Sunday, January 04, 2009

Curtis Roads: Microsound (Lecture)

Curtis Roads teaches and pursues research in the interdisciplinary territory spanning music and technology. He is currently Professor of Media Arts and Technology + Music, University of California Santa Barbara.

This lecture presents an overview of several projects pursued over the past five years in laboratories at UC, Santa Barbara. All this research is based on a scientific model of sound initially proposed by Dennis Gabor (1946), and soon afterward extended to music by Iannis Xenakis (1960). Granular analysis (also called atomic decomposition) and granular synthesis has evolved over more than five decades from a paper theory into a broad range of applied techniques. Specific to the granular model is its focus on the microsonic time scale (typically 1 to 100 ms). Granular methods treat sound as a stream of acoustic particles in both the time domain and the time- frequency (TF) domain.

SCI-Arc
960 East 3rd Street
Los Angeles, CA, 90013 USA
7 PM - February 11th, 2009

[via architectureweek.com]

1 comment:

  1. Microsound is the title of a book of Curtis Roads', coming with a CD. He deals with granulation and FFT, as well as with other types of microsound. He doesn't take a purely technical approach, but rather manages to write a book that pushes the reader to think about music in new ways. By the way, Roads' "the computer music tutorial" is a (the?) trusted reference in the computer music litterature.

    ReplyDelete