Episode 63 – Notes on Innovation in Music with Peter Tregear

This month it was a great pleasure to reconnect with Peter Tregear, both school and college colleague, to explore the world of innovation and in turn technology transfer in music. This was a thoroughly engaging discussion for me, with my less than amateur music knowledge and skills being rekindled, and perhaps reimagined, as Peter took us from Sumer to synthesised music. It also took me back to some of our more profound discussions on theological and indigenous concepts of tech transfer with John Bloomer and Chris Matthews respectively.

Peter describes his journey into music as getting sucked into a whirlpool, having focused on science with some practical music studies at high school, he enrolled in an undergraduate science course at the University of Melbourne. However, he leapt across to the school of music and the rest, as they say, is history! Peter reflected on the impact of co-curricular activities at Melbourne High School and Ormond College and the innate curiosity that this drives to take on different experiences.

I shared with Peter my fascination with Howard Goodall’s Big Bangs and wanted to get his perspective on which of these – notation, pianoforte, opera, equal temperament, sound recording – was of greatest importance. Peter was firmly in the notation camp, and shared with us the story of notation, as a means to preserve, manipulate and standardise music through the ages – most surprisingly seeing notation as an early triumph of bureaucracy in the Catholic Church!

Peter then went on a tour de force on western music, reflecting on how notation has driven many of the things we take for granted as an audience, and some of us as players and performers. Drawing on how writing things down enabled music to be connected through time between composers, performers and audiences, and contrasting western pitch centricity to other cultural systems. I was quite struck to discover the notion of microtonality, and how G# and Ab are not in fact the same note (except on a piano keyboard!)

We then took the chance to reflect on the rise of digital music formats and how music has been at the forefront of digital commerce. We took a quick tour from Edison’s phonograph through radio, LPs, the rise and fall of HiFi culture to CDs and solid state recordings. Peter felt that the composer is being replaced by the role of a producer, able to sample and lean into the use of Large Language Models (LLMs), prompting the broader question as to whether notation is perhaps coming to the end of its reign as the great music enabler.

We closed around the increasing use of AI and its impact on music, both in production and its cultural connection to human centred activities and consumption. In seeking authenticity, is there a need to know a human composed or produced what you hear? And the need for a tangible connection to the intangible, by way of CD or LP, akin to holding a book in a library or from one’s own shelf.