Using Software Emulation to Explore the Creative and Technical Processes in Computer Music: John Chowning’s Stria, a case study from the TaCEM project

The TaCEM project (Technology and Creativity in Electroacoustic Music) has investigated the relationship between technological innovation and compositional processes on the basis of nine case studies, including John Chowning’s Stria (1977). Each case study involved researching the historical and contextual background of the work, emulating the technology used to create it and analyzing its musical structure. For each of these electroacoustic works, a specially designed software package has been developed, forming an important part of the project outcome. If Stria, as a classic work of the electroacoustic repertoire, has been much written about, the study presented in this article is distinctive in that the software enables to present the results of this research in an interactive and aural form: its users can engage directly with the structure of the work and the techniques and processes used by Chowning to compose it. This article presents this interactive aural analysis approach, its application to Stria, and the interactive resources embedded into the resulting software.