Musical Applications
The first musical use of the algorithm was in the work May All Your Children Be Acrobats written in 1981 by David A. Jaffe, and scored for eight guitars, mezzo-soprano and computer-generated stereo tape, with a text based on Carl Sandburg's The People, Yes. Jaffe continued to explore the musical and technical possibilities of the algorithm in Silicon Valley Breakdown, for computer-generated plucked strings (1982), as well as in later works such as Telegram to the President, 1984 for string quartet and tape, and Grass for female chorus and tape (1987).
The patent was licensed first to Mattel Electronics, which failed as a company before any product using the algorithm was developed, then to a startup company founded by some of the laid-off Mattel executives. They never got sufficient funding to finish development, and so never brought a product to market either. Eventually Yamaha licensed the patent, as part of the Sondius package of patents from Stanford. It is unknown whether any hardware using the algorithm was ever sold, though many software implementations (which did not pay any license fees to the inventors) have been released.
Read more about this topic: Karplus–Strong String Synthesis
Famous quotes containing the word musical:
“Then, bringing me the joy we feel when wee see a work by our favorite painter which differs from any other that we know, or if we are led before a painting of which we have until then only seen a pencil sketch, if a musical piece heard only on the piano appears before us clothed in the colors of the orchestra, my grandfather called me the [hawthorn] hedge at Tansonville, saying, “You who are so fond of hawthorns, look at this pink thorn, isn’t it lovely?””
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)