What technological revolutions have been important in shaping the EMS and the field of computer music?
Vercoe: In the early days at Princeton we initially worked on the IBM 7094 and IBM 360 computers, which were by today’s standards very slow; to synthesize a good three-minute high-fidelity piece took some 3-6 hours of computer time. We must have had some belief in where it was all going; the difference these days is that you can now do pieces of that complexity at real time or better. Once the level of synthesis gets to be computable in real time, you have a very different situation. If it’s 99% up to real time then it has to be recorded and played back later. But once it hits 100%, you’re suddenly in a situation where you can play the entire piece and interact with it while it’s actually being created. That induces a whole new way of thinking about things, and it engenders new, interactive opcodes in the computer music language. The pieces that can happen these days, on either big expensive workstations which most composers don’t have access to or relatively inexpensive PC’s with good
