Forgive Paul Lansky if he winces a bit when he hears Auto-Tune in a hip-hop or pop song. Decades ago, the pioneering computer-music composer worked for months with algorithms to get a similar voice program to stop sounding robotic and unnatural.

He laughs about it now, but the Princeton University composer -- this year's University of Pittsburgh Lehar composer-in-residence -- went through Herculean efforts in the 1960s and '70s to create sounds on mainframe computers that you can now get on a cheap electric thermometer.

"You work on your Apple computer today and push a button to make a noise," Mr. Lansky, 65, says of how many of today's composers write music using laptops. "In the old days, I was working with computers with no sound-making equipment. I had to go through back-breaking work just to make it go beep!" There weren't even keyboards on most of these computers, but instead punch cards and tape, which meant composers didn't get to immediately hear their work.

Take Mr. Lansky's first piece of computer music, "Mild und Leise" (1973), composed on a $15 million IBM computer that was less powerful than a cell phone. "We shared it with a weather-research department that used it at night," he says. "And then, I had to take the tape to a lab to hear it!"

Oddly enough, although he feels he has greatly exceeded this early work, "Mild und Liese" may end up being Mr. Lansky's most popular piece. That's because the English art-rockers Radiohead sampled a few seconds of it as the basis of its song "Idioteque" on the acclaimed album "Kid A."

"I liked their piece better than my piece," says Mr. Lansky with a serious tone. "It's imaginative, and the chords of 'Mild und Leise' are the only harmony in the piece." That sort of simplicity appeals to him now just as it did when the composer was writing his seminal work, "Idle Chatter."

" 'Idle Chatter' was a critical point in my development," he says. "Before that I was writing pieces that were very complicated."

---

Audio

---

• Paul Lansky's early computer piece "Mild und "Leise"

• Paul Lansky's groundbreaking computer piece, "Idle Chatter"

• Radiohead song from "Kid A" that sampled "Mild und Leise"

• "Hop" represents Paul Lansky's new acoustic direction in composing

---

The engineering is complex, but the harmony and structure of "Idle Chatter" is as simple as it gets. Mr. Lansky recorded friends and family talking on different tones. He then processed and layered them. The result is strangely engaging music that sounds like you are in the middle of a crowded club in which somehow all the conversation is blending in a musical and infectiously rhythmic way.

The process is as fascinating as the final work, but Mr. Lansky never wanted the computer manipulation of the voices to be the focus. "I make a distinction between the music and the machinery," says the composer, who knows a thing or two about machinery -- among the many software programs he has developed is the computer music language program Cmix still in use today. "If your music makes people want to ask, 'How did you do this?' then you haven't distracted the listener enough. I still feel the music can transcend the medium."

Despite his innovations in computer music, Mr. Lansky began hearing another call. It was in the mid 1990s and it was coming from those same acoustic instruments he had avoided writing for since early in his career.

"I had a great deal of fun with computer music, and I was good at it, but I reached the point where I wanted to do something different." And so Mr. Lansky did a reverse Bob Dylan and moved from electronics to acoustic instruments. He now has written works such as a "Hop," for violin and marimba, "Folk Tropes" for choir and even a string quartet ("Ricercare"). He also has written extensively for the guitar, an instrument he played before he sat in front of computers and synthesizers. "I studied classical and folk guitar as a kid but didn't start writing guitar music until the mid-'90s." And he is writing for orchestra, as well. "I never imagined how much maintenance goes into writing orchestra."

Turning to these traditional instruments later in life felt a little strange to Mr. Lansky at first: "I felt like a real beginner. I still have that experience of how much I have to learn, but a lot of lessons I learned in computer music come up and help."

But the most profound change for Mr. Lansky is that he is now writing for humans. Unlike the fungible nature of computers and software language, a contemporary composer usually writes with a specific person in mind, and it is no different with his new work, "Comix Trips." He wrote this piece for the Philadelphia-based ensemble Relache, which will perform it this weekend in the University of Pittsburgh's Music on the Edge series.

"It is a great combination of instruments -- four winds, percussion, piano, bass, violin and piano. I really had fun working for that ensemble, with their chemistry and how they know each other's playing."

The fun is clear in the piece itself. "The title of each movement is derived from famous comics' expressions over the past 85 years, and the character of each movement roughly reflects the sense of the utterance," he writes. The characters are Charlie Brown, Captain Marvel, Alfred E. Newman and Little Orphan Annie.

Mr. Lansky used to spend hours trying to perfect a good guitar or violin sound on a mainframe computer. Now he composes for the instrument itself. No middlemen and algorithms needed.

Critics Andrew Druckenbrod and Scott Mervis talk about music on "The Beat," available exclusively at PG+, a members-only web site of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.