mathematics into a language: call it Mathalogese or Logimathemian if you want to.

The written form of the syllables as Given in the Numaudo Book and elsewhere, is really not Numaudo; it is a second-order code, and hereafter let's call it Numalittera. It can be used on typewriters like this one, on teletypewriters, or as a sort of extra attachment to computer programming langguages. It is a bonus or by-product of Numaudo, something like a transliteration scheme. It would be used by visually-oriented people, whereas Numaudo is for talking people (and machines). I have other terms for other things, but they will only be used for limited purposes.

Why do I call this a breakthrough? Because it means that mathematics can be taught as if it were a language, orally, by the direct method (such as Berlitz, for instance). Also, mathematics can use the new "language laboratory" facilities and audiovisual centers now being installed at such expense in the schools, for teaching languages. Once the equipment is installed, it becomes financial commonsense to get more "mileage" out of it by giving it another use without increasing the investment. After all, it's the taxpayer's money.

I shouldn't have to overplead how useful Numaudo would be for blind people--this should be self-evident. Even if there were no other application for Numaudo, this alone would justify its existence.

Avant-Garde Dept.: About a year ago Talbot Winchell introduced me to Marshall McLuhan's book "Understanding Media"--and last summer I located copies of the other applecart-upsetter, "The Medium is the Message" and "Gutenberg Galaxy." Before the many just and unjust criticisms of these books leap to your mind, let me turn to another point: 1967 is the Golden Jubilee of Dada--oh, well, 1966-1971 if you want to be perfectionist about that. 1967 also brought me to the half-century mark (May 1917).

Dada, aocording to the books, was preceded by Futurism and followed by Surrealism. Actually they co-existed, and all three movements survive to the present day in one way or another. Right now, as you read this, you are living in the Future envisioned by, and to a considerable extent determined or influenced by, Futurism. So why not celebrate this Golden Jubilee? That's where the excitement stirred up by ~cLuhan comes mi he reconciles the co-existence (note I didn't say peaceful) of Happenings Hippies, Computers, Cybernation, TV, and Progress so fast it's Indigestible.

More about this in my next Expose, but for here, this: Some persons are busy ignoring all the new developments in the hope that they will go away. They cannot ever forgive McLuhan for publishing what they want silenced and suppresseds that the new means of communications and information-handling are already here and have already wrecked the old order. It is too late to turn back, and more important, too late to keep on pretending. Reality is now much more fantastic than science fiction, which is why I didn't become a professional writer of the stuff. In case you were wondering.

Instead of just dreaming or planning or only writing about it, I have done something about it. The new state of affairs is rebalancing the five senses: touch and hearing, and to some extent taste and smell, are oozing out of the eclipse they have been under during some 500 years of dominatioon by print. Having been concerned with audible communication a long time, I am well-prepared to take advantage of this. See the first pages of this Report.

The Futurists had plans for Tactilism--an art-form to be felt and touched and handled rather than merely looked at. Celebrating this Golden Jubilee, I have produced some Tactiles. I suppose it will be difficult for any art gallery to put up a sign saying TAKE H0LD OF THIS after all the centuries of PLEASE DO NOT HANDLE.

This does not mean that I have neglected the visual aspect. I have produced a series of abstract line drawings that can be superposed and kaleidoscopically varied-later on, this can be expanded to include color.

Besides that I have abstract sculptures and keep up with Op.

Writings: Since the publicity in the literary quarterly TRACE and elsewhere, inquiries about my news-bulletin the Expose from all over the world. While I couldn't produce an issue in 1967, I do promise to make up for lost time--I have material on hand for several issues and there are eager readers. Back numbers are on hand, for those of you who haven't read one yet.

I have reprinted quite a number of my publications, such as The Computer and the Brain, Instruments for the Modern Age, Neutral Monism, and Shall We Improve the Piano?, to name a few. Pressure of time may delay future publications; I can't say just now. The Spelling Progress Bulletin has printed some items of mine, and there have been inquires from some publishers about MSS.

Your suggestions are welcome regarding another writing problem: Correspondence, which is far too big for me to handle. Mailing even of bulletins, circulars, etc. is quite a burden. Being on the verge of success, I have to solve this situation quickly.

Though your name isn't listed here, there are quite a number of people who have been most helpful and co-operative, contributing to my progress, this past year and more.

In appreciation, IVOR DARREG.