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Gary Lee Nelson (born Albion, Michigan, 1940) is a composer and media artist who taught at Oberlin College in the TIMARA (Technology in Music and Related Arts) department. [1] He specializes in algorithmic composition, real-time interactive sound and video along with digital film making.
In 1964, Nelson attended Utrecht University's Institute of Sonology in the Netherlands. He earned his composition doctorate at Washington University in St. Louis, where he studied with Paul Pisk and Robert Wykes. [2] He has taught at Purdue University and Bowling Green State University. He was a faculty member at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music from 1974 until his retirement in 2007. [3]
Nelson has worked at Bell Laboratories, the Swedish Radio Electronic Music Studios in Stockholm and at the Institute for Research and Coordination of Acoustics and Music (IRCAM) in Paris. He has been composer in residence and guest researcher at the University of Melbourne, Australia, Taiwan's National Chiao Tung and Soochow Universities, Hong Kong Baptist University, the National Unitersity of Singapore, Moscow Conservatory of Music and Yunan State University in the People's Republic of China. [4]
Nelson has taught at summer music camps since the early 1960s. These include the Allegheny Music Festival, the New England Music Camp, and the National Music Camp (NMC) at Interlochen. At Interlochen Nelson was chair of the composition department. He also founded the NMC Computer Music Studio and established the NMC High School Synthesizer Ensemble. In the summer of 1991, he traveled to the Republic of China. In ROC, he led intensive workshops in computer music. These workshops included high school and college composers as well as teachers and other professional musicians.
Nelson's computer music specialties include real time interactive performance and "hyperinstruments." This term was coined to give focus to a new way that music is being made in the early 21st century. A hyperinstrument consists of a computer, a set of digital synthesizers, a performance interface, and software for linking them all together. [5] Nelson chooses the MIDI Horn for his solo performances. The MIDI Horn is a digital wind instrument designed and constructed at Oberlin by music engineer, John Talbert. A Macintosh computer, and an array of synthesizers from Yamaha, Roland, and E-mu Systems complete Nelson's concert setup. He has performed more than 200 times around the world since 1987.
Some of his compositions are not amenable to performance by live musicians—live performances include an empty stage, with the music heard via speakers reproducing a computer signal. [6]
One of Nelson's pieces, "Fractal Mountains", won first prize in an international competition for microtonal music at the Third Coast New Music Festival in San Antonio. [7] The same work was chosen by Wergo Records of West Germany for inclusion in a compact disc anthology of computer music. In 1988, his “Amber Waves” was awarded first prize in music at “Contours of the Mind,” an international competition for computer-based art held at the Australian National University. [8] “Morso” for solo flute and “Refractions” for MIDI Horn and synthesizers are recorded on Opus One.
In 1999, Nelson was featured in the online version of Discovery Magazine in a piece about fractal music. During the same year, he was awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to develop a new course called “Algorithmic Approaches to Interactive Composition.” In 2001, his work on fractal music was featured on the “Pulse of the Planet” radio program broadcast on NPR. [9]
Nelson has received grants from the Ohio Arts Council, [10] the National Science Foundation, the Sloane Foundation, the Powers Foundation and the Shansi Foundation.
In 2004, Nelson was commissioned by the Boston Museum of Science to create interactive software that demonstrated principles of genetics and evolution through musical sound and graphic animations. [11]
Electronic music broadly is a group of music genres that employ electronic musical instruments, circuitry-based music technology and software, or general-purpose electronics in its creation. It includes both music made using electronic and electromechanical means. Pure electronic instruments depended entirely on circuitry-based sound generation, for instance using devices such as an electronic oscillator, theremin, or synthesizer. Electromechanical instruments can have mechanical parts such as strings, hammers, and electric elements including magnetic pickups, power amplifiers and loudspeakers. Such electromechanical devices include the telharmonium, Hammond organ, electric piano and electric guitar.
An electronic musical instrument or electrophone is a musical instrument that produces sound using electronic circuitry. Such an instrument sounds by outputting an electrical, electronic or digital audio signal that ultimately is plugged into a power amplifier which drives a loudspeaker, creating the sound heard by the performer and listener.
Digital music technology encompasses the use of digital instruments to produce, perform or record music. These instruments vary, including computers, electronic effects units, software, and digital audio equipment. Digital music technology is used in performance, playback, recording, composition, mixing, analysis and editing of music, by professions in all parts of the music industry.
A music sequencer is a device or application software that can record, edit, or play back music, by handling note and performance information in several forms, typically CV/Gate, MIDI, or Open Sound Control, and possibly audio and automation data for digital audio workstations (DAWs) and plug-ins.
Kyle Eugene Gann is an American composer, professor of music, critic, analyst, and musicologist who has worked primarily in the New York City area. As a music critic for The Village Voice and other publications, he has supported progressive music, including such "downtown" movements as postminimalism and totalism.
Morton Subotnick is an American composer of electronic music, best known for his 1967 composition Silver Apples of the Moon, the first electronic work commissioned by a record company, Nonesuch. He was one of the founding members of California Institute of the Arts, where he taught for many years.
Curtis Roads is an American composer, author and computer programmer. He composes electronic and electroacoustic music, specializing in granular and pulsar synthesis.
Tristan Murail is a French composer associated with the "spectral" technique of composition. Among his compositions is the large orchestral work Gondwana.
Philip Cashian is an English composer. He is the head of composition at the Royal Academy of Music.
Tod Machover, is a composer and an innovator in the application of technology in music. He is the son of Wilma Machover, a pianist and Carl Machover, a computer scientist.
Eugene "Gene" Martynec is a Canadian musician, composer, and record producer. Renowned for his versatility, Martynec has worked across multiple musical disciplines as a guitarist, synthesist, pianist, and bassist.
The Oberlin Conservatory of Music is a private music conservatory of Oberlin College, a private liberal arts college in Oberlin, Ohio. It was founded in 1865 and is the second oldest conservatory and oldest continually operating conservatory in the United States. It is one of the few American conservatories to be completely attached to a liberal arts college, allowing students the opportunity to pursue degrees in both music and a traditional liberal arts subject via a five-year double-degree program. Like the rest of Oberlin College, the student body of the conservatory is almost exclusively undergraduate.
Derek Lawrence Keller is an American composer, guitarist, vocalist, and teacher. Keller previously served as a visiting assistant professor of music composition at Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and he currently curates the music series for St. Paul's Episcopal Church, focusing on highlighting original avant-garde and improvisational music. He also works as an adjunct professor at William Jessup University.
John Stanley Hilliard was an American composer.
Gareth Loy is an American author, composer, musician and mathematician. Loy is the author of the two volume series about the intersection of music and mathematics titled Musimathics. Loy was an early practitioner of music synthesis at Stanford, and wrote the first software compiler for the Systems Concepts Digital Synthesizer. More recently, Loy has published the freeware music programming language Musimat, designed specifically for subjects covered in Musimathics, available as a free download. Although Musimathics was first published in 2006 and 2007, the series continues to evolve with updates by the author and publishers. The texts are being used in numerous mathematics and music classes at both the graduate and undergraduate level, with more current reviews noting that the originally targeted academic distribution is now reaching a much wider audience. Music synthesis pioneer Max Mathews stated that Loy's books are a "guided tour-de-force of the mathematics of physics and music... Loy has always been a brilliantly clear writer. In Musimathics, he is also an encyclopedic writer. He covers everything needed to understand existing music and musical instruments, or to create new music or new instruments. Loy's book and John R. Pierce's famous The Science of Musical Sound belong on everyone's bookshelf, and the rest of the shelf can be empty." John Chowning states, in regard to Nekyia and the Samson Box, "After completing the software, Loy composed Nekyia, a beautiful and powerful composition in four channels that fully exploited the capabilities of the Samson Box. As an integral part of the community, Loy has paid back many times over all that he learned, by conceiving the (Samson) system with maximal generality such that it could be used for research projects in psychoacoustics as well as for hundreds of compositions by a host of composers having diverse compositional strategies."
Richard Charles Boulanger is a composer, author, and electronic musician. He is a key figure in the development of the audio programming language Csound, and is associated with computer music pioneers Max Mathews and Barry Vercoe.
Tom Lopez is an American composer of electronic music. He serves as Director of the Computer Music Program at The Walden School. Lopez is best known for his extensive history with the TIMARA Labs at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music.
TIMARA is a program at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music notable for its importance in the history of electronic music. Established in 1967, TIMARA is well known as the world's first conservatory program in electronic music. Department alumni have included Cory Arcangel, Christopher Rouse, Dary John Mizelle, Dan Forden and Amy X Neuburg.
Bruno Degazio is a composer, researcher and film sound designer based in Ontario, Canada, where he is also a professor at Sheridan College. Degazio is an expert on computer music.
Kathryn Alexander is a Guggenheim Award-winning American composer and a professor of composition at Yale University.
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