The Triadex Muse was the subject of my November 2004 Vintage Synths/Gear column in
Keyboard. It's no longer posted online, so I'll serve up the text here. Please forgive me if any links no longer function.
Vintage Gear
by Mark Vail
Triadex Muse
Stochastic melody composer
Photo caption
A Triadex Muse. Optionally available were a light organ and external speaker, both of which shared the same triangular cabinet with the Muse. With proprietary cables and adapters, multiple Muses could be interfaced to produce interactive, polyphonic music.
Vital Stats
Description: Computerized monophonic music synthesizer with user control of volume, tempo (eight steps from 54 to 1,662 bpm), coarse pitch (32Hz to 4.5kHz), fine pitch (±10% of fundamental frequency), intervals, and musical themes. Built-in 4" speaker.
Produced: Development began in 1970; production ran from 1971 to 1972.
Approximate number manufactured: 260.
Manufacturer: Triadex Incorporated, 1238 Chestnut St., Newton Upper Falls, MA (no longer doing business).
Insider information: The Muse was considered more a gadget than a musical instrument. Instead of being sold in music stores, it was carried by novelty shops and Tiffany & Co. An ad for it appeared in
Playboy. . . . A transcript of a 1991 interview that Marvin Minsky did with Otto Laske can be read at
http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers ... .Music.txt. . . . For a freeware Muse simulator for Windows, visit
www.trovar.com/muse/muse.html. . . . The Psych-Tone, a Muse-like kit, was detailed in the February 1971 issue of Popular Electronics.
Original retail price: $249.
Current value: $1,000 to $1,500.
The advent of affordable logic circuits and microprocessors during the 1960s allowed musicians, programmers, and others to experiment with compositional techniques that had previously been extremely difficult or even impossible. One of the offshoots of such efforts was an intriguing little box called the Muse, which generates monophonic note sequences based on front-panel switch and slider settings. It was co-designed by Marvin Minsky and Edward Fredkin, both of the MIT Media Laboratory.
“Marvin Minsky is almost universally recognized as the father of artificial intelligence,†explains David Kean of the Audities Foundation. “One of the favorite areas for any psychological endeavor is music because it has a certain amount of stochastic logic to it. Researchers use heuristics to try to determine compositional form. There are all sorts of ideas about how to shape logic to make it emulate artistic expression and, since music is one of the few time-based art forms that has a serial output, it’s a very fertile area for psychologists and somebody such as Minsky, who’s interested in making machines think.
“The Muse box was born out of an idea about how to offer a user some potential music algorithms. You can’t use a Muse box to realize or compose a pre-determined piece because it won’t do that. But what you can do is program trends, which is a big deal in artificial intelligence. You program the Muse with a compositional or melodic trend and shape it with sliders, which are basically controllers of chaos.â€Â
Three groups of four vertical sliders accompany a handful of switches on the Muse’s front panel. How does the Muse do its thing? A comprehensive explanation of its workings can be found in its 13-page manual, which cost an extra two bucks, but this copy from the February 1971
Popular Electronics provides some clues: “With 14 trillion note combinations, Muse has four switches for volume, tempo, pitch, and fine pitch, and eight slide switches. Four of the latter vary the interval and thus determine the notes, while the other four control the theme and variations of the melody. Triadex warns that it is possible to set up a composition that would take 30 years to play, which may be too long if you’re only interested in the coda.â€Â
Considered as a synthesizer, the Muse voice isn’t very impressive. Then again, that wasn’t its purpose. Its musical output, however, can inspire compositional ideas. Electronic-music composer Laurie Spiegel, developer of the “intelligent instrument†Music Mouse application for Mac, Amiga, and Atari computers (
http://retiary.org/ls), often turns to her Muse for ideas.
“The Muse was an interesting experiment,†sums up Kean. “It didn’t necessarily prove anything, but it was an exercise. Minsky and Fredkin decided that it was an interesting enough outcome that they should market it, so they did. It’s really funny because it was one of those odd moments where an instrument was built to satisfy a concept about some academic idea regarding artificial intelligence.
“The Muse is really cool and it’s amazing to hear. It isn’t something you play, though. You just turn it on, give it some guidelines, and let it go.â€Â
