NIME-03

This presentation will be devoted to an explanation of the more important among the many electroacoustic inventions of Hugh Le Caine. A visual documentation of the machines which, at one time were part of the Electronic Music Studio at McGill, will give an idea of the rather large scope of his research. Some short works produced with the Le Caine machinery will be played: John Bowsher: Sonata Pian e Forte [solo tape, based on a Giovanni Gabrieli piece]; alcides lanza: plectros III, for piano and tape; Hugh Le Caine: Dripsody [solo tape, version from 1957]

Some of the Le Caine inventions to be included in today's presentation were:

• Oscillator Bank [OB] [1957-59], the unit at our EMS [built in 1961] consisted of 24 wave generators [sine, square, pulse and sawtooth waves] controlled by a touch sensitive keyboard.
• Tone Mixture Generator [TMG]: this very special unit consisted of 13 sine tone generators, each equipped with pitch and amplitude controls.
• Filter Bank [FB]: octave filters, six of them on a panel, designated as A, B, C, etc. These filters could be used in series or in parallel. Structured Sound Generator [SSSG], or the Multi-Track Tape Recorder [MTTR] for further treatment.
• Voltage Controlled Filter [VCF]: built in 1957 [an improved version was produced in 1962] had a HI-Pass, LO-Pass filter, controllable by voltage. More advanced versions of these filters became part of the Polyphone [Poly].
• Multi-Track Tape Recorder [MTTR] was also known as "Special Purpose Tape Recorder for Montreal". The initial machine [1957] had six stereo tape recorder heads. The unit at McGill had ten stereo heads, hence a potential for 20 different channels of recorded information. It was the six head machine that Le Caine used for the creation of his well known piece, "Dripsody" [1955].
• Serial Sound Structure Generator [SSSG]: Separate modules stored sequences applied to four musical aspects of sound events: duration, pitch, envelope and timbre. All sequences were stored and coordinated by 'timers'. An additional switch provided a choice of a set of 12 'tempi', controlling the overall duration of the sequence. This sophisticated unit could also play the sequences in reverse mode, inversion and retrograde inversion. The number of terms or steps programmed for each module - from 4 to 13 - could be assigned individually.
  The SSSG could interact with other Le Caine units, like the TMG, the VCF and also the Multi-Track
• Polyphone: The prototype - and only unit built - was delivered to the EMS in 1970. In essence, it was a polyphonic analogue synthesizer, utilizing voltage controllable sources and procedures, and operated by a keyboard with touch-sensitive keys. As far as anyone can tell, the Poly was the first analogue, voltage controlled, polyphonic synthesizer in the world, pre-dating the Moog and Buchla by almost a decade.

In the 1980's, at the initiative of the Hugh Le Caine Project, an effort was made to bring together all surviving Le Caine creations under one roof: the Museum of Science and Technology in Ottawa. In September 1987, the McGill EMS donated all the Le Caine units housed at McGill to that Museum's collection.