I have been composing electronic music and making sound with computers for 15 years. During that time I have made electronic sound in a range of styles for concerts, dance, film, virtual reality, and the web. I have also taught electronic music for most of that time, and am constantly trying to learn as many different electronic musics as I can. My expertise lies in digital audio, digital audio software, medium-mapping, sound effect creation, and spatial audio.
I have written a number of papers and a doctoral thesis which (primarily) focused on the works of others, and were also in a rigorous academic style. I wanted to start this series of writings to put down some of my persistent, but at times unfocused, thoughts on computer music in a format that isn’t seeking to be published and isn’t citing outside work every other sentence. These brief writings will focus on a wide swath of topics related to computer music: its history, its materials, its tools, the people that create and listen to it, its creativity, its issues, and, ultimately, its magic. I will also talk about my own work and experience creating computer music. Listening and creating computer music has at various times in my life been supportive, therapeutic, and communal.
Not that I can change this, but all writing is from my perspective: a cisgendered, white, leaning-towards-heterosexual (“casually masculine”) man born and raised in the United States, highly-trained in academic electronic (AKA “electroacoustic”) music, with some travel outside of the U.S. under my belt, and an interest in progressive and non-hegemonic views of computer music, and music more generally. I have both conscious and unconscious biases, and am also ignorant about numerous computer music practices. As both an artist and academic I tend to lean on the technical over the emotional or philosophical, and I am hoping this essay series can, in some small way, bring more balance to that equation.
To better make the creation of these essays a habit rather than a drudgery, I lay down the following rules:
Each brief essay will focus on a single topic.
Each brief essay will be no more than 750 words.
Each brief essay will have at least one sound example.
Across the essays, there will be a mixture of the real (citing real-world musics and technology) and the imaginary (more general postulations and hypotheses).
To the reader: equip yourself with some headphones or speakers and enjoy.