Scanline Synth

Recently I’ve been playing around with different ideas for instruments in MaxMSP. I rewrote my GrainSieve patch as a Max4Live instrument for a performance, sketched out a bunch of stuff in my notebook that will probably never see the light of day, and created what I’m calling the Scanline Synth. Simply put: it converts images… Read More

End of Summer Composing Bender

Once again, it’s the end of summer, and I’m gearing up for another year of teaching college students all about the joy of composing and doing crazy things with computers. But since I had a little time after finishing the lectures and course prep stuff, I decided to go on a bit of a bender.… Read More

Needle Point

It’s really hard to figure out where to start with this one. I’ve spent more time working on Needle Point than pretty much any piece since my dissertation. In short, it’s a song cycle for tenor, piano, and computer on the subject of opioid addiction. But that’s really a gross oversimplification. It takes a little longer,… Read More

Organism Study

I recently purchased a Soma Lyra 8 Organismic Synthesizer. It’s a very interesting, somewhat old-school machine in the sense that there is no keyboard, just triggering contacts that fire off an envelope for one of the eight oscillators. Naturally, all oscillators have to be tuned by hand, making tuning unpredictable and somewhat messy, with a… Read More

Two New Pieces!

I’ve been busy. That’s not an excuse, just a fact. But I’ve also been writing. Here’s the results. Commissioned by Catherine Ryu of Michigan State University’s Department of Linguistics and Languages, Heart Doubt was created out of the Mandarin syllables “wo ai ni” (trans. “I love you”) to show off the creative possibilities of the… Read More

Lingua Incognita

For two years, I worked closely with Dr. Catherine Ryu of Michigan State University’s Department of Linguistics and Languages in creating a unique audio database of all monosyllables in Mandarin across the various tonal levels; the Tone Perfect: Multimodal Database for Mandarin Chinese.  The goal of this project is to have an easily accessible repository… Read More

Linnstrument LED Controls

Based on a forum post, I created a quick and dirty (and very inelegantly coded) Max patch to allow control of the individual LED cells on a Linnstrument – both versions should work on either the Linnstrument 128 or 200. Both standalone versions will work with other DAWS and softsynths running (tested with Reaper running… Read More

Live Linnstrument Improv

Last night, I had the pleasure of performing live at Wayne State University’s Faculty Electroacoustic Music Concert with a number of other wonderful composers. I did something a little different for me. Instead of having a nice, safely planned set, I decided to do a live improvisation with a Linnstrument. The piece turned out extremely… Read More

Recordings!

Well, it’s come to this point – I’ve added a recordings page. Come check it out. Recordings… Read More