Bay Area Computer Music Technology Group (BArCMuT)
Presentations by John Chowning, Maureen Chowning, Simran Gleason and  
Ge Wang
Thursday March 12th, 7pm, 2009 @ Stanford University CCRMA
RSVP Here: http://electronicmusic.meetup.com/152/calendar/9759931/

Thank you to Stanford CCRMA for hosting BArCMuT this month:
- JOHN CHOWNING and MAUREEN CHOWNING present Composing Voices for  
Soprano and Laptop in MaxMSP.  A presentation using sound-synchronous  
animations to show how John was able to adapt powerful ideas developed  
in old languages to a modern object based language.

- SIMRAN GLEASON presents a new generative music app for the iPhone  
that uses gravity equations to drive compositions.  Kepler's Orrery (http://keplersorrery.com 
) started life as an open source java project, and has been shown at  
Maker Fair, NASA (Yuri's Night), and has been used to teach physics in  
middle school classes.

- GE WANG on the latest from Smule: development, news, and anecdotes  
related to Sonic Media on the iPhone.

All the best,
Noah Thorp
Bay Area Computer Music Technology Group Organizer
http://www.barcmut.org

BIOS
JOHN M. CHOWNING was born in Salem, New Jersey in 1934. Following  
military service and studies at Wittenberg University, he studied  
composition in Paris for three years with Nadia Boulanger.  In 1964,  
with the help of Max Mathews then at Bell Telephone Laboratories and  
David Poole of Stanford, he set up a computer music program using the  
computer system of Stanford University's AI Laboratory. Beginning the  
same year he began the research leading to the first generalized sound  
localization algorithm implemented in a quad format in 1966.  He  
received the doctorate in composition from Stanford University in  
1966, where he studied with Leland Smith.  The following year he  
discovered the frequency modulation synthesis (FM) algorithm, licensed  
to Yamaha that led to a family of synthesizers based upon the DX7 the  
most successful synthesis engines in the history of electronic  
instruments.  His three early pieces, Turenas (1972), Stria (1977) and  
Phoné (1981), make use of his localization/spatialization and FM  
synthesis algorithms in uniquely different ways. After more than  
twenty years of hearing problems, Chowning was finally able to compose  
again beginning in 2004, when he began work on Voices, for solo  
soprano and interactive computer using MaxMSP.  He taught computer- 
sound synthesis and composition at Stanford University's Department of  
Music and was the founding director of the Center for Computer  
Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), one of the leading centers  
for computer music and related research.

Coloratura soprano MAUREEN CHOWNING studied at the Boston Conservatory  
of Music before moving to the San Francisco area.  She has since  
appeared on the Public Broadcasting System’s NOVA series and  
Smithsonian World with Max Mathews, demonstrating his Radio Baton and  
conductor program.  She has also performed at concerts in Canada,  
Poland, and Japan and at the International Electronic Music Festival  
at Bourges, France, where in 1990 she gave the world premiere of  
Solemn Songs for Evening by Richard Boulanger and in 1997 she gave the  
premiere of Sea Songs by Dexter Morrill.  She gave the world premiere  
of “Voices” (version 1) at the Maison de Radio in Paris in March  
2005.  She is noted for her special ability to sing comfortably in  
alternative tunings, such as the Pierce scale, and in a wide variety  
of styles. Her repertoire ranges from Handel oratorios, operatic roles  
such as the "Queen of the Night" from Mozart's The Magic Flute, and in  
the domain of contemporary literature, to works of Schoenberg and  
Babbitt as well as  premieres of works by composers Joanne D. Carey,  
Qui Dong, Servio Marin, and Atau Tanaka.

SIMRAN GLEASON is an artist and professional nerd. He started drawing  
the day after getting a masters degree in computer science (symbolic &  
heuristic computation) from Stanford and drifted through many media  
before arriving at his current focus: making algorithms that make  
music. Among his more successful installations is Haunted Garden, a  
room that listens to you, finds the notes in your conversation, and  
uses them to compose an ambient sound and lightscape. He also did the  
generative music and light algorithms for SWARM, a gaggle of open  
source someday-autonomous spherical robots.  His work has been shown  
in galleries in San Francisco, Palo Alto, as installations at Maker  
Fair, Yuri's Night, Coachella, and of course,the special olympics of  
art: burning man. Kepler's Orrery is his first iPhone app.

GE WANG is an assistant professor at Stanford University CCRMA and Co- 
founder, CTO, and Chief Creative Officer of Smule where he explores  
interactive sonic media on the iPhone. His research interests include  
interactive software systems for computer music, programming  
languages, sound synthesis and analysis, music information retrieval,  
new performance ensembles and paradigms (e.g. laptop orchestras and  
live coding), and methodologies for education at the intersection of  
computer science and music. Ge is the chief architect and co-creator  
of the ChucK audio programming language, the founding director of the  
Stanford Laptop Orchestra (SLOrk) and the Stanford Mobile Phone  
Orchestra (MoPhO). http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~ge/