In college I had this word processing machine that my parents had gotten me, only five years old but already ancient technology. I lugged the 30 pound beast out to Stanford, amidst laptop computers and pentium processors, to the heart of Silicon Valley. It is not easy to find replacement ink ribbons for it, the functions are rather cryptic (I always kept a manual close at hand), printing a full page of text takes a good five minutes, and the sound it makes (something like a fight scene in a kung fu movie, turned up really, really loud) creates such a racket that it can only be used when people are not trying to sleep—never mind staying up all night to work on a paper due the next morning.

My attraction to noise, however, made the Brother WP2410 the perfect musical instrument for a new composition. Borrowing a portable DAT, I recorded samples of my word processor for manipulation in Common Lisp Music (CLM) at Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). These samples, along with a sentence I recorded, and some simple low-frequency sine waves for the bass sounds, comprise the only material for this piece.

I'm a fan of "musique concrète" and the idea of transforming sounds from everyday life into something musical and unusual. I took a typing class in high school once, and I remember thinking how almost musical it was to hear everybody typing at once. The rhythms were fragmented, layered, and complex; something Elvin Jones or Rashied Ali might have played with John Coltrane. Recalling that experience more recently, I found that it was similar to the music of Ligeti and his idea of “micro-polyphony”: a composite sound-mass created out of very detailed individual parts. I began to wonder: hmm, a symphony of word processors?...