Jonny Greenwood tells Computer Music Journal why orchestras beat digital sound

Jonny Greenwood talks recording, electronics and the ondes Martenot in the spring issue of Computer Music Journal (Vol. 28, Issue 1), in an article on how Radiohead use vibrato and sliding pitch to build their backdrops. Its examples are the string glissandi of “How to Disappear Completely”, above all the unsteady passage from 5:04 to 5:24, and the ondes Martenot under “Where I End and You Begin” on Hail to the Thief.

Greenwood scored those strings, and he says the band have not yet started manipulating orchestral sounds, because orchestras still have textures to give that nothing else has.

I think part of me disengages with a sound when I can hear it's digital.

Jonny Greenwood¹

Some people treat the orchestra as a piece of technology past its best, he says, but microtonal string writing and choirs move him more than most digital manipulation, because they sound natural and unnatural at once. As a band, they listen to a lot of Penderecki.

The ondes Martenot, an early electronic instrument, goes back to his school days. He heard Messiaen's Turangalîla symphony at 16 and fixed on it, though he could only read about the instrument, and did not see one until about five years ago.

In 2002 he played in a concert with the ondes player Jeanne Loriod and her pupils, and her name is in the Hail to the Thief credits. He thinks it deserves to be as common as the saxophone, and that putting it in a rock group is the band doing their bit.

Makes the Theremin look like a toy!

Jonny Greenwood¹

He has also taken up Max/MSP, the programming environment, and its makers Cycling '74 get a credit on Hail to the Thief. Other people's sequencers always nudged him into working their way, he says, and his copy of Emagic Logic keeps trying to loop the first four bars. Max/MSP let him think about sound and MIDI more purely, though his patches are a tangle of unfinished ideas and tend to crash in concert.

He uses the laptop to manipulate sound and generate MIDI more than to make sounds, and cannot imagine using it on his own. For Hail to the Thief every patch had to be written before the sessions, and the Max/MSP work was played live in a corner of the studio, so the laptop was part of the band and not one person at a computer with four watching. When the band play “The Gloaming” live, a patch takes over the end, sampling what the others are playing and carrying on once they stop.