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4-1-74 JAM

1) Went to Systems Concepts Inc. in the city yesterday to see Pete
Samson. The place is interesting. It is a converted second floor
warehouse. Saw the precision display they market for $35,000. It
is quite impressive. The characters are beautiful. Fast as can be.

Asked about the digital synthesizer. The capability to write back
into PDP-11 core will be limited. There are 16 output channels,
any of which may feed a DAC or may write back into core, so the
greatest number of independant write-back channels will be 16.
This restricts the analysis capabilities of the machine somewhat.

2) Tried to make an appointment with Ronnie Welch to go over her
writeup with her. She is out of town for the week. Will try again
next week.

4-1-74 JAM

Chowning called from Washington. He talked to NSF, NEH, and NEA.
He said NSF was not discouraging. They probably could not fund
the entire thing, but may very well be able to fund half of it
($250,000 or so.) That of their 1.2 million budget, 800,000 was
already committed. Aufenkamp sent John down to their Psycho-biology
expert who was subsequently impressed. Psycho-biology is one
of those fields that NSF will fund without requiring concrete
applications. We should expand the psycho-acoustic part of the
proposal somewhat. Psycho-biology is considered "fundamental
research" and all the other stuff, digital signal processing,
computer graphics, etc, is in support of the psycho-biology.
He mentioned Bill Dement's (Stanford) work in sleep research. Will
set up an appointment between John Grey and Bill Dement at some
point.

Moraff is going to Bell at the end of the month (April) and
will there see Max and will listen to the tape on Max's hi-fi
system. Moraff will probably come to Stanford in September. Chowning
will try to work it so that he will be here too.

John went to NEA and NEH too. NEH was willing to put in $50,000 or
so. John will try to get the digital synthesizer out of them as
a "musical instrument".

John will write all this down together with his reccomendations for
updating the proposal and send it to us. He can be reached at the
residence of James R. Chowning, Centreville, Maryland.

4-1-74 JAM

Talked to Neils Reimers today about getting my oscillatory reverberator
circuit patented. He expressed interest, but wanted to get some
outside opinion. He will speak to some audio people in LA, the idea
being that they will send us a tape of their favorite material,
unrevererated, then we will reverberate it with our uncolored reverberation
so they can judge its quality.

4-3-74 JAM

Got message from JC via Roxanne. He said he wants disks made of our demo
tape pronto, quantity 35. He said they (NSF) were very interested in
the timbral evolution and thus wanted us to splice in at least three examples
1) The low brasses (of the JC FM brass canon)
	He said there is a good fidelity version of it on the old old demo
2) JMG's violin to sax transformation
3) JC's FM noise to brass transformation (from Sabilith?) Is on old demo

He needs to know how long the demo tape is also. Will call again soon,
like Friday.

I called Mantra, Corp (recording studio, etc) about pricing on such disks.
Their minimum order is 50 copies. We can get a 7" disk (33 rpm, stereo)
for 2.50 each ($125.00 total) which will hold 18 minutes (9 min per side).
If we need more time, we can get a 10" disk at $5.15 each ($257.50 total).
The delivery time will be about 20 days (3 weeks or so). We can get a rush
order for 15% extra (total of $143.75 for 7", $296.12 for 10"). If we need
some immediately, he can hand cut some MONO disks for $7.00 each.

Mantra corp:
	2207 El Camino Real, San Mateo
	(78) 574-1500
	Paul Scofield is the engineer I talked to
	Scott Saxon will actually be doing the work

4-3-74 1950 JAM

Called JC. The idea is that since the brass canon is distorted on the
tape to splice in better copies of those. We also should supplement the
timbral evolution theme with a few more examples.

Since Moraff is going to Bell at the end of May, we should supply Max
with a tape (1/2 in preferable, 1/4 in doable, 4-channel) containing
all our good examples, not just the ones on the NSF tape, with a
writeup on what is there.

JC says Moraff is a good guy and is excited about doing joint support
with Anderson (NEA).

JC says NSF isn't really into hardware support. They prefer to see 10 to 20%
of a budget be hardware, plus they probably will only support us to
the tune of $250,000 or so. JC wants to get the hardware from NEA, who
apparantly has some extra money kicking around.

Phone:	Residence of James R. Chowning
	Centreville, Md
	(301) 758-0274

4-3-74 2302 JAM

Almost done making changes to demo tape. Will take it to Mantra Corp
tomorrow and start the disks rolling. It will easily fit on a 7" disk
and JC said that the time is not infinitely critical, so I will just
put it through the normal channels.

4-4-74 1553 JAM

Got a PO number for Mantra Corp, C353812X from George Wood in purchasing.
JMG and I will finish the tape tonight and I will take it in tomorrow.
The records will probably take about three weeks to finish.

4-5-74 1615 JAM

JC called again. He saw NSF and NEA again. In NSF, the proposal will be
internally distributed to the psycho-biology dept and the computer division.
The fate is apparantely quite up to the reviewers. We need to make a reader's
guide to the proposal for the psycho-biologist. Have JMG go through and
point out all the good stuff. Jacob Beck (NSF psycho-biologist) thought that
the control of bandwidth was essentially a new perceptual correlate and was
quite important. He also thought the data reduction (3 line-seg fit in
additive synthesis) was a breakthrough and should be pointed out as such.

Moraff said the budget is huge, that it is inconceivable that NSF could
fund such a project in its entirety.

NEA is very interested and Anderson did not balk when JC mentioned possible
support for our $250,000 hardware budget. We have an edge with them on
the up and coming bicentenial. The idea of computer music being America's
new ethnic original sound, the technology that (rah rah) only America could
build and unite with american composers (etc etc). The computer as America's
"National resource." Anyway, JC will write
a NEA proposal in Berlin and send it to us for beautification and dispatching.
We will send a copy of the NEA and NSF proposals to NEA. NEA might require
Stanford to put up matching funds of $100,000 or so.

We must stress the importance of the usefulness of our work to research. That
is Moraff's thing. What is useful to research is GOOD. We ought to dig up
more research applications of our stuff. This is where Bill Dement comes in.
Insomnia is a major medical problem. JMG and I (JAM) should go talk to him
and do some brainstorming as to how our control of acoustical environment
might be useful to him (and anything else he can think of). Also that research
in noise pollution and such might benefit, tone quality, etc. Maybe Dement
can use our system to do experiments by precisely controlling the acoustical
environment.

Moraff doesn't care at all about the music industry, music education, and
all that non-research stuff, that we should separate that out and put it
at the bottom under "spin-offs" maybe.

We ought to find as many new (plausable) research applications as possible.
They can involve hand-waving, but the more tenuous they are, the less they
should be stressed.

Rename application section as "Research Applications".

             HOW CAN THIS BE USEFUL TO RESEARCH!!!

We should send separate copies of the proposal to Jacob Beck and Moraff
himself as personal copies, in addition to the required 23 reviewing copies.

JC will be at (301) 933-6832 all day Monday and will go poof monday night.

BUDGET: The entire hardware section should not be totaled into the NSF
budget, but should be totaled separately with a note that application
is being made to NEA to cover the hardware budget. It can sit in the
same format, just don't total it in to the NSF totals.
4-25-74

I (JAM) called John Pierce (CalTech) this afternoon. He said he had written
a letter of support to Stever, the head of NSF, which described our
work in glowing terms. I thanked him greatly. I told him we would send
him copies of the final NSF and NEA proposals + the record when they
go out.

He pointed out several typos in the proposal. He had apparantly read it
in its entirity. He suggested that we study (or at least mention the
study of) loudness cues. In the trumpet, for instance, the waveform
is almost sinusoidal at low levels, but becomes voice-like at high
levels. This is a loudness cue that is somewhat independant of actual
loudness. He said that the only control most electronic musicians have
over the loudness is the volume knob, that we might think about providing
the composer with honest loudness cues, or at least investigating them.

Talked to Ronnie Welch. She claims the new copy of her writeup is in the
campus mail.