I’ve created a dedicated page on this blog that I will use to track the progress of our June 22 Turing event at the Chapel, and to post some of the interesting material that I am working with. As I say on that page: “A. Turing: Automatic Elegy will be a ritualized performance set within a [...]
On June 22, I will be curating and performing in an evening concert/installation in honor of the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing’s birth. His birthday is actually the next day, but if you adjust for time zones, we can sort of get away with it… The event will be held as part of the Wayward [...]
The Park School in Baltimore has a math department that has developed its own excellent mathematics curriculum. (And shares it freely!) At its core, the curriculum is based on fourteen habits of mind, enumerated in the screenshot accompanying this post (which I snarfed from the Quantum Progress blog). What a wonderfully concise, and yet comprehensive, [...]
The Burien/Interim Arts Space is an installation space by and for the current DIY/guerrilla generation. As far as I can tell, Kathy Justin and Dane Johnson, the project’s artist-instigators, sidled up to the city of Burien (directly next door to SeaTac airport) and said “hey, if you’re not using that empty city block, do you [...]
I’m excited about the ambient electronic constructions that I’m currently working on, which combine projective geometry with beautiful field recordings that my friend and collaborator Perri Lynch captured in the Amazon rain forest six weeks ago. A finite projective plane with 31 points and 31 lines provides structure for the virtual space that I am [...]
The picture to the right is a simple but beautiful Mascheroni construction which results in the points for the unit square. (You can see lines for 2 sides of this square in the drawing.) Melissa Plagemann and Linda Strandberg sang a live musical rendition of this construction at the Anathem launch in San Francisco. A [...]
Several people have suggested that I post about cellular automata and music, since two of the pieces on the IOLET CD, Simple Automata and Sixteen-color Prime-generating Automaton, use one-dimensional cellular automata to provide their underlying structure. The subject has also been in the news with recent blog posts about using two dimensional automata for generative [...]
During the Anathem music project, I tried to imagine many different ways that music might be integrated into the daily lives of the avout, not only in the obvious celebratory liturgical uses, but also as a tool for learning, remembering, and computing. One manifestation of this, geometric games for exercising the learning mind, I’ve already [...]
The Long Now Foundation hosted the launch event for Anathem on Tuesday evening in San Francisco, and as part of that event, I had the good fortune to present some of the Anathem math-music, live. All of the singers enjoyed having the opportunity to act as avout ambassadors to the event, and we appreciated the [...]
Many people who have heard pieces from the Anathem music project might think that the music is simply a fiction that accompanies the book, and that the science-related titles are a fanciful nod to the plot. As the composer, I certainly hope that the music stands on its own in this way, but for the [...]