MusicBox (Knut Wiggen, EMS Stockholm, 1971–75)

MusicBox was a composition program written for the Elektronmusikstudion (EMS) in Stockholm under its director, the Norwegian-born composer Knut Wiggen. The first version was finished in 1971. In MusicBox a piece of music was not a list of notes but a network of boxes, each holding a mathematical function, that passed numbers on to each other.¹

The studio

Wiggen (1927–2016) led the Stockholm concert society Fylkingen from 1959 and built up EMS from 1964.² EMS was a hybrid studio: analogue oscillators, filters and reverbs controlled by a computer, a PDP-15 bought in 1970.^1, 3, 4

Composing meant typing numbers. With the studio's language EMS-1, each event was described line by line, on a teleprinter that punched paper tape.¹ The composer Lars-Gunnar Bodin remembers another program on the same machine where one forgotten semicolon spoiled a whole session.⁵ Jan W Morthenson called the work "very cumbersome for making a single sound".³

How MusicBox worked

As Rudi points out, typing numbers for pitch and duration is not much different from writing notes. Wiggen wanted the composer to work with rules and structure instead. In MusicBox each box took a number in, applied its function and sent the result to the next box. Small boxes could be wrapped into larger ones and reused, so that complex events came out without any pitch being written down. MusicBox was written in Fortran. The programmer David Fahrland wrote the first version; Kaj Beskow added sound moving between four loudspeakers, and Zaid Holmin better macros.¹

Rudi describes the score of Sommarmorgon (1972), the first study. A Gauss box sends out an irregular stream of numbers between 35 and 14,000, bell-shaped, so that low numbers are rare. If boxes sort the stream into three ranges: below 200, 200 to 1,600, and 1,600 to 14,000. In each range Choice boxes pick a duration and a waveform from fixed lists by weighted chance, and the number itself becomes the frequency. The rare low numbers get the long durations, so in the piece a dark tone is also a long tone. Half of them have a waveform other than a sine; the high range plays only short sine tones. Two realisations exist, made with different random seeds: different, and recognisably the same piece.¹

New drawing

Five studies, then nothing

Wiggen made five studies with MusicBox: Sommarmorgon, Etyd and Resa (1972), Massa (1974) and EMS för sig själv (1975).¹ They were composed for four channels.⁴ Resa was played at MIT in 1976, at the first international conference on computer music.¹

The program was never given to other composers. A new board wanted EMS to serve composers' immediate needs, and Wiggen resigned in 1975.^1, 2 He took the code with him, partly because EMS did not want it and partly so that it would not be used for "elevator music".¹ Rudi compares the idea to Max and Pd, where music is also made by connecting boxes.¹ The five pieces were issued on an LP in 2018, in new stereo mixes.⁴

In JAEV's exhibition Content, numbers from a hash of the day's text choose among fixed options in a similar way; see SHA-256 as a random source.