Premiere this Wednesday at Tavern of Fine Arts

The Tavern of Fine Arts in the Central West End has generously invited me to play on their St. Louis Composers night, this Wednesday (October 10th), at 7:30 pm.  The Tavern is run by two local composers, Matt Daniels and Aaron Johnson.  They have some really excellent food, wine, beer and bourbon (among other things), as well as a nice performing arts space with a baby grand piano.  They are wonderful supporters of local concert musicians and composers, as well as experimentalists.

I'll be performing a new work, which is a study in the use of flocking algorithms to "scratch" records.  It uses a Pure Data implementation, by Eric Singer, of the famous "boids" algorithm by Craig Reynolds.  I've altered the C code slightly to allow the independent control of the speed of each bird in the flock, primarily so that amplitude can control velocity.  The location of each "birds" determines the location in an audio file, and their movement through space is the "scratching" or "scrubbing" mechanism.  The coherence of the flock determines, roughly, the transformations of the audio file.  A shockingly wide range of effects can be created just from the flocking algorithm - for instance, at fast enough update speeds, and with low enough inertia and with a high degree of avoidance behaviors, various shades of frequency modulation occur as the birds oscillate incredibly fast, stuck in place.  Conversely, with low update speeds and normal inertia, entire segments of the audio file can be heard at various transpositions simultaneously, creating rich microtonal harmonies.

Other works will include Chemical Oscillator (Cellular Automata Study No. 4), though without the visuals (I think) and several tape pieces, including Meditation on a Spent .38 Shell.  I may show a curious little tape piece that I did recently that features field recordings from St. Louis, as well (sometimes I feel so all alone).

Please join us at the Tavern!