Browse Items (868 total)

• Edgeplay

  Guided improvisation with spectral processing.
  
  Edgeplay is a guided improvisation for saxophone and live signal processing (Max). As the title implies, the piece explores boundaries, thresholds, and extremes. The saxophonist is instructed to push technique beyond the limits of control and investigate timbre as a delineator of sound: differentiating registers, distinguishing tone from breath and focused pitch from bands of noise. The score is a hybrid of text and graphics, left intentionally vague to suggest rather than dictate the performer’s investigation. The electronics (primarily spectral manipulations of the live saxophone) react to extremes, dynamic and durational, and adjust to the performer over the course of the piece. The sonic result is a mapping, albeit partial, of the sonic transformations idiomatic to the saxophone when in the capable hands of a trained performer.

• Erin

  Chords voiced as beating sine tones.
  
  Erin (2014) is constructed from five chords. Their harmonic vocabulary borrows heavily from jazz, but their sequencing is non-functional. The progression as originally conceived is heard in its unaltered form voiced by electric guitar near the end of the piece; this small fragment was composed in response to the tragic death of a friend, an accomplish jazz vocalist. The rest of the work is that fragment re-imagined by beating sine tones, spectrally compressed and temporally stretched. The electric guitar, electronically processed, appears throughout, demarcating structural boundaries.

• Composition for S#|††¥ Piano, Drum Samples, Concrète Sounds, and Processing

  (Originally written for 8 channels, can also be performed with 4 or even 2 channels)
  
  Composition of this piece was funded by an Allen Strange Award from the Washington (State) Composers Forum. As per a request from Shiau-Uen Ding, my goal was to combine my interests in musique concrete, electronica/techno, and live computer music as part of a large-scale solo piano work.
  I decided to work with a shitty piano as sound material. The shitty piano has interesting kinds of indeterminacy associated with it. You know that some notes are going to be “out”, but you’re never sure which ones. The details of this composition, though always following the same basic dramatic and formal outline, are always different at each performance. Every shitty piano is different. The musique concrete sounds can be re-realized in different combinations at each performance. Because shitty pianos are unreliable in producing exact pitches, I notate much of the piano part in a “graphic” way, specifying only general contours. Thus, the piece is mostly a “percussion” piece, largely devoid of melody and harmony, but chock-filled with funky rhythms and general joyous chaos and cacophony.

• Breathing 2: Re/Inspiration

  fixed audio piece using recordings of breath sounds, toys and whistles. Best diffused over a multi-channel playback system.
  
  Breathing 2: Re/Inspiration has its origins in a piece I composed roughly 20 years ago entitled "Breathing." That was a very early work for me, and I have wanted to revisit the idea for a long time. This new work uses some of the original source recordings of toys and whistles (which I have been using for teaching demonstrations for years), combined with breath sounds made by my wife that I recorded nearly 10 years ago, and just a few small portions of the original piece. The composition is inspired by various aspects of breath: breath as necessary for the functioning of the body, breath as related to life force/energy, breath as meditation, breath as rhythm, and breath as self-expression.

• Cry Out

  Contact the composer for performance materials.

• Cumulative Deviance

  Uses Daniel Iglesia’s MobMuPlat platform for building mobile interfaces for Pd.

• Memory Failure

  A short fixed media work

• iMonkeypants

  An album of five algorithmically generated compositions in the form of an iOS app

• Latency in the System

  A 5-track set of algorithmically generated electronica.
  
  Uses RTcmix embedded in Max/MSP and controlled with a tether. Recordings, code, and more information at the project website above.

• Trying to Connect

  For PLOrk (the Princeton Laptop Orchestra). Performed with one hemispherical speaker per laptop, but the audio is in stereo. Feel free to contact me for performance materials.