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In March 2012, I was named a Fulbright Scholar and awarded the opportunity to spend 6 months in Bergen, Norway. Since my family and I received the news, life has been a whirlwind of activity as we prepare to embark on this adventure. It feels like each day a piece of the puzzle had to be put in place. Some days it was a little piece and others it was a big piece. From passports to plane tickets to residence permits to project descriptions, there has been so much work leading up to this point.

Now comes the tricky part.  Now we have to pick up the puzzle and transport it across the Atlantic.  Those that have attempted such an operation with an actual puzzle know this is no easy feat.  There is a sense of accomplishment and pride at seeing the completed picture.  Then there is the uneasy feeling as you work through the logistics of moving this puzzle in your head, knowing that one false move could cause you to lose a big chunk of your hard work.  At a certain point, you just have to start the process, taking it one step at a time and knowing the whole time you are at the mercy of certain forces beyond your control.  The analogy isn’t perfect, but seems to capture most of emotions this day evokes.

Once we arrive, there will be the inevitable adjustment period as we figure out routines and settle into our new surroundings in the city of Bergen.  One of my favorite favorite things about travelling to a new place is exploring new surroundings.  Bergen sounds like it will be great for such exploration, with a mix of old fishing wharfs and more modern transit developments, all surrounded by stunning natural beauty.  I anticipate lots of photos, some videos, many sound recordings and even more memories that media simply could not capture fast enough or convey adequately.

I also look forward to getting started on my research project, which will involve significant updates to my previous work with granular processing (plans that I have previously written about here).  I’ll be working closely with Trond Lossius, who works at the Bergen Center for Electronic Arts (BEK) and is one of the principal contributors to Jamoma.  All of these ingredients should make for a productive time as I work through my plan of action, but some of the results remain a mystery even to me, which is as it should be in any research or creative pursuit.  There are certainly some grey areas in the plan where I am trying to keep an open mind and see where the work will take me.

I am so thankful to the US-Norway Fulbright Foundation for this amazing opportunity and Stetson University for granting my sabbatical to facilitate this work.  Both have displayed great confidence in me, which I appreciate more than I could ever express with words.  I would also be remiss if I did not take the opportunity to publicly thank my wife.  The aforementioned puzzle would have likely been half done had I not had such an able partner.

I plan to blog about my work and other adventures on this website, so check back for new entries at least once a month.  For more frequent updates, you can follow me on Twitter.  Here’s to the next six months!

Flicker photo by TimOve

Tags: fulbright, jamoma, norway • Posted in general • 1 Comment »

Every other summer, I usually teach a section of Audio Recording and Production 2. This course gives students a chance to continue developing their skills in the recording studio. This year, we decided to push the envelope and set the goal of producing entire albums in less than 4 weeks (something akin to the RPM challenge).

The eight students below started with nothing recorded on May 16 and here we are on June 8 releasing not one, but two albums! Really proud of the work these folks put into their music. And special thanks goes to Martha Garzon‘s Images and Meaning students for developing album artwork.  You can download their MP3 albums at the links below and import them into your iTunes library.

Dangerous When Wet – produced by Peter Davis, Lindsey Iverson, Kyle Lough & Drew Nunley – artwork by Brittany Alkire
download ZIP archive – 91 MB – 13 tracks, 35 minutes

Lux Nova – produced by Katie Lloyd, Sarah Moore, Kyle Ritch & Kyle Simmons – artwork by Atheer Alharbi
download ZIP archive – 80 MB – 12 tracks, 36 minutes

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Tags: DAW, digital arts, logic, production, recording • Posted in teaching • 2 Comments »

In addition to computer music, I also teach Audio Recording and Production.  Students learn to work in Stetson’s recording studio and use multitrack DAWs to complete a range of projects.  For their final project, students spend 5 weeks pursuing projects of their choice to demonstrate their skills.  This may range from a studio recording with a local band to a spoken-word piece with accompanying music to a MIDI rendition of an orchestral work.

This year, we have revived an old practice of gathering all the projects together in a compilation that we share.  This used to be done with CD-R copies for the students, but with today’s ease of digital distribution we thought, “why not make an MP3 mixtape and share it with the world.”  If you want to hear the work that these 17 students did, simply click the link below to begin downloading.  Once completed, unzip the archive and import the MP3s into your iTunes or other MP3 library.  Enjoy!

download ZIP archive – 98.5 MB – 67 minutes

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Tags: DAW, digital arts, logic, multitrack, production, recording • Posted in teaching • 1 Comment »

Yesterday, I gave a presentation at the first ever Symposium for Laptop Ensembles and Orchestras at Louisiana State University.  I worked with Stephen David Beck, Jesse Allison and Rebecca Fiebrink as a member of the executive committee to help organize this event, so it has been really rewarding to see this conference come together.

My talk surveyed mentions in news media items of laptop music and tried to identify trends and stereotypes.  The goal was to identify key articles that helped to expose large general audiences to the trend of laptops on stage and demonstrate the way instrument language has been grafted onto the laptop.  I also looked at how the THE stereotype (“how do I know they aren’t just checking email?”) has been with us from almost the beginning of this news media coverage.  You can download materials from my talk at the links below.

Stetson’s own Mobile Performance Group also put in a performance at the opening reception (an authentic crawfish boil that was poolside at the hotel) on Sunday night.  Our undergrads put in a lot of hard work to make that happen, which makes me very proud to be their professor.  They are also gaining a lot of valuable perspective as we take in the rest of the symposium.

It’s been a great experience so far.  I look forward to taking in the rest of the symposium today and seeing where this gathering of professionals goes from here!  Special thanks to Steve and Jesse and the rest of the LSU crew for being great hosts.

• enhanced podcast – 11.7 MB
• slides in PDF – 4.1 MB
• extended abstract in PDF – 111 kb

Presenting my talk at SLEO.

Tags: laptop as instrument, laptop ensemble, lsu, sleo • Posted in presentations • No Comments »

Spring 2012 Faculty Composers Recital @ Lee Chapel, Stetson University in DeLand, FL.  Co-composed and performed with Hunter Lee.

These two pieces explore the musical potential of discarded, non-musical objects and are both created using a single item as the source of all sound objects heard in the works.  Layers are built by two laptop performers each using a different method: one performer triggers pre-recorded samples using an interactive sequencer, while the second records simple loops from his live performance.

The works began as improvisations between the two performers that eventually settled into a mostly-scripted set of rhythmic variations.  The results highlight the rhythmic and timbral variety that is possible using these two complimentary methods on a single item.  These pieces were first developed for Mobile Performance Group and premiered as part of our performance at the Harold Golen Gallery in Miami during December 2011.

• Water Bottle / Spray Paint in MP3 – 13 min, 38 sec
• Press Release from Stetson University Marketing
• News item in the Daytona Beach News-Journal

Tags: Faculty Composers Recital, hunter lee, MPG • Posted in performances • No Comments »

12 Nights Electronic Music and Art @ Harold Golen Gallery in Miami, FL

Just before finals last semester, Matt Roberts and I lead a group of advanced Digital Arts majors to Miami during Art Basel where we performed together as Mobile Performance Group, our student-faculty new media collective and laptop ensemble.  We presented all new material inspired by our surroundings in the bustling Wynwood arts district. You can learn all about the experience from our online documentation or get a taste of things from the video below. Special thanks to Juraj Kojs for the invite.

• online documentation @ mobileperformancegroup.com

MPG Miami 12.01.11 – 5 min, 14 sec

Tags: 12 nights, art basel, digital arts, harol, matt roberts, Miami, MPG • Posted in performances, teaching • No Comments »

With the Fall semester drawing to a close, that means it is time for another set of Computer Music final project videos.  This time my Digital Arts students were directed to incorporate machine listening into their Max/MSP development.  Most of them ended up using the [analyzer~] object, which was originally created by Tristan Jehan and is currently maintained by CNMAT.  You can see the results of their work below.  Enjoy!

Awesome Auto-Harmonizer – 4 min, 2 sec

Triggering Percussion Samples – 4 min, 48 sec

Violin Accompaniment – 3 min, 11 sec

Guitar to Voice Harmonizer – 4 min, 2 sec

Tags: computer music, digital arts • Posted in teaching • No Comments »

Third Practice @ University of Richmond

From November 4-5, I attended this year’s Third Practice, an annual festival of electronic music curated by Benjamin Broening. The program included one of my recent fixed media compositions, attack, on the Saturday afternoon concert.

I had heard about this festival for a number of years, so it was an honor to be included on the program with a great roster of composers, most of whom were in attendance.  One of the highlights for me was finally getting to hear Eighth Blackbird in concert.  The campus is also stunningly beautiful and included the impressive Modlin Center for Arts.  The festival certainly lived up to its reputation.  Ben, thanks for the invite!

• Recording in MP3 – 5 min, 47 sec

One of the many festival posters up around campus.

Tags: Richmond, Third Practice • Posted in sound art • No Comments »

Computer music is a discipline that has always relied on people sharing the software tools they create with the larger community. There are many well known examples: Max Mathews & MUSIC, Barry Vercoe & Csound, Miller Puckette & Max/PD, Tom Erbe & SoundHack. Although my own contributions have not had nearly the impact of these gentlemen, I like to think that I have made a small contribution to the community over the years through this website.

By far, the most significant piece of my overall contribution has been the Granular Toolkit.  This collection of Max objects and abstractions was born 10 years ago during a summer research grant that I received during my graduate studies at Northwestern. The plan from the very beginning was to build a useful collection of high-level granular effects and low-level external objects, then give them away for free from my website.

What I got back from the Max/MSP community was amazing! I have met so many great people, heard so many great pieces and read about so many great projects that used the toolkit over the years.  I have also had a few professional opportunities come my way, such as the Hipno plug-in collection.

Although the Granular Toolkit is still working 10 years later with only a few tweaks along the way, new developments have admittedly been sparse these last few years. The toolkit never fully took advantage of some of the big innovations in Max along the way, such as [poly~] or attributes. The biggest reason for this is that I have honestly not always been able to make the GTK a top priority because other projects have demanded my time. I have also tried to maintain the toolkit primarily by myself, which was not easy in retrospect.

Second, the source code for the externals was not designed to maximize the benefits of object-oriented programming.  I was an admittedly naive programmer when I developed the GTK, having learned Java just two years prior to the start of development and teaching myself C as I went along.  Changes to these externals would now require some major surgery on the code to get new features working.

Lastly, the GTK is heavily tied to the Max environment and there is almost no way to use the code in the externals apart from it.  As much as I love working in Max and think it has a long life ahead of it, it would be nice to have the freedom to use my code as the basis for projects in other host environments such as DAW plug-ins and mobile apps.

Over the past several months, I have been taking steps to address these three issues by getting involved with Jamoma, an open-source platform for art and computer music projects that I believe addresses the three issues I outlined with my own GTK:

• Jamoma exists as a software library that can work within the Max environment, but it also has hooks into other host environments and programming languages (things like Ruby, AU, VST, & PD) without being tied too closely to any one of them.
• The code makes use of object-oriented design patterns so that it can be more easily updated as changes are dictated by the circumstances.
• Perhaps best of all, it has attracted a growing list of talented developers from around the globe who are collaborating to ensure that the project is continually maintained.

So I am writing this blog post to announce that GTK will eventually be superseded by new granular components in Jamoma.  While this work is still in its early stages and no release date is immanent, I wanted to put the idea out there for public consumption and comment.

What has already happened?  In November 2010, Tim Place and I had a brainstorming session during his visit to Stetson.  We developed an outline of how to merge my granular work into the Jamoma DSP framework and began laying the foundation for this goal in January.  This meant working on boring things like window functions and buffer support. It’s not very exciting stuff, but it is necessary to support our concept for these improved granular operators.

What is happening soon? Although the Jamoma team completes significant work via email and web services, they occasionally get together for face-to-face meetings. In October 2011, I will be joining Tim, Trond Lossius and Nils Peters for a Jamoma Workshop in Kansas City. This will actually be my first time meeting Trond and Nils in person and I look forward to seeing what progress we make as we put our heads together for three days.

What is happening now? After giving it some thought, I am releasing the source code for the externals in the GTK collection under a BSD license. This will help ensure that if folks absolutely need to maintain these objects, they have the materials to do so. Of course, the abstractions have always been “open source”, as one only needs to unlock the Max patches to see how they are built.

So what are your thoughts?  Are you a GTK and/or Jamoma user?  What are some advantages/disadvantages you see as part of these changes? I welcome your input and look forward to keeping you posted on the progress via this website.

A screenshot from a GTK abstraction

Tags: granular toolkit, jamoma, open source • Posted in code, maxmsp • 5 Comments »

Today I gave a presentation on lecture capture as part of a faculty forum on campus about teaching with technology. Stetson’s Associate Provost for Faculty Development Karen Kaivola helped put together this afternoon of faculty sharing the unique ways we use technology. It was a great event where a lot of ideas were traded among colleagues, some of whom wouldn’t normally get to share techniques with each other. I was especially interested in the way Tandy Grubbs is using casual gaming to teach Chemistry concepts and the use of FaceBook groups in Andy Dehnart‘s first-year seminar.  They gave me some ideas to follow up on.

Since the presentation was on lecture capture, it made sense to capture it! For this task, I used ProfCast. This is the same software that captured the other enhanced podcasts you’ll find on this website. It is super easy to use and I highly recommend it.

I know this a bit different than my usual focus on electronic music and audio signal processing, but I figured some might be interested in the tools I use to teach. Let me know your thoughts.  As I usually do, I’ll post Flickr credits and links to the reports cited in my comments.

• enhanced podcast – 24.9 MB

My title slide. Uses a photo by Flickr user Taqi.

Tags: academic technology, lecture capture, profcast, stetson • Posted in presentations, teaching • 1 Comment »