BArCMuT with John & Maureen Chowning, Simran Gleason, Ge Wang @ Stanford This Thursday, Mar 12 -

Bay Area Computer Music Technology Group (BArCMuT)
Presentations by John Chowning, Maureen Chowning, Simran Gleason and Ge Wang
Thursday March 12th, 7pm, 2009 @ Stanford University CCRMA
RSVP Here: http://electronicmusic.meetup.com/152/calendar/9759931/

Thank you to Stanford CCRMA for hosting BArCMuT this month:
- JOHN CHOWNING and MAUREEN CHOWNING present Composing Voices for Soprano and Laptop in MaxMSP. A presentation using sound-synchronous animations to show how John was able to adapt powerful ideas developed in old languages to a modern object based language.
- SIMRAN GLEASON presents a new generative music app for the iPhone that uses gravity equations to drive compositions. Kepler's Orrery (http://keplersorrery.com) started life as an open source java project, and has been shown at Maker Fair, NASA (Yuri's Night), and has been used to teach physics in middle school classes.
- GE WANG on the latest from Smule: development, news, and anecdotes related to Sonic Media on the iPhone.

All the best,
Noah Thorp
Bay Area Computer Music Technology Group Organizerhttp://www.barcmut.org

BIOS
JOHN M. CHOWNING was born in Salem, New Jersey in 1934. Following military service and studies at Wittenberg University, he studied composition in Paris for three years with Nadia Boulanger. In 1964, with the help of Max Mathews then at Bell Telephone Laboratories and David Poole of Stanford, he set up a computer music program using the computer system of Stanford University's AI Laboratory. Beginning the same year he began the research leading to the first generalized sound localization algorithm implemented in a quad format in 1966. He received the doctorate in composition from Stanford University in 1966, where he studied with Leland Smith. The following year he discovered the frequency modulation synthesis (FM) algorithm, licensed to Yamaha that led to a family of synthesizers based upon the DX7 the most successful synthesis engines in the history of electronic instruments. His three early pieces, Turenas (1972), Stria (1977) and Phoné (1981), make use of his localization/spatialization and FM synthesis algorithms in uniquely different ways. After more than twenty years of hearing problems, Chowning was finally able to compose again beginning in 2004, when he began work on Voices, for solo soprano and interactive computer using MaxMSP. He taught computer-sound synthesis and composition at Stanford University's Department of Music and was the founding director of the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), one of the leading centers for computer music and related research.

Coloratura soprano MAUREEN CHOWNING studied at the Boston Conservatory of Music before moving to the San Francisco area. She has since appeared on the Public Broadcasting System's NOVA series and Smithsonian World with Max Mathews, demonstrating his Radio Baton and conductor program. She has also performed at concerts in Canada, Poland, and Japan and at the International Electronic Music Festival at Bourges, France, where in 1990 she gave the world premiere of Solemn Songs for Evening by Richard Boulanger and in 1997 she gave the premiere of Sea Songs by Dexter Morrill. She gave the world premiere of "Voices" (version 1) at the Maison de Radio in Paris in March 2005. She is noted for her special ability to sing comfortably in alternative tunings, such as the Pierce scale, and in a wide variety of styles. Her repertoire ranges from Handel oratorios, operatic roles such as the "Queen of the Night" from Mozart's The Magic Flute, and in the domain of contemporary literature, to works of Schoenberg and Babbitt as well as premieres of works by composers Joanne D. Carey, Qui Dong, Servio Marin, and Atau Tanaka.

SIMRAN GLEASON is an artist and professional nerd. He started drawing the day after getting a masters degree in computer science (symbolic & heuristic computation) from Stanford and drifted through many media before arriving at his current focus: making algorithms that make music. Among his more successful installations is Haunted Garden, a room that listens to you, finds the notes in your conversation, and uses them to compose an ambient sound and lightscape. He also did the generative music and light algorithms for SWARM, a gaggle of open source someday-autonomous spherical robots. His work has been shown in galleries in San Francisco, Palo Alto, as installations at Maker Fair, Yuri's Night, Coachella, and of course,the special olympics of art: burning man. Kepler's Orrery is his first iPhone app.

GE WANG is an assistant professor at Stanford University CCRMA and Co-founder, CTO, and Chief Creative Officer of Smule where he explores interactive sonic media on the iPhone. His research interests include interactive software systems for computer music, programming languages, sound synthesis and analysis, music information retrieval, new performance ensembles and paradigms (e.g. laptop orchestras and live coding), and methodologies for education at the intersection of computer science and music. Ge is the chief architect and co-creator of the ChucK audio programming language, the founding director of the Stanford Laptop Orchestra (SLOrk) and the Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra (MoPhO). http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~ge/