ghost in the machine

Performance
Saturday, March 11th, 2017

ISSUE Project Room
22 Boerum Place, Brooklyn

Saturday, March 11th, ISSUE presents two generations of artists working in the medium of computational music: pioneering computer musician and scholar Curtis Roads and composer, artist and curator Eric Frye performing work in 4-channel sound.

Curtis Roads’ contributions to electronic music and computer music composition are vast. Roads was Editor and Associate Editor of Computer Music Journal from 1978 to 2000, and cofounded the International Computer Music Association in 1979. In addition, he has written books and anthologies including Foundations of Computer Music, The Music Machine, the textbook The Computer Music Tutorial, and Microsound, which presents the techniques and aesthetics of composition with sound particles.

For his ISSUE debut, Roads performs Flicker Tone Pulse, a dynamic audiovisual experience of finely tuned electronic and cinematic pieces he has composed since 2009 with long-time collaborator and video artist Brian O'Reilly. Roads will be showing O’Reilly’s visuals as he cultivates his purely computer generated tonalities from the “…realm of microsound, [from] sound grains first predicted in the acoustical theories of the physicist Dennis Gabor and the polymath Iannis Xenakis.”

Curtis Roads creates, teaches, and pursues research in the interdisciplinary territory spanning music and sound technology. He studied electronic music and computer music composition at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) and the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and received a Doctorate from the Université Paris 8. He was Editor and Associate Editor of Computer Music Journal (The MIT Press) from 1978 to 2000, and cofounded the International Computer Music Association (ICMA) in 1979. A researcher in computer music at MIT (1980-1986), he also worked in the software industry for a decade. He taught electronic music composition at Harvard University and sound synthesis techniques at the University of Naples. He was appointed Director of Pedagogy at Les Ateliers UPIC (later CCMIX) and Lecturer in the Music Department of the Université Paris 8. Among his books are the anthologies Foundations of Computer Music (1985, The MIT Press) and The Music Machine (1989, The MIT Press). His textbook The Computer Music Tutorial (1996, The MIT Press) is widely adopted as a standard classroom text and has been published in French (1999, second edition 2007), Japanese (2001), and Chinese (forthcoming) editions. He edited the anthology Musical Signal Processing in 1997. His book, Microsound (2001, The MIT Press) presents the techniques and aesthetics of composition with sound particles.

ghost in the machine

Allan Baroto

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