Participant Biographies

Michael Alcorn is Director of SARC (the Sonic Arts Research Centre) and director of the BSc in Music Technology at Queen's University, Belfast, North Ireland. He studied at the University of Ulster, and completed a PhD in composition at the University of Durham.

His compositional activities range from music for conventional instruments to works for live or taped electro-acoustic performance. His music has been performed and broadcast in the UK, Europe, North and South America and the Far East. He has received commissions from the BBC, The National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland, the Nash Ensemble, Singcircle, the Smith Quartet, Darragh Morgan, the Irish Chamber Orchestra, Opera Theatre Company and the Ulster Orchestra. His work has been programmed at a number of international computer music conferences and he was a featured composer at the Elektrisk Helg Festival in Malmö, Sweden, in 1997 and at the “Northern Ireland Now” Festival in Munich in 1999. He was appointed a Director of International Computer Music Association in January 2004.

Marsia Alexander-Clarke is a video installation artist with a background in painting and sculpture. In the 1970s and ‘80s she exhibited her sculpture extensively. These works were entitled “Nomadic” sculptures which she set out in nature, documented and then exhibited in galleries in their “dormant” state. They were made of brown wrapping paper and tape, later of wood and canvas. Ideas of process art, anthropology and packaging were involved.

Since the early nineties Alexander-Clarke has been involved with video. She was an active participant of Studio X productions, an artist video cooperative initiated by Nancy Buchanan in Pasadena, California. In 1997 she exhibited her first video installation at El Camino College, in Torrance, California and at the California Museum of Photography in Riverside, California. This work was entitled STRETCHING. Since then she has created three additional video installations: VOICES, exhibited at Century gallery in Sylmar, California as well as at The Palos Verdes Art Center in Palos Verdes, CA in 2000, and at Bank Gallery in Los Angeles, CA in 2003. 6in1to 64CHOIR was commissioned for an exhibition at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena CA IN 2001. UT COELUM is a video installation which is based on an a-cappella women’s choir singing an original composition by Ethan Nasreddin-Longo. This work was presented at the Robert V Fullerton Museum in San Bernardino, CA in 2003 and also with AIM V: SYZYGY, (the human remix), presented by the University of Southern California School of Fine Arts in collaboration with the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, California in 2004. It was also exhibited at the Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, CA in 2006. Single channel works have been presented in New York, Santa Fe, and Los Angeles.

Marsia has developed new techniques to arrive at visual and aural sound carpets based on a grid format. In this work she strives to arrive at a point of silence within the complexity and fragmentation in our present day world.

Chris Chafe is a composer/cellist with an interest in the computer as an aid to music composition and performance. He has been a long-term denizen of the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, Stanford University where he teaches courses in computer music and directs the center, also having served as Chair of the Department of Music from 1994-97. His doctorate in music composition was completed at Stanford in 1983 with prior degrees in music from the University of California at San Diego and Antioch College.

Chris Chafe is Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America for applications of digital signal processing to musical acoustics. As a researcher at IRCAM, Paris, he developed methods for computer sound synthesis based on physical models of musical instrument mechanics and has recently returned from a year-long residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts. He has performed his music in Europe, the Americas and Asia, and has several compositions available on compact disc. Articles published in various technical journals including Computer Music Journal, Contemporary Music Review, Proceedings of ICMC, IEEE conferences.

Paulo C. Chagas is an Assistant Professor of Composition at the University of California, Riverside. He was born in Brazil and is composer, theoretician and researcher in music technology. He studied Composition at the University of São Paulo, at the Conservatoire Royal de Musique de Liège, Belgium and electronic music at the Cologne Academy of Music. His Ph.D. in Musicology was completed at the University of Liège in 2003.

Paulo Chagas has composed more than 100 pieces - ballet music, operas, musical theater works, multimedia works, pieces for orchestra, instrumental and vocal ensembles, electronic and computer music. His works have been performed in Europe, Russia, the USA, and Latin America to both public and critical acclaim.

Chagas worked for ten years (1990-99) as Sound Director of the Studio for Electronic Music of the WDR (West German Radio and Television Broadcasting) where he conducted extensive research into electronic and computer music, algorithmic composition, interactivity, multimedia and sound spatialization. His theoretical work focuses on subjects like musical semiotics, music and media philosophy (Wittgenstein), new media, and music technology.

Jim Cummings is a writer, editor, and father. An eclectic and devoted listener, with a tangentally related interest in nourishing a palpable awareness of place nesting on all scales (from the neighborhood to regional, continental, planetary, and galactic), in 1999 he founded EarthEar, a record label and online catalog of environmental sound art.  From the start, EarthEar was meant not as escapism into recorded fantasms of nature, but as a means toward deeper listening to the living world around us.  This focus expanded, eventually spawning the Acoustic Ecology Institute in 2004; AEI works largely on the news, policy, and science aspects of acoustic ecology.  Jim is the author of many freelance magazine articles, including “Listen Up! Opening our Ears to Acoustic Ecology” (Zoogoer, 2002), edited the books Why do Whales and Children Sing? (1999) and Investing With Your Values (2000), and is executive producer of eleven EarthEar CDs, most intimately on the compilation/meta-composition The Dreams of Gaia (1999).  He received his M.A. (Interdisciplinary Consciousness Studies) at JFK University in 1987 and his B.A. at Wesleyan University in 1979.

Beth Griffith grew up in Texas and has studied voice in South Bend, Graz, Cologne and most recently in Neheim-Huesten with Hanni Mack-Cosack.  Since her European debut with Mauricio Kagel’s solo theater piece Phonophonie (La Rochelle, France in 1979), the demand for Beth Griffith as soloist has led to appearances at such important music festivals as the Warsaw Autumn, Cologne Triennale, Wien Modern, Numus Festival,  Donaueschingen Musiktage , Darmstadt Summer Courses, Wittener Tage für Neue Kammermusik , ISCM and New Music America. Of special significance to Beth is her work with contemporary composers including Mauricio Kagel, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Morton Feldman, Walter Zimmerman and Wolfgang von Schweinitz.  Her one-hour, solo recording of Feldman's Three Voices was awarded the German Record Critics' Prize.

Among her recent performances:  Jocasta in the Harry Partch opera Oedipus in Montclair, NJ, John McGuire’s A Cappella at the Brueckenmusik Festival in Cologne, Germany, and Three Voices in Cologne and New York.

Douglas Kahn - is the founding director of the Program in Technocultural Studies at the University of California, Davis. . He has a PhD in Art History, an MFA in post-studio art from Cal Arts, and an MA in music composition from Wesleyan University, where he studied with Alvin Lucier and Ron Kuivila. Before coming to UC Davis, he taught at in the Department of Media Arts and Production at University Technology, Sydney, in Australia.

He writes on the history and theory of sound in the arts, and the arts and technology, from the late-19th Century to the present day. He is author of Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (MIT Press, 1999), coeditor of Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant-garde (MIT Press, 1992), coeditor of a new book series Technoculture and the Arts at University of California Press, the journal Senses and Society (Berg), and Leonardo Music Journal (MIT). He is completing research for a book entitled Sound No Sound.

Sang-Hee Lee is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Riverside. She has a B.A. in Archeology at the Seoul National University (South Korea), a MA and  Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of Michigan.  She is interested in the evolution of human morphological variation based on the fossil record and seeks to identify the causal mechanisms for the patterns observed in the human (and ancestral human) fossil record.

Her research is multi-disciplinary in nature, bridging biology and anthropology: biology, in that the mechanisms of evolution and variation apply to all species; anthropology, as human evolution has been shaped by cultural factors. She has been active in five research topics: variation and taxonomy, longevity, sexual dimorphism, brain size, and sampling bias. All of these play an important role in human evolution, each with a long history of research. Her approach is focused on “excavating” new knowledge by rephrasing a question, redefining a concept, and developing innovative methods, all in ways that make it possible to get empirical information from fossil data that have not been possible before.

René T.A. Lysloff - is an Associate Professor of Music (Ethnomusicology) at the University of California, Riverside. He received a Bachelor of Music from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1977, a M.A in Ethnomusicology from the University of Hawaii and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.

Lysloff has published numerous articles on Javanese traditional music and theater journals and collections.  Since 1995, however, Lysloff has also been exploring issues related to changing technologies and their impact on cultural practices and epistemologies involving music.  His seminal article in Ethnomusicology (the Journal of the Society for Ethnomusicology), entitled "Mozart in Mirroshades: Ethnomusicology, Technology, and the Politics of Representation," brought technoculture squarely in the middle of ethnomusicological study.  More recently, Lysloff has co-edited (with Leslie Gay) a collection of articles titled Music and Technoculture (2003, Wesleyan University Press).  Finally, Lysloff is an active laptop musician and electronic music composer.

John McGuire was born in Artesia, California in 1942.  He began piano lessons at the age of 8 and French horn at the age of 12.  He began composing in college at 17.  His principal composition teachers in California were Robert Gross at Occidental College, 1960 to 1964, Ingolf Dahl at the University of Southern California, Seymour Shifrin at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1964 to 1966, and Karl Kohn.

In 1966-68 two consecutive Alfred E. Hertz traveling scholarships allowed him to begin an extended stay in Europe where he became directly acquainted with the music and thought of the European avant-garde.  He studied counterpoint, instrumentation and composition with Krzysztof Penderecki at the Folkwang-Schule in Essen for two years, attended the International Summer Courses in Darmstadt in 1966 and participated in the Composition Studios of Karlheinz Stockhausen in Darmstadt in 1967 and 1968 on scholarship from the state of Northrhine-Westfalia.  In 1970-71 he attended lectures in electronic and algorithmic composition at the Institute of Sonology in Utrecht.

His music has been performed at the International Gaudeamus Music Week, 1971 (awarded first prize), the ISCM festivals in Paris, Amsterdam and Aarhus, the Darmstadt Summer Courses, Festival Musica in Strasbourg, the ICA London, the International Computer Music Conference, the Cologne Triennial,  the West German Radio's Musik der Zeit (six times), the Zagreb Biennial, Festival d'Automne, Paris, the Logos Foundation, Gent, the Holland Festival, Klang-Aktionen, Munich, Pro Musica Nova, Bremen and the Bochum Planetarium; it was the focal point of the Winter Music in Karlsruhe in 1985, the Minimalisms Festival of the Berliner Gesellschaft für Neue Musik in 1998 and the Ussachevsky Memorial Festival of Electronic Music, 2000, at Pomona College.

In 1998 McGuire moved from Cologne to New York City.   He has since taught 20th-century music and composition at Columbia University.

Miller Puckette is Associate Director of the CRCA (Center for Research in Computing and the Arts) at the University of California, San Diego. He obtained a B.S. in Mathematics from MIT and Ph. D. in Mathematics from Harvard. Puckette was a member of MIT's Media Lab from its inception until 1987, and then a researcher at IRCAM, Paris, where he wrote the Max program, which became a widely used platform in computer music research and production facilities.

He is currently working on a new real-time software system for live musical and multimedia performances called Pure Data ("Pd"), in collaboration with many other artists/researchers/programmers worldwide. Pd is free and runs on Linux, IRIX, and Windows systems. Since 1997 Puckette has also been part of the Global Visual Music project with Mark Danks, Rand Steiger, and Vibeke Sorensen, which has been generously supported by a grant from the Intel Research Council. Puckette is author of the book project Theory and Techniques of Electronic Music, which is available online.

Pedro Rebelo has been awarded a PhD in composition from the University of Edinburgh and is currently Director of Research at the SARC (Sonic Arts Research Centre) at Queen’s University, Belfast, North Ireland, and Chair of the Sonorities Festival of Contemporary Music.

He is composer/digital artist working in electroacoustic music, digital media and installation. His approach to music making is informed by the use of improvisation and interdisciplinary structures. He has been involved in several collaborative projects with visual artists and has created a large body of work exploring the relationships between architecture and music in creating interactive performance and installation environments.

His electroacoustic music is featured in various CD sets (Sonic Circuits IV, Discontact III, Exploratory Music from Portugal, ARiADA). His audio-visual work "lautomata.3" has recently been awarded the Special Recognition prize from the CynetArt Festival, Dresden. Pedro conducts research in the field of digital media, interactive sound and composition. His writings reflect his approach to design and composition by articulating creative practice in a wider understanding of cultural theory.

Lawrence D. Rosenblum is Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Riverside. He received his B.A from the State University of New York at Binghamton and his Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut. His research addresses issues of multimodal speech perception, as well as general auditory perception. His recent speech research examines the relationship between speech and speaker properties as they exist across auditory and visual (lipread) modalities. His recent research on auditory perception examines human sensitivity to reflected and obstructed sound. Professor Rosenblum addresses this research from the perspective of Ecological Psychology. Ecological Psychology is a theoretical approach to perception which strives to understand how humans perceive and act in the natural environment. Emphasis is placed on establishing a thorough description of the information available to the senses rather than on the mental processes usually thought to embellish impoverished input.

Professor Rosenblum's research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and is published in international journals. He has also authored a number of book chapters and is currently writing a book on perceptual expertise.

Barry Truax is a Professor in both the School of Communication and the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University, Canada, where he teaches courses in acoustic communication and electroacoustic music. He has worked with the World Soundscape Project, editing its Handbook for Acoustic Ecology, and has published a book Acoustic Communication dealing with all aspects of sound and technology.

As a composer, Truax is best known for his work with the PODX computer music system which he has used for tape solo works and those which combine tape with live performers or computer graphics. In 1991 his work, Riverrun, was awarded the Magisterium at the International Competition of Electroacoustic Music in Bourges, France, a category open only to electroacoustic composers of 20 or more years experience. He is also the recipient of one of the 1999 Awards for Teaching Excellence at Simon Fraser University.

Barry is an Associate Composer of the Canadian Music Centre and a founding member of the Canadian Electroacoustic Community.