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 creating [...]
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 [...]
Over the weekend, Perri and I performed a new piece at Seattle’s “Arts in Nature Festival.” As is usual in Seattle, this site-specific piece was performed in a steady rain, but fortunately for us, our venue was inside a large geodesic dome in the center of a meadow. While the rain kept the number of [...]
Thanks to Al Billings, who posted on his blog about the CD of music that was included in the Anathem ARC. His description of my music: “weird shit”, I take as high praise. He’s right about the Asian throat-singing influences. The mystery language is Orth, of course!
Thanks also to Cory Doctorow and Joey deVilla, whose [...]
Here is my latest piece of “math music”: a geometry proof, turned into a puzzle, that is set as music for one or more players. One player starts with the first circle, and the others join in, cooperating to find a way to sing or play all 22 circles. The rules for the game are [...]