loop with clicks

Scrub

JitterHeart is an acousmatic work that explores how AI can reimagine traditional musical notions of the score, performance, and expressivity. In this piece, I use the Max MSP programming environment in conjunction with Jitter (Jit.GL) to create a self-regulating, quasi-organic audiovisual system. The core material stems from a StyleGAN3 neural network I trained at the Yale Center for Research Computing (YCRC), using an ethical dataset composed entirely of frames from my own digital music scores. The resulting AI- generated video is not merely representational – in a sense, it becomes a new score itself: the “heart” of the piece, the motor for both its sound and structure – the difference being that this score is read in a completely different way.

Rather than interpret the video visually, I process it technically. Jit.GL extracts its pixel-level data into four dynamic matrices – like the pulsating chambers of a heart – converting the video into long lists of numbers. These are mapped to musical parameters such as frequency, resonance, envelope shape, articulation density, and velocity. The video’s abstract jitteriness becomes a kind of LFO constellation – a network of oscillators – governing the sound in ways that feel both organic and alive.

The composition’s harmonic and timbral structure is shaped by a custom-built polyphonic subtractive synthesizer I programmed within Max, using noise as the foundational signal – conceptually echoing the visual noise matrices typically used as generators in Jit.GL. Its behavior is refined by a “modalizer–microtonalizer” module I developed this semester for spectral control. I quantize this filtered pink noise using scales, and further sculpt it with delay, reverb, and sequencing tools. The audio processing mirrors the structure of the video –turbulent, layered, yet precise and self–contained.

The idea of the score is further expanded in this piece through a new mode of “reading” and extracting musical information: a data-rich object interpreted and generated by machines from its prior incarnation as a man–made symbolic system for human musicians. In JitterHeart, the score becomes both performer and performance – simultaneously visual archive and generative code. By giving the video agency over sound, JitterHeart poses a speculative question: what if a score could not only instruct performance, but become it, pulsing with its own synthetic jittery heartbeat?

JitterHeart

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4tetosc - B side - 2405025

4tetosc - A side - 2405025

Salvage contains four selected recordings captured in 2024 — Live, improvised takes, captured digitally.

For me, 2024 was a year full of exploration and maturation in the Max/MSP environment. In particular, my effort was focused on building live sets that could be taken to the stage. With these sets, I wanted to create music that was as a full as a score, but also as improvisational and expressive as an instrument, using only my laptop and the interactive algorithms that I had coded. I built countless sets in that year, and hit the record button a dozen or so times.

These four recordings — which are, at times, rough around the edges — stood out. They capture what I was trying to achieve during that period of time — both in terms of technical achievement and sound.

In these tracks, you will hear loneliness, longing, and despair — a snapshot of my emotional state throughout my first year in New York.

released July 4, 2025

Patched, performed, recorded, and mastered by Brian Gawlik.

Numbaii

Only For You

Bedroom Window

Lanai

stardust (2025)
for organ and live electronics
2-channel binaural

first performed at the St. Ursula's Church, Vienna
june 11, 2025

performers:
	• organ (Hradetzky-Orgel): Valeria Lanner
	• live electronics: João Pinto

recording: Karlheinz Essl
post-production: João Pinto

special thanks to Karlheinz Essl and Jeremy Joseph

"stardust" is an improvisation-based piece for organ and electronics that explores light, space, and texture. wide, flickering chords on the organ build a luminous harmonic field that seamlessly blends with the electronics, which—entirely derived from live sampling of the organ—zoom in on its surface. fragments are stretched, granulated, and layered in real time, creating a spectrum of textures: from vast, resonant masses to delicate, dust-like noise with no pitch left.

the title reflects this dichotomy: the monumental and the microscopic, the radiant and the fragile. organ and electronics merge into a single entity, forming a sound world larger than the instrument itself. one that hints at the vastness of the universe, full of invisible particles and distant life waiting to be discovered.

painting: Untitled #1, 2016 (Vija Celmins)

stardust (2025), for organ and electronics

netssx (2025.01)

Between waking and sleeping, between the real and the unreal, exists the uncanny valley where the constructed starts to resemble the natural in a middle state of being. 

Created using physical modeling synthesis (Max4Live, and the ContinuuMini’s DSP accelerated EaganMatrix) and spatialization in third order Ambisonics, this is a depiction of the transitory state just at the point of un/consciousness. What is real and what is still a dream in this state of in-betweenness? 

Languid and Liminal (Binaural)

hysteria acrobat { edit }

Ben Fuhrman, is a composer, musician, programmer, and coffee aficionado. As a result, he writes music with a focus on technology, including acousmatic, interactive, and improvisatory works. His degrees are from Michigan State University (D.M.A and M.M in composition), and Hope College (B.Mus in violin performance). His teachers include Ricardo Lorenz, Mark Sullivan, Steve Talaga, Rob Lunn, and Mihai Craioveanu. 

He has had works commissioned from a number of performers, including Keith Kirchoff, Drake Dantzler, Violet, Jeffrey Loeffert, Nathan Boggert, the H2 Quartet, the East Lansing High School Orchestra, REACH Studio Art, and the MSU National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory and Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, and has been performed throughout the world. He was also the recipient of a billboard dedicated to his music from the Arts Council of Greater Lansing – possibly the first composer in the US to receive one. His solo albums Concrete Oasis and Synthesizer and Computer Works are available online, among others on the Albany Records, Argali Records, Blue Griffin, Elmstreet, and SEAMUS labels.

He maintains an active role as a performer and as assistant professor of music technology at Montana State University, and has previously taught at Oakland University and Mott Community College. For more information, check out www.benfuhrman.com

Composer and scholar of new acoustic and electronic music at the Yale School of Music

Algorithmic music producer. My older stuff is just made with Ableton, but since the beginning of 2023, I have been getting deep into algorithmic composition with Max.

i dont believe in art, i believe in artists. (M. Duchamp)

New tracks tagged #MaxMSP