Trevor Wishart: I studied science and maths at school, and did one term of university maths (for chemists). Mathematics has always been one of my hobbies it’s beautiful, like music. When I was 15, my school organized a visit to the local (Leeds) university computer, a vast and mysterious beast hidden in an air-conditioned room from where it was fed by punched-card readers. I wrote my first Algol programs then. I only took up programming later, as a student at York, when Clive Sinclair brought out his first ultra-cheap home computer. I taught myself Basic, graduated to the other Sinclair machines, up to the final ‘QL’ which I used to control the sound-spatialisation used in VOX-1. Later I graduated to C. Martin Atkins, who designed the CDP’s soundsystem, and Miller Puckette at IRCAM, from whom I picked up some useful advice but I’m still only a gifted amateur when it comes to programming!
USO: Could you explain us your preference for offline processing software instead of real-time environments? Trevor Wishart: Offline and realtime work are different both from a programming and from a musical perspective. The principal thing you don’t have to deal with in offline work, is getting the processing done in a specific time. The program must be efficient and fast, and understand timing issues. Offline all this is simply irrelevant. Offline also, you can take your time to produce a sound-result e.g. a process might consult the entire sound and make some decisions about what to do, run a 2nd process, and on the basis of this run a third and so on. As machines get faster and programmers get cleverer (and if composers are happy for sounds to be processed off-line and re-injected into the system later) then you can probably get round most of these problems. But the main difference is aesthetic. If you’re processing a live-event, you have to accept whatever comes in the mike or input device. However precise the score, the sounds coming in will always be subtlety different on each performance. So the processes you use have to work with a range of potential inputs. The main problem with live music, is you have to be the sort of person who likes going to
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