Library Composition
Stria
John Chowning's 1977 tape piece, its FM synthesis and structure built entirely on the golden ratio.
Commissioned by Luciano Berio for Pierre Boulez’s inaugural concert series at the Centre Pompidou and premiered there in 1977, John Chowning’s 17-minute tape piece Stria built both its FM carrier-to-modulator ratios and its own tuning system — a “pseudo-octave” of 1:1.618 rather than 1:2 — entirely from the golden ratio and the Fibonacci sequence, realized at Stanford’s CCRMA in SAIL on a DEC PDP-10.