The New Architecture of Sound:
Electricity is the Medium

By Brooke Wheeler

Bruised saxophones, love-worn guitars, sweat-stained fiddles and road-roughed-up baby grand pianos have earned their tenure in music, but over the past few decades computers have begun intruding onto this hallowed turf. Computer technology has created a whole new legion of music geek-freaks. These new-sound architects tool around in darkened basements or in white-washed high-tech noise labs surrounded by drum machines, signal processors, amps, cables, cords, and thousands of dollars worth of equipment with names like "GSP-2101," "H3000 SE," and "GC2020B." They mess about with dials and sliders and switches and keyboards, and blur everyday sounds into an unrecognizable aural chop-suey.

British sound alchemist Mark Tinley is one of these converted. He has been working with the English band Duran Duran for about five years, programming for keyboardist Nick Rhodes and twisting perfectly nice, natural sounds into bizarre, hypnotizing, and fantastical noises. His arsenal includes Macs, PCs, and dozens of input and output boxes that altogether require enough electricity to power a small developing country.

"I started on the guitar, but when I was about nineteen I went to a friend's house after the pub and spent the whole night playing with a Roland SH101, which he later lent to me," says Mark. "I became hooked on synths, and have never quite progressed musically on the guitar since then."

Back then Mark also used drum machines, but said he soon realized that he could do drum programming on a computer. He bought a Sinclair ZX Spectrum with 48K of memory and built his own sampling interface from a project in a magazine. "I realized I could be a one-man band," he says.

Tinley eventually turned into a "bedroom musician," writing and experimenting with recording techniques while learning about engineering and programming.

"I never sent out any demos -- I was more interested in how to make things sound good than the songs themselves. So I learned a lot about getting the best out of my gear," he says. "And I achieved some major miracles with the Sinclair. If I wanted synthesized chords, I would synchronize the computer to a four-track and do each note of the chord separately, overdubbing and creating a big sound."

In 1987, Mark started his own AV studio. He bought an Atari ST as his main sequencer, acquired "a decent sampler" to play chords on, and wrote a lot of music for corporate films. In 1988, he won the industry award for "Best Music for Corporate Video."

Meanwhile, he was also recording his brother Adam and creating demos for him. Adam shopped these demos around and landed a record deal as "Adamski." In 1990, he wrote a a song called "Killer," featuring the singer Seal, which became a number-one hit in the UK.

"'Killer' was recorded on five tracks of a 24-track, with stereo keys, stereo drum machine and one take of vocal. Because of the programming, when Ben Chapman came to remix it he was really freaked out because there was nothing on tape for him to work with."

Welcome to Medazzaland

Then about five years ago, Mark's friend Rob Furguson called him up and asked if he could do a day's programming for Duran Duran. He set up Nick Rhodes' keyboards for a rehearsal, and the next thing he knew he was on tour with Duran Duran for a year and a half.

Mark said, "Lots of the regular touring people were pissed off because I had walked in with very little knowledge of how a major tour worked and got away with it. But although I was given hell by a few people, I stuck it out because I knew I would eventually end up in the studio with them- which was what I really wanted to do."

Apple Macintoshes came into the picture after Mark had been working with Duran Duran for a couple of years. He said he wanted to have the ability to cut up various takes and make composite parts.

"On Medazzaland if you listen carefully to the synth parts, they sometimes jump sounds in the middle of a phrase. Nick played loads of takes, and I cut them up on the Mac into tiny pieces and glued the interesting bits together to make these evolving melodies that jump from note to note and sound to sound, and really are impossible to play," said Mark.

"Fixing things so Nick can actually play this live has been a nightmare, and we had to do a lot of sampling. It's resulted in a lot of weird key combinations, and the use of an Apple PowerBook."

Mark says an Apple PowerBook 3400 got worked into Duran Duran's onstage act when, "Nick wanted an 'acoustic' instrument that he could play if they did an acoustic set on television, on Jay Leno or what have you. I laughed and said 'let's just bung all the samples into a PowerBook and you can play that.' He thought it was a good idea, so that's what we ended up doing."

Mark configured the PowerBook as a sampler, so that the QWERTY keyboard triggers various sounds just like a synthesizer keyboard. Nick can even play chords by holding down several keys at once.

"Nick appears to play some truly bizarre chords if you watch carefully enough, and it often doesn't look musical. There is technique there that confuses and amazes. And after getting the last run of shows together during the last tour, I realized I could program anything and make it playable live."

Onstage, Nick also uses a MIDI controller called a Dimension Beam from Interactive Light Inc. that plugs into one of the keyboards. He controls it by moving his hands around over light beams which trigger
various MIDI sounds.

Electric Jamming

So how do Mark and Duran Duran invent and agree upon all this sonic weirdness?

"I turn up at Warren's house [Warren Cuccurullo, Duran Duran's guitarist], and switch the gear on. Warren is a musical genius and comes up with a ridiculous amount of material. We generally record scratch melodies into the Mac on Pro Tools, and then Warren goes into the kitchen and does his health food thing while Nick finds counter melodies and I make sounds to suit them," Mark says.

"I don't have a sound library any more, because I find that tailor-made sounds make the overall thing sound so much better. I usually let Nick find a sound that's close, then dig into the synth he's using and adjust a whole load of parameters so that it does something weird," he continues.

"We end up with a lot of Mellotron flutes with weird percussive things trailing off them. But in the context of the song they work really well and make sense."

Mark says his all-time favorite musical mucking-about that he's done with Duran Duran is on "Perfect Day."

"We used an Ensoniq TS10 and really didn't change the sounds a lot for that song. What I did was bend the sound, changing the intervals between the notes so they bend from one chord shape to another. I don't really want to say how I did it as it's a secret, and I might want to write a book on programming one day."

The Post-Modern Future of Noise

Mark says he sees himself as a sound designer who breaks the rules and takes sound design into the next dimension. He wants to create sounds for companies like Sony, Sega, and Nintendo.

"Hollywood has gotten away with that totally false 'ricochet' sound for gun shots for years, and I feel the same way about 'laser zaps' in action games," says Mark.

"Game manufacturers are getting away with them until someone like me does something a bit more realistic. Game and multimedia graphics are more and more convincing, but the sound is awful."

Yes, Mark is a real sound junkie; he's a man obsessed with noise.

"When I sit outside in a park I hear all sorts of different sounds, all coming from different directions, all at once. That's what Nick's keyboard parts are: ambiance, not just music."

He says the sounds he makes for Nick Rhodes freak out front-of-house engineer Davy Moire and Medazzaland mix engineer Bob St. John. "I don't think they know where to place them in a mix sometimes, as they don't understand the musical context of them. Where I see them as textures, they see them as random noise."

"And just wait till you hear Nick and Warren's upcoming 'TV-Mania' album," Marks says. "It's pretty mental."

As far as new projects go, Mark says his current objective is to work in multimedia sound design. As a composer with extensive knowledge in synthesis, computer-based MIDI and digital audio applications, plus both live and studio-based audio engineering, Mark says, "Computer games, Internet and multimedia can be greatly enhanced by experienced and creative people such as myself. I suppose I foresee the music and audio soundscapes of computer-related media being comparable to those of blockbuster movies."

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