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FRIDAY, APRIL 21, 1989
Ya'akov Kirschen: 'Music is alive and has a genetic makeup' Kirschen says he is able to produce 'all the music
that never existed'
No Time To Muse? It's Time
To Try Cartoonist's 'Jiffy Box'
DAVID HOLZEL
Israel' Correspondent
A
fro-Cuban
music
never cross-pollinated
with the traditional
music of Japan, but Ya'akov
Kirschen has a way to find
out what such a hybrid would
sound like if the two styles
had ever mixed. From a com-
puter, Kirschen churns out a
bit of uncannily Japanese and
Caribbean sounding music he
calls "Ohio Rhumba." Ya'akov
Kirschen is the American
born creator of Israel's "Dry
Bones" comic strip. For those
who know the 50-year-old
Kirschen only as the unseen
pen behind the comic strip, it
may come as a surprise to
learn that back in the 1960s,
Kirschen was a New York-
based consultant for IBM and
NCR. And although he plays
about 60 instruments, it's
clear he prefers his computer.
For most of the time since
he came to Israel in 1971,
Kirschen has concentrated on
cartooning. Some six years
ago, however, the computer
world lured him back.
The product of Kirschen's
research and development is
an invention he calls the Jif-
fy Box, an artificially creative
device that can analyze the
stylistic elements of a piece of
music, remember them, and
use the rules it extracted to
create new music in that
style. It can also mix styles
and come up with a hybrid,
crossing Springsteen and
Chopin.
The Long Beach, Calif., end
of Kirschen's Just For You,
Inc. (hence, "Jiffy") produces
and markets the invention. It
cost about $1 million to
develop the invention, accor-
ding to Sally Ariel, Kirschen's
Jerusalem business partner.
Most of the funding came
from the BIRD Foundation,
the Binational Industrial
Research Foundation of the
United States and Israel.
The system is already at
work. The Jiffy Box was used
to write the score for the
"Demnjanjuk Dossier", a
British documentary on Nazi
war criminal John Demjan-
juk. After initial consulta-
tions, creating and fitting the
music to the hour-long pro-
gram took under eight hours.
Kirschen says he is now
negotiating to produce a Jif-
fy softwear version called
"The Music Creator" for the
home computer market.
He says his creation
necessarily changes the way
that we think about music,
even though the Jiffy Box
really has nothing to do with
music.
"I haven't done anything
with music," the car-
toonist/inventor says. "I'm
dealing with creativity. It
grows out of the problem of
creating under pressure. Peo-
ple ask me,- 'How do you
create a cartoon every day?'
People who don't have jobs
where they have to be
creative every day look at car-
tooning as if it were magic.
"When I sit down to make
music, I'm like everybody
else. I'm terribly frustrated.
But I know that music isn't
magic."
By demystifying and for-
matting creativity, Kirschen
says he hopes to make the
musical muse available to the
average person. Kirschen's
system starts from the
premise that music is alive
and "everything that is alive
has a genetic makeup." The
computer operator/composer
begins by selecting the paren-
tage of the work-to-be. The x
parent might be baroque; the
y parent might be romantic
music; the z parent might be
the blues.
It's like crossing a red
chicken with a white chicken.
But now we're going to
change the particular white
chicken," he explains. The
computer can compose a piece
of a specific duration, and the
operator/composer can alter
the instrumentation, add
chords and rhythm, change
the key, pitch and tempo. A
musical hybrid can itself be
used as one of the parents of
a new combination. "It's all
the music that never existed,"
Kirschen says.
The traditional notion of
creativity as the product of a
lifetime's study and sweat is
outmoded, Ki ,-Qeber, nrgues.
"The world is moving too fast.
Nobody is willing to wait the
10 years of preparation to
become whatever?' The Jiffy
Box is what you get when you
cross the generation of the
1950s and '60s, reared in the
electronic age and accustom-
ed to receiving programmed
signals with the interactive
computer generation of the
1970s and '80s.
With the Jiffy Box,
Kirschen creates music that
is all new, yet sounds familiar.
"It's bizarre," Kirschen