Teenager Replicates Beethoven's Fifth with Macintosh

Critics Applaud Use of Apple's Garage Band Program

 

It landed him in the hospital, but a 14-year-old Macintosh computer fanatic has used a new $49 program to re-create Beethoven's entire Fifth Symphony working only with digital music "loops" or snippets of drum beats, orchestral instruments, electric guitars and electronic musical synthesizers.

"Awesome. It rocks. Super rocks," Chester Akins said in a bedside interview at Mercy Hospital today after he awakened from an 18-hour sleep while an intravenous glucose drip nourished him and a beeping heart monitor tracked his vital signs.

The Macintosh world, famed for the fanaticism with which it members worship and defend their computers, is abuzz over Akins' triumph using Apple's new Garage Band program.

Paramedics were called Sunday morning when Akins' mother found him in his bedroom unconscious and slumped over the keyboard of his Apple Macintosh G4 with Dual 1.25GHz PowerPC processors, 2MB L3 cache/processor, 256MB of DDR333 SDRAM, 80GB Ultra ATA drive, Combo CD-ROM RW and DVD Drive and ATI Radeon 9000 Pro video graphics card.

The paramedics began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, only to discover that Akins was merely in an exhausted sleep. They decided he needed hospitalization due to dehydration and lack of food. However, the eighth grader refused to leave his bedroom until the paramedics and his mother listened to his digital rendering of the entire Beethoven symphony.

"If you're an artist like me, you want people to hear you," Akins explained. "My mom just says, 'That's nice, Chet, now pick up your room'. But she never really listens. Those paramedic dudes, now they listened."

"What Chester has done is as significant to the future of music as the first prehistoric man who whistled through his teeth and created a tune that he then repeated," said Garrison Catlin, who monitors Macintosh developments at his Web site MacRulesBigTime.com. "Just think of it, a 14-year-old kid with no music training and using only a program that costs $12.50 has created a Beethoven symphony that is better than the original. And he did it over three days without eating and no sleep."

Akins mother said her son often spends long periods in his room at the keyboard, emerging at odd hours to raid the refrigerator. She said she had no idea he wasn't eating or sleeping for so long

Apple boasts in its ads that "With GarageBand you don't need to be a musician to make original music." A user can choose from thousands of snippets of musical instruments playing loops that are each a few seconds long. By assembling the loops one after another, music is created.

The program is bundled with three other Macintosh digital media programs that handle video, photos and collections of songs. The bundle sells for $49. The growing legions of Garage Band aficionados are quick to point out that, strictly speaking, the program only costs $12.50.

Some cultural critics have suggested that Garage Band will lead to endless proliferation of bad digital music. One even called the program, "a weapon of mass destruction for music appreciation and taste."

Asked about Akins' creation, Bernie Johnson, one of the paramedics who listened to the entire symphony, said "it sounded pretty good." He said, "I don't hear much music like that except when I'm hunting for a station on thecar radio and it lands on one of those public radio stations. But this sure sounded like the real thing to me."

Jasper Winters, the music reviewer for The Atlanta Barfly, an alternative weekly, said he had listened to a recording of Beethoven's Fifth by the Philadelphia Orchestra and then to Akins' Garage Band version. He said Akins might have the edge.

"It's truly amazing when you think about what it costs to pay all those musicians in a symphony orchestra," he said.

Attempts to reach Eugene Ormandy, the former conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, were unavailing.

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