Music

I come from a musical family. My mom is a piano teacher, my brother Aaron is a jazz saxaphonist, and my brother Adam creates a lot of electronic music. (Dad brings other things to the family. The legend goes that upon hearing him sing to me as a baby, my mom begged him to stop, citing the idea that he’d ruin my ear. Sorry Dad!) When I was a kid, I promised my mom that I would “never grow up to play the piano and bake cookies like you do”. Joke’s on me. My cookies are a big hit.

But seriously folks, I majored in composition, with an emphasis in music technology. My principle instrument is piano, but I play a lot of (bad) guitar and can handle several other instruments as well. Mainly, however (at least as far as audio goes), I’m a composer and digital audio artist. (That music tech major means I know all about synthesizers, music synthesis in general, and sound engineering.)

Lately, other media (painting, fashion, etc.) have been taking center stage while music has fallen a bit into the background. Last year I bought myself a 73-key, 1979 Fender Rhodes for my birthday (with vibrato!), so I play all the time, but haven’t been composing much. The exception to all of this is the analytics audio research I’m doing, though I don’t know if I’d qualify it as music yet. The post explains everything, but the basic idea is to see what I can hear that I can’t see from the numbers alone.

These are fliers (flyers?) from my major recitals in college:

Oh yeah–I had really long hair back then. And I wore Birkenstocks. And overalls. And…oh, give me a break, it was Montana!

These are mostly pretty old, but still relevant to my artistic expression, I’d say.

• Too Close to be Strangers
  Just a simple blues with a little country influence. The recording is really raw (just me and my guitar, recorded from my iBook’s internal mic…) but isn’t blues supposed to be that way?
• The Exodus Generation
  This piece is in the same vein as Glenn Gould’s “contrapuntal radio” pieces. It was originally conceived and mixed for a quadraphonic environment. None of the text was scripted; I conducted, transcribed, and edited interviews with each character. I performed and recorded the Bach a minor prelude from WTC II and created the background sounds on an analog synth.
• First Experiment in Accidental Music
  One summer when I was stuck without a piano for a few months, I took up painting as an artistic outlet (you can see some of my paintings here). This piece was composed by splattering paint on staff paper and then transcribing the dots.
• Eleven Feet
  This is an excerpt from some dance music in 11/8.
• (Excerpt) Bach Concerto in d minor (fast movement)
  I sequenced the orchestra parts for synthesizer and then performed along with the recording. This was part of my senior recital of composition, music technology, and piano performance when I graduated from college.
• (Excerpt) Bach Concerto in d minor (slow movement)
  An excerpt from the slow movement of the above concerto.

Lately, I’ve been working with my brother Adam on translating <2008/11/01/making-analytics-sing/">web analytics data into audio as a method of data analysis.