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.
A recording studio is a specialized facility for recording and mixing of instrumental or vocal musical performances, spoken words, and other sounds. They range in size from a small in-home project studio large enough to record a single singer-guitarist, to a large building with space for a full orchestra of 100 or more musicians. Ideally, both the recording and monitoring spaces are specially designed by an acoustician or audio engineer to achieve optimum acoustic properties.
IRCAM is a French institute dedicated to the research of music and sound, especially in the fields of avant garde and electro-acoustical art music. It is situated next to, and is organisationally linked with, the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The extension of the building was designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers. Much of the institute is located underground, beneath the fountain to the east of the buildings.
ChucK is a concurrent, strongly timed audio programming language for real-time synthesis, composition, and performance, which runs on Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, and iOS. It is designed to favor readability and flexibility for the programmer over other considerations such as raw performance. It natively supports deterministic concurrency and multiple, simultaneous, dynamic control rates. Another key feature is the ability to live code; adding, removing, and modifying code on the fly, while the program is running, without stopping or restarting. It has a highly precise timing/concurrency model, allowing for arbitrarily fine granularity. It offers composers and researchers a powerful and flexible programming tool for building and experimenting with complex audio synthesis programs, and real-time interactive control.
MUSIC-N refers to a family of computer music programs and programming languages descended from or influenced by MUSIC, a program written by Max Mathews in 1957 at Bell Labs. MUSIC was the first computer program for generating digital audio waveforms through direct synthesis. It was one of the first programs for making music on a digital computer, and was certainly the first program to gain wide acceptance in the music research community as viable for that task. The world's first computer-controlled music was generated in Australia by programmer Geoff Hill on the CSIRAC computer which was designed and built by Trevor Pearcey and Maston Beard. However, CSIRAC produced sound by sending raw pulses to the speaker, it did not produce standard digital audio with PCM samples, like the MUSIC-series of programs.
Max, also known as Max/MSP/Jitter, is a visual programming language for music and multimedia developed and maintained by San Francisco-based software company Cycling '74. Over its more than thirty-year history, it has been used by composers, performers, software designers, researchers, and artists to create recordings, performances, and installations.
Perry R. Cook is an American computer music researcher and professor emeritus of computer science and music at Princeton University. He was also founder and head of the Princeton Sound Lab.
Karlheinz Essl is an Austrian composer, performer, sound artist, improviser, and composition teacher.
The contrabass saxophone is the second-lowest-pitched extant member of the saxophone family proper. It is pitched in E♭ one octave below the baritone saxophone, which requires twice the length of tubing and bore width. This renders a very large and heavy instrument, standing approximately 2 metres tall and weighing around 20 kilograms (44 lb). Despite this, it was used in marching bands in the early 20th century.
Dan Trueman is a composer, fiddle player, improviser, new instrument creator and software designer. He plays the violin and the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle. Trueman studied physics at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, composition and theory at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati and composition at Princeton University. He taught composition at Columbia, Colgate, and since 2002, at Princeton. As a performer, Trueman has played at both contemporary and folk music festivals, among them Bang on a Can and Den Norske Folkemusikkveka. Trueman has written for his own ensembles, Interface and the Princeton Laptop Orchestra, as well as the Brentano, Daedalus, Cassatt and Amernet string quartets, Non Sequitur, So Percussion and others. He has received awards from the Guggenheim (2006) and MacArthur Foundations.
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.
Eldad Tsabary is a composer living in Montreal. He composes and performs in a variety of styles including contemporary, experimental, acousmatic, sound art, and live electronics. His works, in all styles, are created with wide textural and timbral variety and attention to motion and process.
Koji Asano is a Japanese musician and composer. He works primarily in the field of electro-acoustic music, with his principal instrument being computer software. Although he is essentially a solo performer, he has also appeared in numerous ensembles, such as Ensemble Die Reihe, Paragon Ensemble, Smith Quartet, Barcelona Winds Orchestra, and the Koji Asano Ensemble. Besides a prolific string of albums and limited-edition CD-Rs, he has also composed music for video art, films, and theatrical performances.
The European Bridges Ensemble (EBE) was established for Internet and network music performance. Its current members are the five performers Kai Niggemann, Ádám Siska, Johannes Kretz, Andrea Szigetvári, Ivana Ognjanović, the conductor and software designer Georg Hajdu, and video artist Stewart Collinson.
Live electronic music is a form of music that can include traditional electronic sound-generating devices, modified electric musical instruments, hacked sound generating technologies, and computers. Initially the practice developed in reaction to sound-based composition for fixed media such as musique concrète, electronic music and early computer music. Musical improvisation often plays a large role in the performance of this music. The timbres of various sounds may be transformed extensively using devices such as amplifiers, filters, ring modulators and other forms of circuitry. Real-time generation and manipulation of audio using live coding is now commonplace.
Keith Hamel is a composer, software designer, and professor of music. His music consists of orchestral, chamber, solo, and vocal music, often focussing on live electronics and interactivity between acoustic instruments and the computer.
Ge Wang is a Chinese American professor, musician, computer scientist, designer, and author. He is best known for inventing the ChucK audio programming language and for being the co-founder, chief technology officer (CTO), and chief creative officer (CCO) of Smule, a company making iPhone and iPad music apps.
Laetitia Sonami, is a sound artist, performer, and composer of interactive electronic music who has been based in the San Francisco Bay area since 1978. She is known for her electronic compositions and performances with the ‘’Lady’s Glove’’, an instrument she developed for triggering and manipulating sound in live performance. Many of her compositions include live or sampled text. Sonami also creates sound installation work incorporating household objects embedded with mechanical and electronic components. Although some recordings of her works exist, Sonami generally eschews releasing recorded work.
Sam Hayden is an English composer of classical and electronic music and an academic. His music has won several prestigious prizes and been performed widely at international music festivals.
Georg Essl is an Austrian computer scientist and musician, who works in the areas of human-computer interaction, acoustics, mobile computing and mobile music. He is a visiting research professor at the College of Letters & Sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, and he is also affiliated with the Center for 21st Century Studies. Prior to that he was an assistant professor at the University of Michigan.
