---
id: xenakis
title: "UPIC"
year: 1977
category: "AI & Code"
lang: en
canonical: https://nodemusic.cc/node/xenakis
source: node.music
---

# UPIC (1977)

AI & Code · https://nodemusic.cc/node/xenakis

## Summary

Iannis Xenakis had handed the computer his arithmetic back in the early sixties, yet living players still read his music off the page. UPIC removed the page and the player alike: the composer drew a line by hand, and the line itself sounded.

## Full text

By 1962 Iannis Xenakis had already handed the computer the hardest part. A FORTRAN program running on an IBM 7090 worked out densities, durations and glissando slopes; out of the printouts came the ST series — a quartet, an ensemble piece, an orchestral work. People still played all of it: between the machine and the listener stood a copyist, turning figures into notation, and a performer.

UPIC (Unité Polyagogique Informatique du CEMAMu) removed both. The composer ran an electromagnetic pen across a tablet a metre by eighty centimetres and drew "arcs" — lines in time-and-pitch coordinates: a horizontal line sounded as a steady note, a sloping one as a glissando, and every arc carried its own waveform and loudness. Nobody transcribed the drawing into notes any more — the computer read it directly.

The system was built in a hurry. In March 1976 Xenakis hired the engineer Guy Médigue against a hard deadline: a festival in Bonn in May 1977. Two months later Médigue said he would not make it, and a second programmer was brought onto the project.

UPIC made its debut with Mycenae Alpha (1978), the first work Xenakis assembled entirely from computer-generated sound. Memory held one minute of sound per page of score, so the piece is built from twelve pages of a minute each; its famous harshness is a side effect of the same hurry — in that first version the waveform did not change as the sound unfolded. The piece was not written for a concert hall: in September 1978 Xenakis staged the Polytope de Mycènes in the ruins of the Mycenaean acropolis, with air force searchlights in the sky and a women's choir reciting Homer in ancient pronunciation. Sentenced to death in absentia at home, he made his first work on Greek soil out of hand-drawn sound.

That same 1977 opened another road: in La Légende d'Eer the random walks moved not notes but points inside the waveform itself. UPIC won, and that line fell silent for ten years — until it grew, in the late 1980s, into the GENDY program. The same chance that in 1962 had placed notes across the score of a string quartet was now placing the points of a wave, the scale dropping from the bar to fractions of a millisecond.

## People

- Iannis Xenakis (1922–2001) — Greek-French composer and architect.

## Connections

### Influenced by

- [Poème Électronique](https://nodemusic.cc/node/varese_poeme.md) - COLLABORATED
- [ANS Synthesizer](https://nodemusic.cc/node/ans.md) - TECHNIQUE
- [Oramics](https://nodemusic.cc/node/oramics.md) - TECHNIQUE
- [Illiac Suite](https://nodemusic.cc/node/illiac_suite.md) - EVOLVED

### Influenced

- [Iamus](https://nodemusic.cc/node/iamus.md) - EVOLVED

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UPIC