Recording of this weekend’s performance is now available.  Thanks again to Juraj Kojs for the invite to perform in Miami.  I enjoyed hanging out with him, Paula Matthusen, Scott Miller, Michael McCurdy and the others before during and after the show on Sunday.

• desire for in MP3 – 9 min, 21 sec

The graffiti sign greets visitors

Combined setup before the show on Sunday

This weekend, I will be performing as part of this three day event that ends the 2009 12 Nights concert series. It coincides with Art Basel Miami, one of the biggest art festivals in North America. The series of concerts was curated by Juraj Kojs, who selected my piece desire for to open up the silence-themed Sunday concert.

A very fitting theme for this quiet piece inspired by distant alphorns my family and I heard one afternoon wafting through the window of our Swiss hotel. It was only after everyone had settled down from the dayʼs activities and committed themselves to silence that the music could be heard and enjoyed. It persisted for such a long time (literally hours) that it was a challenge of remain quiet. Thus the alphorns became a kind of replacement for complete silence the way that a room tone typically functions, but there was something far more pleasing and peaceful about them. Lulls in the conversation would last longer as we would extend our pauses to accommodate the distant, dreamy song. I found myself wishing that all silences could be filled with such beautiful and haunting drones.

If you were not able to attend the FEASt Festival at FIU, you can now download an enhanced podcast recording of my lecture.  The topic of the presentation was network-enabled coordination of laptop performance and featured the public debut of the MPG Carepackage.

The patches involved can be downloaded as well.  There are currently no help patches, so feel free to comment on this post if you have questions about this work.  The demo should work once you have placed the supporting files in the Cycling 74 folder of your Max installation.

• enhanced podcast of lecture – 17.4 MB
• MPG carepackage – last update 11 Nov 2009, 185 KB

This weekend, I will be giving a lecture as part of the FEASt Festival on my work as music director of MPG. I will be introducing for the first time to a group outside of Stetson my MPG carepackage. This collection of abstractions makes it easy for our members to share relevant musical data over the network and focus on the business building instruments that produce interesting timbres.

Special thanks to Paula Matthusen and Nayla Mehdi for the invite.  I am looking forward to it!

MusicLinks screenshot

Co-authored with Peter V. Swendsen.

EXCERPT – Programs in music technology certainly have individual approaches to teaching their students, emphasizing different aspects of the field in their curriculum. However, the differences are magnified in part by the multiplicity names these departments and research centers use to identify themselves. Names and acronyms such as CCRMA, TIMARA, iEAR and CARTAH come to mind. With their differences in the foreground, it can be difficult to see what they have in common beneath the surface. This paper will examine the differences between specific music technology programs in an attempt to identify the similarities in their approaches to the topic, as well as common issues that face these programs. We will also synthesize our observations about these programs and attempt to develop a theory for comparing these emphases within the field. Based on our findings and conclusions, we will then turn our discussion to how technology can act as a hub for arts pedagogy as a whole and not just music.

One question that we should address before diving into the topic is our motivation as authors and the unique perspective our experience allows us to bring to the topic. We are both, admittedly, young scholars at the beginning of our academic careers. But we are also part of a newer breed of students that have been able to pursue music technology as our subject of primary interest throughout our student careers. We were able to seek degrees up to the PhDs that we currently pursue that fall under the umbrella of music technology, a relatively new phenomenon for our field. It is from this perspective that we present our findings, as students who had to search through the myriad of schools offering programs fairly recently in order to choose the best fit for ourselves. We also present this paper as young academics, finding our way in our chosen field of study, and humbly submit it to those more established in the field in the hopes that it will encourage more dialog on these issues.

• Download Paper in PDF – 148 kb