An Electrical Future for Music
John Mills and A Fugue in Cycles and Bels [1935]
John Cage in his 1940 Guggenheim Foundation grant application identified a number of research sources that he consulted in the 1930s when formulating ideas that surfaced in his The Future of Music: Credo [1940 … or later]. In the section
‘(B) BRIEF HISTORY OF THIS FIELD OF MUSIC, STATEMENT CONCERNING ITS SIGNIFICANCE, EXPECTATION AS TO ITS COMPLETION’
he named Luigi Russolo, Edgard Varèse, Leon Theremin, Henry Cowell, and Joseph Schillinger as key figures in this history. He then noted
[In 1937] Carlos Chavez published his book, ‘Toward a New Music’, in which there is much mention made of the possibilities of electrical music. About the same time, John Mills, physicist, published his book, ‘A Fugue in Cycles and Bels’ which also [prophesizes] an electrical future for music. Similar prophecies have been made by physicists such as Dr. Vern O. Knudsen and musicians such as Dr. Leopold Stokowski in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.
As has been discussed in previous posts, Cage summarised these many prophecies in his Credo, and as such we should view this famous text not as a product of his genius, but as a digest of the ideas of a complex scenius of scientists and musicians writing and working on the electrical futures of music in the 1920s and 1930s.
John Mills’s 1935 book A Fugue in Cycles and Bels [New York: D. Van Nostrand] was mentioned on more than one occasion by Cage as an influential work, particularly concerning Mills’s ideas on the use of ‘graphical sound’ templates to construct optical film sound libraries. This post will specifically focus on Chapter 15 ‘Electrical Music’ that makes important interventions on the possible futures of the application of electricity to music-making.
John Mills [1880-1948]
John Mills was a physicist, researcher, engineer and writer who would best be understood today as a science communicator; that is, somebody who translates complex scientific information for a non-scientific audience, with the aim of educating, engaging, and inspiring public interest in science. He was also an important contributor to the development of transcontinental telephony, and held 29 patents relating to wire and radio telephonic communication. He studied at the Universities of Chicago and Nebraska, and then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology [MIT]. He taught at MIT, Western Reserve University and Colorado College before moving into research and engineering.
In 1911 he joined American Telephone and Telegraph Co. [AT&T] as a transmission engineer; here he played an active role in the transmission phases of the development of transcontinental telephony, and on a transatlantic radio telephone project. In 1916 he transferred to the Western Electric Company in the research department [that also served AT&T]. Here he focused on radio transmission and in WW1 conducted a radio training course for engineers. From 1921-1925 he became the Director of Personnel at the laboratories with responsibilties for recruiting and nurturing new technical staff. In 1925 Mill's Western Electric Company/AT&T research department was renamed the Bell Telephone Laboratories and became a key research and development center for telecommunications and other technologies. Mills was appointed Director of Publication for the Bell Laboratories Record journal that covered the activities of the laboratory; Mills described his role as ‘assisting colleagues in the publication of the results of their research’. He also took on general publicity and communications roles beyond journal activities. Additionally, he acted as an educational director, establishing ‘out-of-hour’ courses and developing educational materials.
In 1933 he planned the Bell Labs exhibits at the Chicago Century of Progress World’s Fair, and in 1939 those at the New York World's Fair and San Francisco's Golden Gate International Exposition. He was especially interested in audience participation in the displays of scientific advances - for example, in an interactive ‘hearing test’, a ‘Voice Mirror’ where visitors could hear their ‘telephone voice’, and demonstrations of high quality audio recording. A particular feature of the 1939 exhibits, though one that lacked audience participation due to its operational complexity, was the Bell Labs Voder speech synthesizer that had been developed from its vocoder research.
Mills activities also included developing Bell Labs informational films, such as The Electrical Transmission of Speech and The Nature of Speech and Audition [1923], Through the Switchboard [1925], A Telephone Call and A Circuit Study [1926], for which he created film scenarios. In the 1940s, Echoes in War and Peace focused on the Bell Laboratories contribution to sonar and anti-submarine warfare in WW2, with Mills again contributing the scenario and acting as technical supervisor.
Mills was a Fellow of the Institute of Radio Engineers, the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, and the American Physical Society. He retired from Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1945, and moved to California where he advised students at the California Institute of Technology. He died in 1948 on a visit to family in Rochester, NY.
As an author and ‘science communicator’, Mills wrote several books - as well as scientific articles - that aimed to communicate new developments in electronics and physics to wider audiences:
1908 - A Short University Course in Electricity, Sound, and Light
1910 - An Introduction to Thermodynamics, for Engineering Students
1917 - Radio Communication: Theory and Methods
1919 - The Realities of Modern Science: an Introduction for the General Reader
1921 - Within the Atom: a Popular View of Electrons and Quanta
1922 - Letters of a Radio-Engineer to his Son
1928 - The Magic of Communication : a Tell-You-How Story
1934 - Signals and Speech in Electrical Communication
1935 - A Fugue in Cycles and Bels
1944 - Electronics: Today and Tomorrow
1946 - The Engineer in Society
A Fugue in Cycles and Bels [1935]
As far as I have been able to ascertain, John Mills had no specific expertise as a musician. However, he had wide knowledge of and experience in the production, transmission and reproduction of sound through electrical technologies. In A Fugue in Cycles and Bels, Mills drew from this experience in explaining ‘what science is doing to music and what it can do for music’. He observed
The electrical arts of communication [have] supplied apparatus and techniques to increase enormously the size of musical audiences. Radio carries music to millions; improved methods of recording permit its preservation and reproduction long after the original sounds have ceased; and motion pictures are accompanied by music electrically reproduced. These electrical developments have had great effects socially and economically, and also upon the profession of music. Upon the art, so far, they have not had much effect. Quietly, however, in their own technical advances they have been laying the basis for a revolutionary change in music itself.
Mills’s book covers a great deal of technical ground in an accessible manner, concerning theories of sound, and technical findings from scientific studies of hearing. There are many research insights on sound and music covered in his discussion of amplifiers and engineers, audition research, loudness, overloading and distortion, noise, acoustics, sound recording and auditory perspective that I don’t have space in this post to cover - several of these are alluded to in statements and questions printed on the inside covers of the book, including:
Do you know why the bass notes in band music sound louder as the band approaches?
There are tones in orchestral music which could be omitted without being missed
Do you know that all the critics at a concert do not hear the same music?
The location of one’s seat makes a great difference in the music of a violin solo
As indicated, the focus of this study is to consider Chapter 15 - Electrical Music, and Mills ‘prophecies’ that appealed to Cage (and potentially influenced Carlos Chavez whose own book appeared 2 years after Mills’s).
Mills begins his discussion of electrical music by indicating how, in the field of chemistry, synthetic substitutes and imitations of natural products are sometimes profitable and attractive as novelties. However,
Synthetic products in the early days of a science are likely to be poor substitutes; but as time goes on and technological skill develops, mere imitations cease to be the objective. New products are sought with qualities superior for certain purposes.
He notes that music has been unaffected by developments in chemistry, but it needs to look towards the communication arts, as
the music of the future will involve synthetic imitations, substitutes and, very probably, productions superior in various respects to the more natural music of today. Electrical, or synthetic, music is entirely possible.
In terms of the orchestra, Mills suggests that the scientific study of tones, that is their overtone structures and intensities, will eventually result in composers being able to identify the overall mixture of instrumental tones they wish to achieve, and technologies could be developed that create such tones without traditional instruments. He foresees that
A series of pure tones would then replace the orchestral score. Each tone would be defined by its frequency in cycles per second and by its intensity in decibels above or below some reference level … A series of vacuum-tube oscillators, each controlled in intensity by a dial potentiometer, could produce the music through loudspeakers … The resulting system under keyboard control, and with many of its adjustments automatically performed, could replace the orchestra.
Mills emphasises that even if this portrayal of future music proves inaccurate, his point is that ‘complex music’ is nothing more than the result of ‘a series of pure-tone components of various relative intensities, and of frequencies which are separated by simple ratio intervals.’ He suggests that with this knowledge
… some composer of the future, who understands the electrical possibilities, will wish at some point in a composition to enhance some chords or groups of overtones to intensities impossible to any ordinary musical instrument or to any number of players which his stage will accommodate.
This enhancement can be achieved in two ways. The first is through the manipulation of instrumental sounds and intensities using ‘vacuum-tube amplification’ in a concert hall (e.g. using a loudspeaker and shielded microphone to give a piccolo ‘the acoustic power of twenty piccolo players’). The second is through a new electronic musical instrument creating novel tones using ‘vacuum-tube oscillators’ connected to a loudspeaker. This would be controlled by dials and switches, allowing different forms of attack, decay and vibrato. Mills suggests both of these methods are practical and achievable.
Mills then moves on to discuss another method of enhancing sound materials with new tones by combining electrical production and reproduction methods. That is, by mixing the outputs of a number of oscillators and recording these on a phonograph record or sound film to create the particular tone a composer wishes to achieve. These recordings would require ‘very little mechanical ingenuity’ to be reproduced from a recording ‘upon the depression of a key’. In fact, at the mid-1930s time of writing, such electronic instruments were beginning to be constructed, such as Ivan Eremeef’s Syntronic Organ and Photona.
Mills acknowledges that his suggestions for the development of future music ‘would be anathema to many music lovers’ but it was important to appreciate that
The electrical devices which are today in prospect can produce complexes of musical tones far beyond the dreams of composers; they offer untold possibilities but require new skills for their use.
There follows a further discussion of drawing sound directly onto film soundtracks, and it is this section that particularly drew John Cage’s interest. Mills argues that through the combination of sine waves, complex sounds can be transferred directly onto film without the need for recording.
The wave form of any desired complex sound may be constructed by accurate mechanical drawing. All that is required is to lay out each sinusoid (sine wave), making the height of its wave proportional to the amplitude desired for that component, and then to combine all these space patterns into a pattern for synthetic sound. This graphically constructed wave may then be photographed on a strip of film to produce a variable-area sound track. From this the synthetic sound can be obtained in the usual manner for such [recordings].
Mills then suggests that in the future, metal or celluloid strips dedicated to sound and tone drawing without the fidelity issues that are inherent to optical film systems could improve playback clarity. The drawings themselves could be constructed from templates that capture the overtone structure of any musical instrument or combination of instruments, and he claims ‘[t]he mechanics of assembly of such wave patterns and of the sequential reproduction of the corresponding sounds is not too difficult a task for electrical engineers.’ Mills notes that this graphical sound method is also more feasible when compared with electrical instruments that would require a ‘very large number of oscillators’ to achieve similar outcomes. He goes on to emphasise that the sound template method would also offer the possibility of creating ‘unheard-of combinations’ of harmonics, manipulated in ways not possible with the natural vibrations of existing musical instruments. John Cage noted this, suggesting in a 1940 letter to Peter Yates that Mills was in effect describing the future possibility of an accessible library of templates that could be used by composers. Cage wrote ‘through the acquisition of a library of templates, i.e., film library, the most practical exploration of sound may be made.’
Mills goes on to indicate that this method that clearly appealed to Cage could be the basis of future musical sound and tone exploration.
What new sounds will prove pleasing or useful in musical compositions can be determined only by trial. A broad field of research, therefore, is opening in music.*
There is then a discussion of an important question that it seems very few other writers and promoters of electronic music had asked at the time. That is, many times writers and inventors had promoted the purity of electronic tones as if this was a self-evident improvement on existing musical resources. Mills asks
Is perfection desired or an average of imperfection?
What he means by this is that in existing musical performances and auditory experiences there is always continual variation - or imperfection; Mills asks is it right to downplay or overlook the importance of these imperfections in the pleasures music affords. For example, Mills considers these variations in the context of the classical music concert hall experience.
Most of the different variations, which inevitably occur in the production of music, are today of undetermined importance. There have been almost no exact researches on the basis of which correlations might be established between these variations and pleasurable sensations or emotion.
[For a listener, their] auditory threshold varies from day to day by several decibels. It is not the same … as that of his neighbour in the next seat in the orchestra. The interference pattern in the hall shifts and varies, with the result that he gets at any instant a markedly different sound from his neighbour … Even for the same tones, it is different if they arise from different points on the stage since that will mean different paths, different reflections and absorption, and different amounts of interference or reinforcement at each position throughout the auditorium.
The auditorium conditions change, slowly rather than suddenly, due to changes in temperature which affect transmission of sound through air, in humidity, and in the size and arrangement of the audience … They will make one performance unlike another …
Finally, as to the musicians: There are physical limits closer than which they cannot perceive differences in pitch; hence there are differences in the tune of the various instruments even of the same kind. Between the musicians there are inevitably differences of tempo. Only within certain limits can they all draw their bows at the same instant. There are differences in their attack, their style of play, their vibrato or what not.
Mills considers, based on these factors, if the purity and uniformity of synthetic music will affect the pleasures and emotions that may, in part, be afforded by the imperfections in sound and listening found in existing instruments and performances. If music was perfected, ‘would an audience enjoy it, or would there be the feeling that the music was mechanical and monotonous?’ Mills then considers the future implications if there proves to be data indicating a preference for the ‘imperfect’.
Two lines of further progress can then be anticipated. One will be toward the quantitative study of the amount, character and frequency of occurrence of musical imperfections which are preferred by music lovers and music patrons. When that has been determined the wave forms of the synthetic music can be drawn to include such imperfections. There will still remain the possibility of the human control of the equipment by the musical director. Instead of waving a baton in an effort to express his ideas and emotions through a hundred human musicians he may turn dials and push keys, performing upon an essentially perfect source of musical tones.
Mills may not have been surprised to know that in the 2020s, great efforts are made in the software design of DAWs and plug-ins to create functions to ‘humanise’ timing, pitch and any number of musical factors. The perfection of digital sound, far beyond the possibilities of analogue electronic equipment, is regularly distorted with glitch effects, tape and recorded noise simulations, pitch drift (e.g. to recreate the technological imperfections of analogue electronic synthesizers), and the use of lo-fi recording equipment in sampling practices - all to provide a sense of place, time and texture that is absent from ‘pure’ digital sound.
I thought it would be enlightening to now see how Mills’s ideas were received by a representative of the existing ‘musical establishment’ of the time. In The Musical Times [April and May 1936] the music critic Feste [Harvey Grace] in his Ad Libitum column discusses Mills’s book over two issues of the journal. In part one of ‘Science Takes a Hand’, he reports
My feeling after reading his very interesting book is that science can and almost certainly will 'do' for music in the most fatal sense of the term. We shall be told, of course, that complaint is futile; that we live in an age of progress; and so on. Nevertheless, we may venture to point out that a move forward is not necessarily progress in the best sense of the word. The dictionary admits that 'progress' means 'to move forward': but (with what seems to be a necessary touch of caution) it adds, 'also, to make improvement.'
After a full and detailed exposition of the themes of A Fugue in Cycles and Bels, Feste concludes in part two
Those of us who look coldly on these new developments, regarding science as an intruder, must be prepared to justify our conservative attitude. We may begin by pointing out that, so far as can be seen at present, the drawbacks far outweigh the advantages. For it is a drawback, surely, that science is able to make one instrument do the work of ten; increase the power of an orchestra a hundredfold by the mere turning of a handle; produce musical sounds 'very close indeed to the threshold of pain'; and obtain by mechanical means dynamics and subtleties that have hitherto demanded the utmost skill from the soloist, plus, in the case of a large orchestra, a degree of co-operation that is surpassed in no other kind of human activity. Will not the world be the worse for the gradual diminution, and, probably, the final loss of all this finely-applied skill, feeling, and taste? Looking at the matter on the lower plane of economics, is this 'progress' worth the inevitable throwing out of employment of the majority of orchestral players?
It is interesting to consider that 90 years after Mills’s book was published, and despite the growth of electronic music cultures and genres, inside and outside academia, orchestras and conservatoires are still clearly with us (although almost always under threat). The range and number of orchestras and professional orchestral players may have diminished, but music-making has been transformed and ‘enlarged’ by the accessibility of technologies affording the creative manipulation of sound and new compositional practices that Mills (partly) foresaw.
*In 1935 John Mills wrote ‘[t]he wave form of any desired complex sound may be constructed by accurate mechanical drawing’ when discussing creating ‘drawn music’ or ‘graphical sound’ using optical film sound technologies. This idea was already being practically pursued in the 1920s and 30s in the Soviet Union and Germany. In the Soviet Union, Evgeny Sholpo with his Variophone (1932) and Nikolai Voinov with his Nivotone (1931) ‘Paper Sound’ template process were experimenting with optical sound processes, as were Arseny Avraamov, Mikhail Tsekhanovsky, Nikolai Zhilinsky and Boris Yankovsky. Meanwhile in Germany, Rudolf Pfenninger (from 1929) in Munich and later Oskar Fischinger in Berlin were conducting similar graphical sound experiments. As Thomas Y. Levin notes in his 2003 article ‘“Tones from out of Nowhere”: Rudolph Pfenninger and the Archaeology of Synthetic Sound’, the German and Soviet workers in this field were unaware of any details of each others efforts.
Of this work, John Mills is likely to have been aware at least of Rudolf Pfenninger’s Tönende Handschrift [sound handwriting] as it was reported in a number of English language press, journal and magazine articles between 1932 and 1934 in the UK and USA - this may account for distinct similarities between Pfenninger’s use of sound templates and the compositional process described by Mills in 1935. As such, John Cage encountered Pfenninger’s work in mediated form via Mills, even if he hadn’t done so directly in his own research. Oskar Fischinger, who John Cage briefly had some contact with in 1937, arrived in the USA in 1936 - a year after Mills’s book was published. Likewise, an article, Absolute Music by Vladimir Solev in the British Film Institute magazine Sight and Sound [Summer 1936, Vol. 5, No. 18], gave an overview of the work of Voinov, Sholpo and Yankovsky, identifying ‘Timbrograms’ (Yankovsky’s term) as the ‘music of the future’ - again, this was a year after Mills’s book. For fuller details on the development of graphical sound techniques in the Soviet Union, see Chapter 7 - Graphical Sound in Andrey Smirnov’s 2013 book Sound in Z: Experiments in Sound and Electronic Music in Early 20th Century Russia. Smirnov points out that apart from four ‘short articles published in German [1 in 1931], French [1 in 1935] and English [2 in 1936] most publications about research and developments in the USSR were only in Russian.’(p.176) This also explains the lack of awareness Mills may have had concerning the achievements of Sholpo, Voinov and other Russian graphical sound pioneers.