INTERFACING ART AND SCIENCE

Ivor Darreg

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The urgent need to establish better communication between the "two cultures" has become a matter of increasing public concern lately. Call them mathematics and music, call them art and engineering, call them poetry and technology, call them science and literature--the fact still remains that what we need is not a co-existence in isolation, but fruitful interaction.

And Ivor Darreg is one of the people who have been doing something about it. His main avenue of approach to the problem has been in the field of audible communication3 but the visual, tactile, and more abstract phases of this endeavor have not been neglected.

You probably have heard of the various efforts (especially during the 1960s) to form teams and groups of artists and engineers, of literary persons and scientists. Not too much came of this, despite the very real and important fact that artistic and scientific creativeness are akin. We will explain in a moment why these attempts did not lead to a satisfactory solution.

Suppose we borrow a computerese buzzword: Interface. The two cultures need to be interfaced. Ivor Darreg is one of those who are doing so. Look at the situation: One and the same word has different meanings to artist and engineer. For example, modulation is the process of changing key and/or mode in music; an expressive handling of tones of voice to the dramatist, actor, or public speaker; but in electronic engineering modulation means the variation of one kind of electric current by another, superimposing a signal on a carrier, or having two or more currents interacting with one another to produce sidebands--for instance the imposing of voice or music currents upon the "carrier" of a radio station. Only a person familiar with these opposed meanings, and to whom they all make sense, can resolve the impasse resulting from people in these diverse fields attempting to converse.

Not only has Ivor Darreg composed music for some 50 years; he has built instruments, and modified existing instruments. In the last several years, he has produced some novel and effective instrument designs, which now are ready to be taken up by custom builders and other interested parties. Some time ago, he correlated the structures of music and language, investigating the borderline between speech and music. The resemblance between elements of musical form and grammar and syntax has been another point of interest. It is found that music and linguistics have many features in common: indeed they must, for both appeal to the ear. For instance, the rate at which you speak syllables in normal conversation is about the same as that of the violinist's or singer's vibrato. A spoken sentence and a musical phrase for quite similar reasons, must not strain the hearer's memory-span by too complicated a structure. Through co-ordinations like these, useful cross-fertilizations between science and art will result in progress for both!

Ivor Darreg's circle of acquaintances and their acquaintances have been kept abreast of developments by the issuance at irregular intervals of a bulletin, The Expose', begun in 1945, which has been listed and reviewed in literary journals, and selections from the earlier issues will be anthologized in booklets before long.

Besides this bulletin, Ivor Darreg has produced books, booklets, and leaflets on a long list of subjects, such as: Audible Communication, Neutral Monism, Inspiration and Creativity, The Computer and the Brain, Lumia: the Art of Light, Shall We Improve the Piano? Booby-Traps of Everyday Language, Abs tract Nouns, The Language problem in World Affairs, What Makes Arithme Tick?, Information Theory, Numalittera, No Reading Aloud Allowed! The Uplift that Lets You Down, Stenomath, Art-o-mation, New Moods.

In addition, there are many charts, diagrams, and tables. The last few years have seen the inauguration of a journal called the Xenharmonic Bulletin, dealing with musical systems and scales which do not sound like the conventional 12-tone equal temperament. This bulletin has published frequency and fretting tables, and how-to information -- new instruments, tuning, the impact of electronics on what is possible nowadays.

Items and articles by or about Ivor Darreg have appeared in newspapers, books, and magazines, among them: Guitar Player, Trace, Product Engineerng, Musical Courier, Pacific Coast Musician, Xenharmonikon, and others. For the last year or so, he has contributed articles and reviews to the new magazine Interval, and is affiliated with the Interval Foundation of San Diego, California, which promotes music in systems beyond 12 tones per octave.

The studio of Ivor Darreg, as well as the music composed there,was listed in Repertoire International des Musiques E'lectroacoustiques / International Electronic Music Catalog, compiled in France under the auspices of the Office de la Radiodiffusion et Television Francaise in Paris and the Independent Electronic Music Center in upstate New York.

The usual piano lessons were taken from 1925 onward, later to be followed by organ, and then violoncello under Ferdinand Sorenson of the Portland Oregon Symphony -- this latter between 1931 and 1935. The late Charles Wakefield Cadman was Ivor Darreg's composition instructor. Orchestra performing experience was gained under John F. Metzger of San Diego, and in other orchestras and ensembles at various locations.

Back in the 1930s, there was talk and speculation on electronic musical instruments and their future, even though many worshippers of the status quo ignored this as carefully and diligently as possible. The thereminvox was a showpiece, played without touching it; later on, electronic organs appeared. Here was an answer to the musical impasse which the conventional instruments had reached even then; here was the road to musical progress which Ivor Darreg had been seeking. His experience with various ensembles and orchestras proved that there was a need for greater control of the proportion of noise to tone in musical instruments, especially when the music got louder. The noise got louder faster than the tone did. In the upper register of the piano, there is so so much irrelevant noise that even professional piano-tuners have trouble with these evanescent tones. Listening to concerts showed the many gaps--missing instruments--as well as the limitations, often severe, of what instruments there were. How was a composer going to avoid sounding like a faded carbon copy of previous composers? This meant new instruments, some electronic, some acoustic. Remember: this was long before synthesizers and computers!

Among Ivor Darreg's instruments are : an electric keyboard drum, the amplifying clavichord, an electronic keyboard oboe (1936), an amplifying five-string cello, a thereminvox, and a special electronic organ with elastic tuning and the ability to play in 12, 17, 19, and 22 tones per octave. Around 1969, he began refretting guitars to non-12 scales and has done this for others also. In the mid-seventies he developed a whole family of steel-guitar-type instruments, some with justly-intoned chords, and some extending the bass register as low as the piano goes and beyond (The Megalyra, of which there now are 5 instruments). In collaboration with Ervin Wilson, Glen Prior, and others he began constructing metallophones in such scales as 5, 10, 7, 14, 17, 19, and other numbers of tones per octave. Jonathan Glasier of Interval Foundation performs on some of these instruments and has arranged concert appearances for Ivor Darreg. Other collaborations include exchanging compositions in just, 17, 19, 22, and 31-tone systems with several composers and correspondents all around the country. It is now hoped to extend this to the detwelvulating of synthesizers, computer music, electronic organs, and other instruments.

Various activities within and outside music, including linguistics, phonetics, and translating, and the necessary occupation with the mathematical and physical aspects of musical instrument design and music theory, led in 1958 to a sudden insight: the 9-century-old syllables of Sol-Fa express relations among tones akin to the relations dealt with in symbolic logic. This linked itself up with the question, Is mathematics speakable? Can you talk in it, rather than merely about it? Between 1958 and 1960, he did something about it: the Numaudo (numbers made audible) internationally-pronounceable code for spoken mathematics and symbolic logic. This was published in a book, which soon sold out, and further orders have had to be filled by xerographic copying since then. Numaudo is NOT a language! It is not a system of letters, but of syllables, each syllable standing for a letter or symbol used in mathematics and logic. This is emphasized by coining a special term for the international written and printed mathematical notation in common use-Lomano. Till now, this standard notation had no name of its own! Lomano (logico-mathematical notation) is a deaf and dumb purely silent written language, which Numaudo vocalizes without changing it and without translating it into ordinary words.

Nor is that the end of the story: typing out a phonemic transcription of Numaudo syllables generates a second-order code called Numalittera, and this code, compatible with all typewriter and peripheral keyboards and printouts, requires no special characters. Thus it becomes a business skill, usable in many walks of life. The Numaudo System has great potential for alleviating math anxiety, for preventing high-school dropouts, for math instruction for the blind, and for promoting general mathematical literacy. Those who learn the system will take over its growth.

Anyone wishing to do anything to, by, with, for, in behalf of, on account of, with the advice of, in collaboration with, or about the projects of Ivor Darreg, should write Ivor Darreg, 3612 Polk Avenue, San Diego CA 921O4, or phone (Area Code 619) 284-7075. Why procrastinate?