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Alvin Lucier’s “I am Sitting in a Room” is a classic piece of feedback-based sound design. It consists of Lucier sitting in a room with 2 distant mics, 2 tape decks, and speakers. The recording begins with Lucier verbally describing the process of the piece, which is that he is recording his voice, and after [...]

When presented with an Aphex Twin track, Karlheinz Stockhausen once commented: “I heard the piece Aphex Twin of Richard James carefully: I think it would be very helpful if he listens to my work “Song of the Youth,” which is electronic music, and a young boy’s voice singing with himself. Because he would then immediately [...]

The other day I was listening to AT’s “Selected Ambient Works Vol. 2″ and track #2 off the first disc got me thinking. In case you’ve never heard of R.D. James (aka Aphex Twin), he is an electronic musician. Occasionally he does something nerdy and/or snarky which cracks me up. For example [...]

Ive just finished reading Godfried Toussaint’s excellent paper ‘The Euclidean Algorithm Generates Traditional Musical Rhythms’.   As the title suggests, Toussaint explores the applications of Euclid’s famous algorithm for computing the GCD of two integers to algorithmic rhythm generation.  It turns out that if you take a templated version of the algorithm and apply it to [...]

A couple of months ago i got my roommate Ryan hooked on Perry Cook’s excellent sound synthesis library STK.  Since then he’s been writing musical versions of classic sorting algorithms- check them out.