The Globe & Mail - Saturday, October 3, 1964.

The sound of the garbage can

  A young radio technician made his debut this week as a composer, with a recital of his electronic music in a Toronto coffee house.
   Terry Rusting. who has worked for 11 years as an audio technician for the CBC, heard the first public performance of his music at the Bohemian Embassy. The performer was a tape-recorder: Rusling writes electronic music.
Rusting, 32, whose only skills in conventional music are in playing the Hawaiian guitar and the trombone, turned to the creation of the new sound two years ago at the urging of Morris Surdin, one of the CBC's most prolific composers.
"Morris is a close friend," Rusting said. "and he didn't want to see me a technician all my life. I thought he was crazy: but then I figured, why not? So I ran off a composition in one of the CBC studios, with four tape-recorders and filters. I used a note off a piano and one from a violin."
   Rusling took his first composition to Dr. Myron Schaeffer of the University of Toronto's faculty of music. Schaeffer was not able to listen to the composition while the composer was present. However, the next day he phoned Rusling to offer him the use of the music laboratory in the Edward Johnson Building. Further, he invited him to attend a seminar in electronic music that was being offered to graduate music students. Every Monday for a year, Rusling sat in on the three-hour sessions.
   Now the young composer divides his composing time between the complex electronic equipment of the music lab and the CBC radio studios where he is also allowed to pursue his music.
   In the Johnson Building, one of his chief tools is a mutli-track creative tape-recorder devised by the National Research Council. Only three of the machines have been manufactured. The recorder will accommodate 10 half-track tape loops. A tape loop is a length of recording tape on which a sound has been recorded, or a succession of sounds: the ends of the tape are joined to form a loop that will reproduce perpetually the same sounds. On the multitrack recorder, the electronic composer can ring endless changes an each tape loop--altering the pitch of the tape loops, reversing them.
The sounds that provide raw material for the electronic composer are infinite in variety, Rusling said. He may use natural sounds, or others that are created electronically. One Rusling composition is built on a sound derived by hitting a garbage can lid and some electronic sounds.
   Rusling has spent as many as 200 hours creating a five minute electronic composition. In that instance, however, he found that after completing 40 dubbings he had gone astray, and had to go back almost to the beginning.
One of the pieces that satisfies him most was taped in just eight hour, he recalls.
Rusling sees great commercial potential in electronic music; and hopes some day to make a living as art electronic composer.
"My two oldest children are girls," he said. "and sometime at the dinner table the older one will say to her sister, 'Let's sing something.' When they start, the older sings 'Doo-wa' and then the younger sings 'Beep-beep.'"