Digital Music Under the Stars:  
2001 CCRMA Summer Concert  

The title Picking is a double entendre which captures two important components of the piece. In one sense, Picking represents the technique of plucking a stringed instrument. The only timbre used in this piece is that of the Karplus-Strong plucked-string algorithm developed at Stanford in the early 1980's.

The second facet of Picking is the meaning "to choose." Most of the compositionally controlled elements in the piece are generated by random choices created with first-order Markov transition tables. Transition probabilities control all performance aspects of the K-S algorithm including: pitch, rhythm, duration, loudness, pick position on the string, and pan location between loudspeakers.

Picking was realized in Rick Taube's CM (Common Music) LISP environment for algorithmic composition. The composition was generated with 85 calls to a single algorithm which generate notes for the piece using the following format:

(pick time count p1 p2 p3 r1 r2 r3 r4 tempo)

where time is the starting point of the algorithm during the piece, count is the number of notes to generate, "p1 p2 p3" are three pitches to choose from, "r1 r2 r3 r4" are four rhythms to choose from and tempo is the overall speed of the algorithm. Here is the opening of the score for the piece:

   ;     time  cnt  pitches      rhythms             tempo
   (pick  0.5  1   'c3 'c3 'c3   1.00 1.00 1.00 1.00  2 )
   (pick  1.0  1   'd3 'd3 'd3   1.50 1.50 1.50 1.50  4 )
   (pick  1.75 1   'a3 'a3 'a3   1.00 1.00 1.00 1.00  16)
   (pick  4.0  20  'c4 'c4 'c4   0.25 0.50 0.75 1.00  4 )
   (pick  5.0  20  'd3 'd3 'd3   0.25 0.50 0.75 1.00  4 )
   (pick  6.0  20  'a4 'a4 'a4   0.25 0.50 0.75 1.00  4 )
   (pick  8.0  15  'r  'd3 'r    0.25 0.50 0.75 1.00  1 )

Note that the first three lines of the score each generate one note, and since all of the pitches and rhythms are the same, the pitch and rhythm of that note is precisely determined. The next four lines gradually overlap the pitches c4, d3 and then a4 within a range of rhythms. Each time music is generated from the score there will be a different configuration of notes due to the built-in randomness of the algorithm, but the basic musical structure is preserved due to the constraints given by the sequence of function calls to the pick algorithm.

Craig Sapp is a Ph.D. student at Stanford University in computer music. He has a Master's degree in composition and piano performance from the University of Virginia.

Soundstates explores the 3 states of matter (gas, liquid and solid) and their transformations into one another. This flowing from one sound state to the other forms the basis of the structure of the piece, to reflect a similar process in the spontaneous changes in nature. The piece begins with solid, block-like sounds which gradually disintegrate; it ends with a succession of rising and atmospheric sounds, which dissolve into a return to elements of the original material. The source sounds were mostly drawn from the marimba and were digitally processed in CLM (Common Lisp Music) environment.

Ching-Wen Chao is currently pursuing a DMA degree in composition in the music department at Stanford University. She also studies at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). Recently her String Quartet No. 2 was awarded the first prize of the Young Composers Competition in Asian Composers Leaque and of the Music Taipei Composition Competition. She has collaborated with ensembles such as the California Ear Unit, St. Lawrence String Quartet, Ju Percussion Group and members of the Eighth Blackbird, and her works have been performed in Taiwan, Korea, China, and several major US cities.

Miho Takekawa is currently studying for her Master of Music degree in percussion performance at the University of Washington. She has received the Boeing Scholarship for excellence in percussion performance for the last two years. Originally from Tokyo, she received her B.A. in percussion performance and music education at Kunitachi School of Music in Tokyo. Ms. Takekawa started playing piano at age three and percussion at age thirteen. She has been playing percussion for operas, musicals, symphonies, percussion ensembles, ethnic music ensembles and jazz bands in Japan and America. Since coming to Seattle, she has been playing with various local music groups, such as the Microsoft Wind Ensemble, Orchestra Seattle, Philharmonia Orchestra Northwest, Comptemporary Chember Composer and Player and accompanist for dance classes at Washington Academy Performing Arts and Seattle Japanese Choir; U-I singers, at Nikkei Manor and Keiro Home. She has performed at the Moore Theater, Benaroya Hall, Town Hall and various concert halls in Washington. She has also performed many world premiers, including Way Of The Hand by Marius Nordal and Shikyo by Christopher Shainan. Ms. Takekawa has taught for elementary and junior high schools and has been teaching classical, contemporary and ethnic percussion instruments privately in Japan and America. Along with playing in numerous musical projects, she devotes much of her time to the Pan Leggo Steel Drum Group and the Seattle Mallet Jazz Ensemble. Ms. Takekawa is a very active multi-percussionist in the Pacific Northwest.

Strata 2, for flute and interactive computer programming, is a study in obscuring and defining harmonic motion, obstructing and establishing rhythmic pulse, animating surface detail, and signal processing with modulation techniques.

The piece is divided into four sections, with an additional introduction and two brief interludes. Each section is further divided into seven subsections, each of which are based on one of three harmonies, eight- and nine-pitch groups, which extend through the range of the flute. The four sections move from obscured to defined harmonic motion, through the use of greater or fewer auxiliary pitches, which revolve around the primary pitches of the harmonies.

These sections also move from obstructed to established rhythmic pulse, through the use of greater or fewer rhythmic interruptions and grace notes, and expansion and contraction of sustained notes.

The sustained notes are animated with trills and vibratos of three different speeds, flutter tongues, and sung pitches, which create interference with the timbre of the flute.

The timbre of the flute is further processed with computer programming, using amplitude- and ring-modulation, and spatialized around four speakers.

Charles Nichols received his Bachelor of Music degree in violin performance from the Eastman School of Music, and his Master of Music degree in composition from Yale University. Composing and performing interactive computer music, and researching digital synthesis and musical instrument design, he is currently working towards a Ph.D., and serving as interim technical director, at Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA).

Patricio de la Cuadra is pursuing his Ph.D in Computer Based Music Theory and Acoustics. Last year he received a M.A. in Music, Science and Technology together with his M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering at Stanford. He also was honored with a Fulbright grant and the President of the Republic of Chile scholarship. Prior to coming to Stanford, Patricio studied Flute Performance and Electrical Engineering in Chile at the Universidad Católica de Chile. Between 1992 and 1998 he was member of the musical group Barroco Andino, playing various Chilean folk instruments and performing in Europe, South America, Japan, Taiwan, and US (including Carnegie Hall '94). The group also recorded three professional CD's.

The Accordiatron is a MIDI controller created at CCRMA by Michael Gurevich and Stephan von Muehlen. We hope you like it.

Michael Gurevich. Born in Winnipeg, Canada. Endured 21 frigid winters, 4 while in Montreal completing a B. Mus in Music Technology at McGill University. 23, 5'8" brn/brn, likes scuba diving, ice hockey, long moonlit walks on the beach, and interactive performance.

he-said, she-said . . . is an electro-acoustic innuendo about American politics and modern pop culture that inundate us. Our lives, our work-a-day world, and our relationships are literally overwhelmed with opinions and other noise that never stops. Someone always wants us to know what to think.

The performance environment for this music is designed for an eight speaker acoustomatique sound field utilizing live vocalization, a liberal supply of media samples, various mechanical sounds, and manipulations using CM, CLM, and MAX MSP algorithms and granulations.

Ron Alford's music has been performed in Europe, Canada, China, and in various venues around the US. His music has been selected for performance by World Music Days, SEAMUS, ICMC, and the Canadian Council. Ron studied at the University of Colorado, Adams State College, University of Illinois, and Stanford. He has studied with George Crumb, Larry Hart, Wayne Scott, Vladamir Ussachevsky, and Cecil Effinger. He taught music in the American Southwest, and has been an active performer since childhood. He operated recording studios, hosted opera and 20th century music on commercial and NPR FM radio, and was a founding member of the New Mexico Jazz Workshop. He has been the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities when he hosted such artists as Alvin Lucier, Bob Ostertag, Fred Frith, Henry Kaiser, Cecil Taylor, Robert Ashley, Brian Eno, Peter Gordon, John Cage, among others. His grants also include the New Mexico Arts Council, California Arts Council, and the Arts Council of Santa Clara County. He has had commissions for theater, ensemble, multi-media, film, and dance. He is an active member of the International Computer Music Association (ICMA), and the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS).

The Aeolian Harp is a mechanical instrument that creates musical sound from wind. As air passes through the harp its strings vibrate in sympathy with corresponding motion in the moving column of air. The result is an ethereal Aeolian resonance, a tonal memory of the wind's chaotic motion that, like our own memory, is a colored artifact of a presence that has since departed. The ideas of transformation, resonance, memory and loss are all thematic currents in this work. The piece is dedicated to my sister, Marianna Christine Taube, who died in 1997 after a long and courageous battle with cancer. Although some elements of the composition relate specifically to her life, I think the piece is best described as simply being a reflection, or resonance, of my struggle to come to terms with her death, of the transformation we all undergo when emotional chaos, despair and anger gradually yield to the duller ache we tolerate and carry forward. The ideas of resonance, transformation and memory operate on many different levels in the composition. On the largest scale, the piano and tape music always reflect the transformation of a source into an artifact, that is, in every section of music one part was derived from the other either though a process of attenuation ("dampening" aspects in the source part) or resonance ("amplifying" aspects of the source part). The tape music consists of real sounds (primarily wind and plucked piano strings) that have been transformed or colored in some manner appropriate to the composition. These techniques include the use of resonating comb filters, time stretching, varied repetition, and cross synthesis. Cross synthesis was used to create the "singing wind" that occurs toward the end of the composition as wind sounds take on the spectral properties of the Buddhist chant Zen Sho Kada sung by the Rev. Haruyoshi Kusada of Berkeley, California. Some passages in the piano part reflect distant memories I have of studying the piano as a young man. A short passage from the seventh Visions Fugitive by Serge Prokofieff (title Arpa) appears briefly with Zen Sho Kada. Most of the melodic and harmonic structures in the tape and piano were derived through Frequency Modulation (FM), a computer synthesis algorithm invented by my teacher John Chowning. This technique produces an amazing variety of spectral resonances through a few simple controls on the complexity and density of sidebands around a carrier frequency. As a synthesis technique FM sidebands produce the timbre of individual notes. As a compositional technique, the side bands constitute melodic and harmonic sets whose dissonance and texture can be controlled in musically interesting ways. All the sounds in the composition have their basis either in FM or in the justly tuned Aeolian (natural minor) mode. The Aeolian Harp was composed in Common Music, a software environment for computer-based composition developed by the author. The tape part was created using Common Lisp Music (CLM) developed by Bill Schottstaedt at CCRMA, Stanford University.

Heinrich Taube received his B.A. and M.A. from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in composition at The University of Iowa. Active as a composer, researcher, and music software designer, Taube has published numerous articles on issues related to music composition and technology and has served as associate editor of The Journal of New Music Research. Prof. Taube has won awards for his musical compositions and for his software. He was awarded a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation for composition at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University. His Wilderness of Mirrors for string quartet and tape won first prize at the Santa Cruz String Quartet Competition. His tape piece Tremens won honorable mention at the Bourges Music Festival in France; and an algorithmic composition, Gloriette for John Cage, was released by the MIT /Computer Music Journal on a CD of new and innovative works in computer music. In 1995 his commissioned piece for computer and Disklavier opened the 3rd Multimediale Festival in Germany. His music compositions have also been performed at Tanglewood, in London, at numerous International Computer Music Conferences and at other concert venues in the US, Europe and South America. He worked for number of years at applied research labs in the software industry, including at Intelligenetics (biotechnology), Intellicorp (expert system shells), and at the Price Waterhouse Technology Centre (financial modeling). In 1991 Taube moved to Germany to become for five years head of software design at the Institute for Music and Acoustics at the Center for Art and Media Technology in Karlsruhe, Germany. While there he developed "Common Music," a now internationally used software environment for music composition. His papers detailing part of this work have appeared in Computer Music Journal and The Journal of New Music Research. In 1996 the Common Music software environment won 1st Prize at the First International Competition of Music Software in Bourges, France.

In 1995 Taube joined the faculty at the School of Music at the University of Illinois He currently teaches music composition, music theory, acoustics and computer-music related classes along with pursuing his own music and research. His current projects include a book on computer-based music composition to be published by Swets and Zeitlinger and interactive Music Theory courseware for develping electronic text books supported by Harcourt Brace Publishers.

Mei-Fang Lin was born in Taiwan. She got her bachelor's degree in composition and theory at the National Taiwan Normal University and her master's degree in composition at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is currently pursuing her doctoral degree in composition at the University of California at Berkeley. She has studied composition with Guy Garnett, Sever Tipei, Zack Browning, and electronic music with Scott Wyatt. She is now working with Edwin Dugger and Ed Campion at UC Berkeley.

Among her honors include the Kate Neal Kinley Memorial Fellowship, Dr. and Mrs. James C.Y. Soong Fellowship, Geraldine Cooke Fellowship, Second Place in the 2001 Left Coast Chamber Ensemble Composition Contest, Third Place in the 2001 SCI/ASCAP Student Composition Commission, First Prize in the 2000 NACUSA Young Composer's Competition, First Prize in Prix SCRIME 2000 in France, winner of the 21st Century Piano Commission Competition in 1999, finalist at the Concours International de Musique Electroacoustiques, Bourges in 2000 and the Concorso Internazionale Luigi Russolo in 1999, Honorary Mention and Special Award in the Music Taipei Composition Competition in 1998 and 1997 respectively. Her compositions have received performances and broadcast in the United States, Europe and Taiwan.

As a pianist, she has been soloist with the National Taiwan Symphony Orchestra and the National Concert Hall Symphony Orchestra in Taiwan. She has been very active performing new music in the past few years since she came to the United States. Over four years, she has performed in over 40 new music concerts. These pieces range from solo, chamber pieces to works involving electronics. And before she came to the United States, she has already been featured performer in the 1992 International Computer Music Conference, 1994 Asian Pacific Music Festival, 1996 Festival of Taiwanese Composers in Paris, etc. Upcoming concerts she is doing include a recital of six pieces for piano and electronics at Ball State University in Indiana in the fall, 2001.

Wadi Musa or the Valley of Moses was the city of the Nabateans some centuries ago. A "rose-red city half as old as time," where sand has witnessed unconscious listeners of the whisper of dessert creatures, wind, and water. Well deep there, two thousand and one steps below, there is the Monteria Hat, a curious object indeed.

This is a composition for Quenas (Andean flutes), Cello and Physical Models of Maracas and Clarinet. The Maracas belong to special breed of models developed by Perry Cook called PHISM (Physically Inspired Sonic Modeling). The polyrhythms are the result of combinations somewhat chaotic between the shake rate, seed quantity and size of shell, thus inspired by the Monteria Hat.

Born in Barranquilla Colombia, Juan Reyes holds degrees in Mathematics and Music Composition. Since 1989 he has co-organized the International Contemporary Music Festival and periodic electro-acoustic cycles in Bogota. He was also professor of art, music and a research associate at La Universidad de Los Andes in Bogota. Currently at CCRMA, Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics of Stanford University, his research topics include physical modeling, and spectral modeling of musical instruments, algorithmic composition and their use for expression modeling. Among his works are Equus and Resonancias, a collection of computer music works for the stage and also several compositions based upon instrumental sound subjects like Boca de Barra, for trombone, and Sygfrydo for cello. In the context of sound installations his works ppP and Los Vientos de Los Santos Apostoles have been presented in museums and galleries of Colombia. His writings have appeared on severa international publications and his music has been performed around the world as part of contemporary music radio broadcasts and festivals.

Patricio de la Cuadra is pursuing his Ph.D in Computer Based Music Theory and Acoustics. Last year he received a M.A. in Music, Science and Technology together with his M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering at Stanford. He also was honored with a Fulbright grant and the President of the Republic of Chile scholarship. Prior to coming to Stanford, Patricio studied Flute Performance and Electrical Engineering in Chile at the Universidad Católica de Chile. Between 1992 and 1998 he was member of the musical group Barroco Andino, playing various Chilean folk instruments and performing in Europe, South America, Japan, Taiwan, and US (including Carnegie Hall '94). The group also recorded three professional CD's. Patricio de la Cuadra is honored to have his wife Gabriela Olivares, join him on this program.

Gabriela Olivares graduated last year from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music with a double M.A. in Violoncello and Voice performance, and received the President of the Republic of Chile scholarship. Originally from La Serena, Chile, Gabriela began her violoncello studies at the age of 11 and then moved to Santiago in 1992 to continue undergraduate studies in musical performance at the Universidad Católica de Chile. She has played Violoncello with the National Young Symphonic Orchestra, and has sung with the most important orchestras in Chile, performing Mozart's Requiem with the Chilean Symphonic Orchestra conducted by Irwin Hoffman, as well as Bachianas #5 by Heitor Villalobos with the National Young Symphonic Orchestra, the Schubert Mass in C and the drama Egmont by Beethoven, with the Chilean Chamber Orchestra. Gabriela and Patricio are going to spend next year in Paris studying at the Ecole Normale de Musique.