Friday, January 21, 2005

Jazz, meet computers. Computers, jazz.

David Wessel, whom I was fortunate to meet at ICMPC 8, is not just another mathematician/psychologist/percussionist. He is also a master performer on the Macintosh G4 laptop. Okay, he is really performing on Thunder, "a pad that looks like the control panel of an alien computer on Star Trek." Yet that pad controls a TiBook to produce sounds on eight Meyer Sound Lab speakers. So he is really playing a nonkeyboard version of a synthesizer

But what I really like about this article is that it mentions Pierre Boulez, Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, and Karlheinz Stockhausen, alongside oscillators and the Institute de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM). It should really have mentioned CNMAT, the Center for New Music and AudioTechnologies that David Wessel directs. Then it would have married all of my favorite subjects in one little 700 word article.

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