Me and my Casio. In my exploration of creativity in all its forms, writing, acting, invention, imagination, art, science, poetry, photography, I find music most fascinating. I was raised in a family that considered music as entertainment. The only instrument anyone in the family played was a Player Piano that used  punched paper rolls that moved the piano keys with solenoids controlled by the holes punched in the song rolls. There were lots of different songs that were available but my parents mostly had rolls of sing along standards and dance music. The player piano lasted a couple of years before the player ceased to work and since no one actually played the piano it was disposed of. When I was in college I wished I had learned to play an instrument growing up. The saxophone would have been my choice but with my seventh nerve was cut. I have no control  of  the  muscles on the left side of my face so my lips can’t seal. I can’t even blow up a balloon and drooling is a problem. A wind instrument was out of the question. Once out of college I decided to get into music and I bought a $300 upright piano, got some books on learning to play and started practicing scales. After a year of getting nowhere I found a teacher and took some lessons. I never learned to sight read I would just improvise. The upright was hard to move around so I  purchased a Rhodes piano.

 Then I learned about the Alpha Syntauri synthesizer. Money wasn’t an issue and I invested $5000 in a system that used an Apple 2e along with syntauri synthesizer boards, drumulators, MIDI interfaces, amplifiers, speakers and tape recorders. I learned to make digital instrument sounds as waveforms of all kinds, storing the information on 8 inch paper  thin floppy disks. I played around for years experimenting and learning about sounds and multi track recording. Eventually the Japanese caught up and  Yamaha came out with a thousand dollar synthesizer.  A couple years later Casio got the price down to $500. Years later my haphazard approach to learning lead me to purchase a Casio with many of the alpha syntauri capabilities for $350.

This page contains several compositions I made in the mid 1980s on my Casio. I recorded them on cassette tapes, put them away and forgot them. About a year ago I began transferring my CDs, cassettes, and albums to my iPhone. I had literally hundreds. I ran across a tape marked songs for ma and pa and then several other tapes with recordings I made while playing my casio. They are crude recordings. You can here the tape machine noise and the pops when I would start and stop recording. I had something like 30 songs I taped. All are original compositions. Some had titles but most were just numbered. The two I have put on this page are number 4 and number 3 mp3. At some point I will add more. Number 4 was first recorded in 1986 and #3 in 1987.

#4

#3

I still have that Casio I bought over 36 years ago. It still works. It’s waiting for me to get the urge to play. The recordings are my creative musical memories.

When you think about it music is amazing. It’s so amazing it’s difficult to explain, like explaining color to a blind person.  Much of the magic of music occurs in the unconscious regions of the human mind after being collected and processed by the peculiar physical attributes and sense organs of human beings. All the music made by people around the world, all the music ever made from the distant past to the present is made for and by human beings. Only human beings with human ears and human auditory senses and human brains to process the compressed variations in air pressure create in the mind the music we all appreciate and enjoy. Just as you learned how to see, how to make sense of the jumble of light and color frequency exploding in your mind when you open your eyes, you also learned how to hear, how to make sense of that jumble of air pressure variations coming at you from all around you into your ears on the way to the brain.

Have you ever wondered about the golden record sent on Voyager as it moves away from the solar system into the Universe at large? What do you think will happen if it is found by an alien civilization? Assuming they have a technology that could play back the record by recognizing that the grooves contained information that meant something, that their technology could spin the record at 16 2/3 revolutions per minute, and that they knew what a minute was. That being accomplished; what would happen?  The record has songs from all over the world and from various  eras of world history: Louis Armstrong, the Kronos Quartet, even a Navaho Night Chant. 

What would happen? Their alien ears and auditory sensors (assuming they have ears of sense organs that pick up our auditory frequencies) will distort the patterns that were created on earth with its air constituents and pressures which would be different different on  the alien world. The sounds of the music will be noise, gibberish.  The frequency variations may have an effect on the aliens but any similarity to human reactions would be highly unlikely. There are words and speeches that might with effort be translated into  equivalent concepts by the aliens. But translating the music would be impossible since music (excepting lyrics) involves emotions not reason even if the aliens had equivalents in their being. The record would be the indecipherable ciphers. Maybe in the far distant future when human and aliens have coexisted for a significant time, some truly great composers will create music that resonates with both human and alien beings. That would be amazing.