Flare for High-Density Loud Speaker Array at CubeFest

I was invited to be a researcher at Virginia Tech as part of their 2nd annual Spatial Music Workshop, which preceded the CubeFest, a weekend long festival dedicated to utilizing The Cube, a massively multi-channel room in Virginia Tech (139 speakers). During the week that I had to work in The Cube I composed Flare, a 7 minute electroacoustic and video art piece. Below you can listen to a B-format ambisonics recording decoded to stereo.

Here is a schematic of the speaker layout I created during the workshop:

Mach for Trumpet + Electronics

In collaboration with trumpet player and composer Sam Wells and as part of the SPLICE Institute hosted at Western Michigan University I composed Mach, for trumpet and electronics. You can listen to the piece here: 

This work makes heavy use of extended technique graphic notation, for example (from the third page):

Starboard at International Symposium on Computer Music Multidisciplinary Research

In collaboration with Fernando Rocha (with whom I also presented a paper at the conference) and Peter Bussigel (who is currently teaching at University of Virginia) I created an interactive video extension of Peter and Fernando's piece titled "Starboard".

User interface I used to control (really just to set and forget the settings) the video of the piece.

User interface I used to control (really just to set and forget the settings) the video of the piece.

Video of the premiere coming shortly.

 

Memory Sustained for Clarinet + Live Electronics

Over this past semester I worked with clarinetist and recent University of Virginia faculty hire Shawn Earle on a work for clarinet and live electronics.

Working in fairly heavy collaboration, we came up with Memory Sustained, a work that first explores the barrier between tone and noise on the clarinet, and secondly investigates some non-linear presentations of musical material.

Both of these elements of the work are enhanced through tracking, recording, and playing back the sound of the instrument. At the time of writing we are working together on a fixed version of this work.

Elements

Over the past year I composed a piece for string quartet and electronics titled Elements in preparation for a short residency of the JACK Quartet at University of Virginia that I helped organize. The program notes for this piece read:

Elements follows the birth and death of a world through the lens of combinations of the four alchemical base elements: Earth, Water, Fire, and Wind.
The timid, then explosive formation of the Earth is followed by a presentation of the four base elements in their purest form. The base elements disappear, and as the activity subsides Water and Earth mix to form a slurry of rich, living activity. Wind returns, splitting the earth into ground and sky and catalyzing the activity of the Water into a chaotic force. The chaos builds to ignite Fire, which heats the Earth and scorches all life. A period of stasis follows, before a light haze rises, a memory of what used to be. The haze dries and falls to Earth, ending the piece.

This work consists of three layers: the material performed by the quartet, a fixed electronic composition, and a reactive, intermediary texture created through analysis of the performed material in real-time. An example of this last texture is a pizz. gesture triggering the playback of an audio file of a water droplet at a matching intensity level (dynamic, timbral valence).

This piece also makes some unique notational choices. All of the material of the piece is derived from a set of Gestures, Textures, and Transitions, the first page of which is below:

The first page of the score can be seen below, which has staves for the quartet, the Instrument Tone Extender (the interactive electronic component), and the fixed media part of the piece.

A recording of the piece performed by the quartet can be heard (and soon seen) below.


Splinters

This last year I responded to a call for works from the Parvenue Duo, a group consisting of Megan Kyle, oboe, (a classmate of mine at Oberlin) and Katie Weissman, cello, based in Buffalo, NY. The piece I composed for oboe, cello, and live electronics ended up being called Splinters.

This was my first venture into live electronics for performers other than myself (and was followed by Trio, described in this blog post) The live interaction is limited but effective. Any time that I was able to use fixed electronics (i.e. sound files) I did, but at three points in the piece the performer’s live input is recorded and granulated into clouds, creating chordal accompaniment from a monophonic sound source.

First use of live-granulation in _Splinters _(cue 7)

The piece has a number of different textures and relationships between the instruments and electronics. The work will be performed in Buffalo, NY and recorded by the Parvenue Duo in the fall.

UPDATE: here is a video of Parvenue Duo performing the piece:



Transference @ Third Practice Festival 2015

Video of a performance of my piece Transference for interactive video/audio performed by myself at the University of Richmond as part of the 2015 Third Practice Festival.

This piece utilizes the size, direction, and other heuristics about the performer's hands to trigger and manipulate the parameters of audio sources, which in turn are used to manipulate several animation scenes. Written in MaxMSP and Processing.

Leap Motion Toys

Video of myself playing with 4 Leap Motion Controller instruments I made to demonstrate electronic music to a middle school group.

The four presets are:

  • Piano (MIDI piano),
  • Recording (granular playback of several user-choosable audio files)
  • Synthesizer (FM params. mapped to 3D space)
  • Flies (resonant lowpass filter on 10 sawtooth oscillators, controlled by 10 fingers)