Primavera

Festival of Contemporary Arts and Digital Media

March 8–April 13, 2011, UCSB

April 7 — CREATE

Solo concert by Kaffe Matthews.

www.kaffematthews.net
http://annetteworks.com

CREATE

The Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology was established in 1986, and is situated within the Department of Music at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Dr. JoAnn Kuchera-Morin founded CREATE and serves as its director. Dr. Curtis Roads is Associate Director.

CREATE serves as a productive environment available to students, researchers, and media artists for the realization of music and multimedia works. Courses are offered at the undergraduate and graduate levels in collaboration with several departments. The Center also serves as a laboratory for research and development of a new generation of software and hardware tools to aid in media-based composition. Their web site describes in detail the educational, research, and production activities at CREATE. CREATE is committed to maintaining the highest possible level of artistic and technological capability. Professional composers will find the Center a productive place to realize their works. Among those who have made use of our facilities are Iannis Xenakis, Thea Musgrave, and Bebe Barron.

Website: create.ucsb.edu

JoAnn Kuchera-Morin, Director

Dr. JoAnn Kuchera-Morin is a composer, Professor of Media Arts and Technology and Music, and a researcher in multi-modal media systems, content and facilities design. She created, built, and designed the Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology and is the Center Director since its inception in 1986. Her years of experience in digital media research led to the creation of a multi-million dollar sponsored research program for the University of California, the Digital Media Innovation Program. She was Chief Scientist of the Program from 1998 to 2003. In 2000 she began the creation, design, and development of a Digital Media Center within the California Nanosystems Institute. The culmination of her design is the Allosphere Research Laboratory, a three-story metal sphere inside an echo-free cube, designed for immersive, interactive scientific and artistic investigation of multi-dimensional data sets.

A composer of mixed media works, she received her Ph.D. in 1984 from the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester. Her current music research is focusing on a general purpose interface for control of digital information through natural performance gesture. A composer of primarily electro-acoustic works, her music has been performed throughout the United States, Europe and Asia.

Curtis Roads, Associate Director

 

Dr. Curtis Roads is Professor of Media Arts and Technology and also Associate Director of the Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology (CREATE) at UCSB. He studied music composition and computer programming at California Institute of the Arts, the University of California, San Diego (BA Summa Cum Laude), and the University of Paris VIII (Doctorat «Très honorable avec félicitations du jury»). From 1980 to 1986 he was a researcher in computer music at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the MIT Media Laboratory. He then taught at the University of Naples Federico II, Harvard University, Oberlin Conservatory, CCMIX (Paris), and the University of Paris VIII. He has led masterclasses at the Australian National Conservatory (Melbourne) and the Prometeo Laboratorio (Parma), among others. He is co-organizer of international workshops on musical signal processing in Sorrento, Capri, and Santa Barbara (1988, 1991, 1997, 2000). He has served on the composition juries of the Ars Electronica (Linz) and the International Electroacoustic Music Competition (Bourges, France).

At UCSB he developed the Creatophone, a system for pluriphonic spatial projection of sound in concert, and the Creatovox, an expressive instrument for virtuoso performance in collaboration with Alberto de Campo. Roads and de Campo also developed PulsarGenerator, a widely distributed program for sound particle synthesis. Together with David Thall, he developed EmissionControl (2005), a program for generalized granular synthesis.

His composition Clang-Tint (1994) was commissioned by the Japan Ministry of Culture (Bunka-cho) and the Kunitachi College of Music, Tokyo. His music is available on compact discs produced by Asphodel, MODE, OR, the MIT Media Laboratory, and Wergo. A cofounder of the International Computer Music Association in 1979, he was Editor of Computer Music Journal (The MIT Press) from 1978 to 1989, and Associate Editor 1990-2000. His writings include over a hundred monographs, research articles, reports, and reviews. Some of these have been translated and printed in Italian, French, German, Finnish, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. His books include Foundations of Computer Music (1985, The MIT Press), Composers and the Computer (1985, AR Editions), The Music Machine (1989, The MIT Press), Representations of Musical Signals (1991, The MIT Press), Musical Signal Processing (co-editor, 1997, Swets and Zeitlinger, Amsterdam), and Microsound (2002, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts).

His book, The Computer Music Tutorial (1996, The MIT Press) is the best-selling textbook in the field, and has been published in French as L’audionumérique (1998, Editions Dunod, Paris) and Japanese (2001, Denki Daigaku Shuppan, Tokyo). A Chinese edition is being published in 2007. His current book project is Composing Electronic Music (in progress).

His current research is focused on microsound synthesis (granular, pulsar, and related techniques), matching pursuit decomposition of audio signals, pluriphonic spatialization, notation and visualization of sound, and the history and aesthetics of electronic music composition.