Computers Are Busy Setting Music on Its Ear : Technology: Digital innovations have already revolutionized professional production. Now they are showing up in amateur hands.

When Sony Music producer Walter Afanasieff works on a record these days, he spends a lot of time gazing at one of the three computer screens in his Sausalito recording studio.

On one recent afternoon, it was music from an upcoming Celine Dion record that was spread out in graphic form before him, each note represented by a horizontal, pastel colored line. He listens to a few bars, points at the screen, and says, “Get rid of these two.”

Gary Ciromelli, Afanasieff’s computer guru, flicks the computer’s “mouse” and deletes the offending notes, just as an office worker might use a word processor. Now Afanasieff wants to add a couple of drumbeats. Ciromelli makes a few quick adjustments on the computer, and suddenly Afanasieff is playing drum sounds on the keyboard in front of him. The same bars are played again, Afanasieff adds the new beats, and a glance at the screen quickly reveals whether he’s done it right.

Such is the world of music in the age of the microprocessor. Already, digital music--in which sounds are represented by the ones and zeros of computer code--has revolutionized professional music production, ushering in rap music, lip-syncing scandals and wholesale changes in the way music is distributed and compensated.

And now, these same computer music technologies are moving into the living room. Advanced sound equipment is becoming a standard feature on many personal computers, and new software is giving amateur musicians professional-quality production capabilities. Video games are fast abandoning the irritating synthetic noises of yore in favor of sophisticated sound systems that provide compact disc-quality accompaniments, and in some cases even “compose” music instantaneously to match the action in the game.

“What hobbyists are starting to realize is that with these new technologies, they don’t really have to have any playing skills to manipulate the music data,” says Tom Beckmen, president and chief executive of Roland Corp., a musical instrument company. “It opens music up to a broad variety of people and creates a whole new process for dealing with the art form.”

It also creates new markets for the small but technologically sophisticated companies that produce digital music equipment. Roland and other instrument companies are diversifying into sound products for personal computers, while firms such as Emu Systems and Digidesign are discovering that electronic music hardware designed for professionals can now be simplified and sold to consumers.

Because high-quality sound is a central component on so-called multimedia PCs--viewed by many in the PC industry as the next big growth area--companies such as Creative Labs that specialize in low-cost sound accessories are experiencing a mini-boom. Firms including Opcode and Passport Design are profiting from broader interest in music-production software, while developers of educational and video-game software are coming out with a new generation of products that feature high-quality sound.

While the technology creates new financial opportunities, it also creates new problems. The use of music in personal computers and video games has raised concerns about how to value the music and compensate those who own the rights to it.

Of course, not everybody is altogether enthused about the computer music revolution. Even the now-ubiquitous compact disc--the first consumer-oriented music product to incorporate digital technology--continues to draw fire from some quarters. Rock star Neil Young, for example, said in a recent interview with the magazine CD Review that CDs are a “catastrophe” because they eliminate the subtle, supposedly inaudible sounds that give music its emotional texture.

Yet even Young admits that “digital control . . . is the ultimate.” By taking the undulating sound waves that people hear and converting them into the ones and zeros of computer code, digital technology makes it possible to store, edit and otherwise “process” music in an infinite number of ways, thus vastly expanding the set of tools available to professionals and hobbyists alike.

Digital technology has been used in some professional music production processes since the late 1970s, and the compact disc has been around since the early 1980s. But for most musicians, the computer revolution really began to take hold in the mid-1980s with the introduction of MIDI, or musical instrument digital interface, a set of protocols for describing, in computer language, what’s played on an electronic keyboard.

MIDI data represents what notes are played, how long they’re held, and how hard they’re struck, but remains entirely independent of any particular sounds. MIDI information can thus be used to “play” electronic instruments in a fashion similar to a player-piano, giving composers unlimited freedom to experiment with different tempos and tones, or even to create full orchestration from a single keyboard.

“A human being only has two hands, and MIDI made it possible to have keyboards that didn’t have keys,” explains keyboard artist Herbie Hancock. “I could have five or six or seven (electronic) instruments in a rack and play one or all of them without getting up.”

Today’s electronic “instruments” are a far cry from the artificial-sounding synthesizers that many people associate with electronic music. Rather, they’re sophisticated computers that contain hundreds or even thousands of sound “samples,” essentially miniature digital recordings of specific instruments. If the sampler is set on “cello,” for example, the MIDI codes will call up the individual cello sounds that correspond to the particular notes.

These technologies now govern not only how pop music is recorded, but how it’s performed as well. A live band using amplified instruments simply cannot recreate many of the elaborate sounds that are produced electronically in the studio, so many acts now use computers even in their concert performances.

That has helped to produce the pop music phenomenon: the lip-syncing scandal. While the most famous lip-syncers, Milli Vanilli, never even sang on their album, many bands regularly rely on pre-recorded tracks to bolster concert performances and assure that the “live” sound bears some resemblance to what’s on the record.

“A lot of bands are obviously faking the whole thing,” says Ciromelli with a shrug. Afanasieff--whose stable of artists includes New Kids on the Block, recently alleged to have lip-synced under a previous producer--says that when his bands play, they are really playing.

But they might not be playing what they appear to be playing. Percussionists, for example, often have electronic “triggers” hidden inside their drums. When the drum is struck, what’s heard is not the drum itself but rather an electronic drum sample that has been activated by the trigger.

While these digital tricks sometimes make a mockery of live performances, music lovers can take solace in the fact that many of the same tricks can now be performed at home.

“The home studio is really taking off,” says Suz Howells, a product marketing manager for Digidesign, a Menlo Park company that makes musical accessories for personal computers. Any hobbyist, she says, can now make “an all-digital recording that rivals what you can do in a studio.” It’s even possible to take a digital tape of that recording and get a few dozen or a few hundred compact discs made from it--a kind of CD vanity press.

A living room recording studio still isn’t all that cheap. At a minimum, it requires an Apple Macintosh or Atari computer with lots of storage capacity, “sequencing” software from a company such as Opcode or Passport, a MIDI electronic keyboard and interface box, a “digitizer” to convert vocals or other live sounds into computer code, and a digital audio tape machine to make a final recording. All of this costs at least $5,000, and it’s easy to spend far more.

But even a cheaper setup--a Macintosh, the software and a MIDI keyboard (most electric pianos are MIDI-capable)--makes it possible to compose music electronically and integrate those compositions with MIDI music that’s sold on computer disks. Passport, for example, sells a disk called “MIDI Hits” containing 300 songs. Because they’re in the MIDI format, they can be edited track-by-track, enhanced with new sounds, or otherwise manipulated in any number of ways.

“You can cut and paste your tracks, just like a musical word processor,” says Chris Yalonis, vice president of Passport.

The amateur musician who now buys sheet music may in the future buy a MIDI file instead. Two companies, in fact, are now marketing computer kiosks for music stores that will allow customers to select songs and have the sheet music printed out on the spot--or have a MIDI file of the song created on a computer disk.

Even if you have absolutely no interest in writing or playing, the digital sound revolution now means more than CDs. Long a standard feature on Macintosh and Atari computers--sound accessories are being added to IBM-compatible PCs (as are video and still-image capabilities), and a new genre of “multimedia” software programs are emerging to take advantage of the new features.

LucasFilm Games recently debuted a new “interactive” sound system for its video games that enables the musical accompaniment to track the action in the game. When Guybrush Threepwood, hero of adventure game “The Secret of Money Island,” heads into a dark and dangerous swamp, the music turns ominous. When he’s trying to lure an old flame into bed, it turns mirthful, then romantic.

And the sound revolution isn’t limited to the PC world. Nintendo, Sega and other vendors of video game machines that plug into the television set are also putting more emphasis on sound. A new generation of game machines that use CD-ROM disks--which have the capacity to store huge amounts of pictorial and sound information--promise to accelerate this trend.

“The game industry has had a big influence,” says Beckmen of Roland Corp. “They’re going out and finding top musicians to do their scores, so the whole standard for sound has been raised.”

The biggest barrier to further use of music in PC programs and video games is legal rather than technical. No formulas have yet been developed to determine the value of a song that might be one of many options on a multimedia program.

These “rights” issues, as they are known, have become a quagmire both for software companies and for musicians, who don’t know how to value their work for these new outlets and dread the potential for piracy. And the problem has been exacerbated by the fact that digital production techniques and the use of samples have muddied the question of who owns the rights in the first place.

“The days of there being songs with one owner are over,” says Ron Gertz, president of the Clearinghouse Ltd., a Los Angeles company that handles rights issues for musicians and filmmakers. “Traditional concepts of prorated royalties no longer work--we have to develop new concepts.”

Still, video games and multimedia computing are inexorably moving digital music technology out of the specialty music shops and into mass-market computer and electronics stores, says Ray Bachand, president of a San Francisco music software distributor called Thinkware. “This is still a small niche compared to databases or word processors, but its growing very fast,” Bachand says.

One of the fastest-growing areas of all, he says, is music education. One of the most popular new products, the Miracle Piano Teaching System from Novato-based Software Toolworks, comes with a MIDI keyboard and a software package, and plugs into any personal computer or Nintendo game machine.

Not only does the program use images of sheet music and graphics to show you what to play, it also provides feedback, telling you what notes you missed or how your timing was off. It requires students to replay lessons that are not done properly. And for fun and practice, it provides a “performance studio” where you can play along with a background orchestra. The power of this type of computer teaching is so great that even prestigious music schools such as the Berklee College of Music in Boston are now beginning to integrate computerized instruction into their curricula.

Surprisingly, schools are also beginning to use one of the odder spinoffs of the digital music revolution: karaoke sing-along systems. Karaoke got its start as a late-night diversion for inebriated Japanese businessmen, who would sing along with Frank Sinatra recordings that had had the vocal tracks removed. Today, though, karaoke has far broader appeal, and the machines are often sophisticated devices that can digitally shift the key of a song to accommodate the singer’s vocal range.

Pioneer Laser Entertainment, a Long Beach-based company that dominates the karaoke market in the United States, sells a so-called “combi” player that can read standard CDs, video laser disks, and the special karaoke disks that play vocal-less songs and simultaneously display the lyrics on a television screen. Bars and clubs are the most obvious market for these machines, which start at about $600. But Pioneer marketing manager Steven C. Rogers says that home sales actually exceed commercial sales.

Cynics might say that all of this technology is simply a license to create bad music, and that it will ultimately undermine genuine music-making among both professionals and amateurs. But Herbie Hancock is one of many musicians who take a much different view.

Computer technology, he says, “makes my life a lot easier, and allows me to get to the creative stuff more quickly. It’s added to my music. I’ve been a scientific type since I was a kid, and I never thought I would be able to combine my interest in science with my interest in music.”