TIM HOME

BIO + STATEMENT

UPCOMING EVENTS

PROJECTS

DISCOGRAPHY & MP3s

SELECTED WRITINGS

PAST PERFORMANCES

SOFTWARE

LINKS

Some Past & Ongoing Works 

Fuzzybunny(1999-2004) was a high-powered electronic improvisation and composition trio consisting of Chris Brown, Scot Gresham-Lancaster and myself.

MOTIVE(2000-present) is my ongoing project of studio-based, beat-implicated electronic work. The first MOTIVE CD was completed in May 2000.

Touch Typing (1991- present) is a software/hardware musical instrument designed to be used in improvisational performance situations.  This piece grew out of attempts to build a work based on the behavior of genes in biological systems:  the process of evolution is very much like a musical improvisation. I've used a simplified model of sex and mutation: A string of bits defining a sound event (a "gene") is randomly mutated--one bit, selected at random, is flipped--or the entire gene is cut in half and mixed with another one. These actions are all done under the control of keys on the computer keyboard, which either play events("express" the gene), cause a mutation to happen, or cause an event to be "bred" with another. This set of controls defines an instrument, which I freely play in the performance: I fill the role of natural selection, by  choosing to keep some sounds and discard others. This makes an interesting musical instrument, which is partially under my control, but is also always coming up with surprises , to which I, and other players I may be performing with, must respond. I have used this instrument in solo performances, as well as in performances  with many other  players and groups,  including John Bischoff, Chris Brown, Rotodoti, the ROVA saxophone quartet, the Splatter Trio, William Wynant and John Zorn. 
==== ð ==== 

Openfield (1994) is an interactive work for the internet, produced during my residency at Xerox PARC. Openfield continuously broadcasts a live audio space world-wide to users of the internet. Using  web browsers and VAT, an audio conferencing tool, users shaped the behavior of virtual "agents" who make sounds in this common space and interact with the agents defined by other users currently working with the system. 
Consider the analogy with a natural environment: it's amazing to me how the various birds and insects "multiplex" the channel of the outdoor acoustic space, each species differentiating its signal from the others in the space. I'm interested in seeing what kind of ecology may emerge as multiple simultaneous users try to create agents which can be heard. As in an open field, there is a harmony that arises out of each agent just trying to make itself heard among the multiple voices in this acoustic community. 

==== ð ==== 

Rasamudra (1994) was first performed at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, July 31, 1994.  This piece explores the possibility of making music by simulating the process of biological evolution.  Over the course of three hours or more, a computer program running an evolutionary process composes musical phrases. A panel of musical judges make judgements on each phrase, classifying phrases by how well they express the nine rasas or emotional states of the classican Indian tradition. Each performer's judgement is sent to the computer/composing system through foot pedals, as well as communicated to the other performers by hand gestures.  The resulting piece of music is built using this phrases,which all end up in a certain family resemblance, sorted by rasa. 
Over the course of the afternoon, a structure emerges in the music, through the interaction of chance and judgement: likewise, a structure of understanding and consensus emerges among the players, as they develop a practical language of hand gesture to communicate their perceptions to each other. 

==== ð ==== 

Netfield  (1996) An Internet sound environment 
 a collaboration with Philip Perkins & Bill Thibault 

A collaboration of three Bay Area sound & computer artists, this piece created a spatial sonic environment accessible to users of the internet. Twenty five continuous environmental recordings made by Perkins from a diverse range of environments around the globe are organized into a two dimensional world ranging from wet to dry along one dimension and urban to rural along the other. Listeners at internet-connected computers anywhere can move through this spatialized sound field, using software they download from this site. 
After downloading and starting up the client application, users could move through the Netfield world by using the arrow keys on their keyboard; as they passed from one zone to another, the sounds would smoothly mix and be spatialized using a custom 3d sound spatialization system. 

==== ð ==== 

InterZone Transfer (Rome/Peru) (1995) is one of a series of audio installations,  which form a critique on the mythological and nostalgic use we make of recorded natural environments.  In each installation a linear space is defined by the interpenetration of two recorded sound environments. All the InterZone Transfer environments are defined by two environmental recordings which form a dichotomy along one or more axes: wet/dry, urban/rural, tropical/arctic, human/nonhuman. In moving along the length of the installation, one moves from one space to the other: the manner of one's going however, is not as simple as fading or mixing from one to the other. Each environment explores a particular style of moving or "morphing" between the sound, which defines an "Interzone" made up of elements of both environments. Sounds heard in the Interzone are computer processed combinations of the two source environmental recordings, and are always an abstracted electronic sound environment, in which there is no representation. The experience of listening to this non-representational complex sound built from the component environmental recordings transforms our ways of hearing the unprocessed recordings.  Through embedding nature recordings in a thoroughly artificial context, we are able to hear them in a new way, freed of their function as representations of anything, and revealing more clearly their nature as a peculiar cultural artifact. 

In the version (Rome/Peru),  presented at Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco, you are lead from a representation of where you are-- an urban, indoor, public space, perhaps full of concertgoers--through the  electronic interzone, to the upper sound environment,  a recording of the peruvian rain forest.  It's interesting, to my ears at least, that after being prepared by the experience of the frankly fake and noisy interzone, the rain forest recording is almost completely non-functional as a representation of anything: it too is revealed clearly as the hissing and jangling of a cheap loudspeaker, and has been stripped of its mythological content. 

The source recordings were made by Philip Perkins and used with his permission. The electronic interzone material was processed from the source recordings by computer programs of my own design. 
==== ð ==== 

 Ongoing work continues with The Hub,  a computer network band I started in 1985 with composer John Bischoff.  In the Hub, individual composer/performers connect separate computer-controlled music systems into a network. Individual composers design pieces for the network, in most cases specifying certain properties of the data which is to be exchanged between players in the piece, but leaving implementation details to the individual players. The players then write computer programs which make musical decisions in keeping with the character of the piece, in response to messages from the other computers in the network. The result is a kind of enhanced improvisation, wherein players and computers share the responsibility for the music's evolution, with no one able to determine the exact outcome, but everyone having influence in setting the direction. The Hub has also done a good deal of collaborative work in a variety of electronic media, including the 1988 "Hub Renga" collaboration involving poets, live radio and internet, and collaborations with  the ROVA saxophone quartet and composer Alvin Curran.  The group has recorded and performed widely throughout Europe and North America, and Hub work has been supported by funds from the Rockefeller Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Meet the Composer and the San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund.