A few days ago, Ian Rogers mentioned that his company, Topspin, is adding “four more rock star engineers in the last two weeks of this month.” At the risk of seeming immodest, I appear to be one of said rock stars. I’m joining Topspin. “Damn. Look out. Look out.”, wrote Ian. Heh… Hope Ian doesn’t […]

Are you a computer nerd? Do you like music? I’m quite pleased to report that the hard working web-services team here at Yahoo! Music unleashed a very powerful new Music API upon the music-nerd community this week. This is the same API we used to build the Facebook Music Videos app, reported here some months […]

Bebe Barron is no longer with us. “Bebe was the last of the pioneering composers of classical studio electronic music. She was a close friend, an enthusiastic colleague, and a most gracious lady. ” writes composer and teacher Barry Schrader, to his mailing list of electro-acoustic music fans. You can learn more about Bebe and […]

Craig Kaplan wrote to tell me about some newly available high-res scans of seven complete works of (my hero/obsession) Athanasius Kircher, made available by the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbuttel. UPDATE: I’ve corrected the above since my first post. The Bibliothek site is posting seven complete works, not just the illustrations excerpted on the bibliodyssey blog. […]

Fans of my Whitney Music Box will certainly want to check out IanniX, a highly graphical music composition software program based a pioneering system (UPIC) developed by the late Iannis Xenakis. Xenakis was an influential stochastic composer who had a background in architecture (he was the principal designer behind the Philips Pavillion at the 1958 […]

This weekend, after adding stereo support to my software synthesizer, JSyd, I added three new stereo variations to the Whitney Music Box. These are fun to watch and listen to with headphones. Variation 14 Variation 15 Variation 16

You may have noticed that I haven’t been blogging much the past few weeks. This is because I’ve been furiously working on a rewrite of my software synthesizer, Syd, originally written nearly 10 years ago. Syd is a digital music program that is designed for teaching basic computer music and synthesis concepts. I used Syd […]

Wheel Music is another music visualization, using similar techniques to those I used in my Whitney Music Box. Each dot in the animation represents an individual note you are hearing. The notes are slowly traveling around in a circle. Each square represents a different tone cluster, or chord. Colors represent note values, and the radius […]

One of my favorite composers, Gyorgy Ligeti, died this morning at the age of 83. Time for a little Lux Aeterna.

Martin Wattenberg’s The Shape of Song provides a series of graphic analyses of MIDI files. The arches link musical phrases that are repetitions of each other, and provide a striking guide to the structure of the music. The above image is Madonna’s “Like a Prayer.” The site contains images of varying styles of music ranging […]