In May 2018 I was in Münster with edimpro colleagues Dimitris Papageorgiou and Karin Schistek to give improvisation workshops to students at the Hochschule für Musik. Mieko Kanno…
On July 12th 2018, Portuguese saxophonist Henrique Portovedo premiered HOTPO, my new piece for alto saxophone, ensemble, and electronics. The performance was part of the World Saxophone Congress…
elsewhere by Edwards/Hayes/Michalakos/Parker/Svoboda Back in May 2012, while Mike Svobodo was visiting Edinburgh to do some workshops with University of Edinburgh postgraduate students, some locals, including myself, did…
forest by edimpro alison by edimpro heated by edimpro Just before leaving the UK in September 2017, amongst packing boxes and the fifteen other circles of hell that…
This is the full and original text of my article published on February 15th 2018 in Times Higher Education. In January of 2017 a colleague and I travelled…
Back in 2011, after several years of using either CMN or Sibelius (the latter via MIDI file import), I was considering alternative score output formats for my algorithmic composition software slippery…
(and no, it’s not just Brexit) Last year I started playing competitive squash in the East of Scotland League. After the matches, meals and drinks are provided by…
Henrique Portovedo and I have just finished recording my piece in limine, for two soprano saxophones and computer, written 2003-2005. We’ve now got to work on the mix and…
First of all I should say that there are no current plans to port slippery chicken. But: A humourously intended (though sarcastic: you know who you are!) post on my…
Quasar Quartet, Le Gesu, Montreal, Canada, 19/1/17: It was disappointingly warm in Montreal. I’d promised Martin temperatures of -20C and below (it reached -33C on my last trip)…
Below is an interview I initiated online with the artists who made the above video to my algorithmic composition for rei as a doe. CI = Chante Inglis (animation)…
I’ve just returned from teaching algorithmic composition for a week at the Conservatorio Statale di Musica “Niccolò Paganini” in Genova, Italy. It was a pleasure to meet and work with Professor…
I’m just coming to the end of my second week of teaching in the Institute for Computer Music and Electronic Media (ICEM) at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen,…
Those present at the St Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh performance by Mieko Kanno of my hyperboles 2 (“until the cherries burst in the orchard”) on 20/5/16 were very patient. I…
Whilst searching online forY/Our Music, Salee Art Every’s excellent film about Thai music, I stumbled across a complete recording of the post-concert question and answer session we did at Museum…
The week of March 28th 2016 saw me giving saxophone and electronics masterclasses with Gianpaolo Antongirolami at the Conservatorio di Musica “Benedetto Marcello” in Venice. We were guests of…
It was a pleasure to be a guest and one of the featured composers of the AVEIRO_SÍNTESE 2016 festival and the Dias De Música Electroacústica in Portugal earlier this month…
Anyone who has input a piano score into notation software knows that it’s not so easy as, say, creating a woodwind part. First of all there are chords,…
Ellen Fallowfield and I outed the latest version of my hyperboles project last weekend at the Crosscurrents Festival in Birmingham. After two days of intense rehearsals and development it…
slippery chicken’s automatic chord sequencing algorithm creates an ordering for a set-palette’s sets (or chords) based on user-given dissonance and spectral centroid envelopes. The terms set and chord…
Back to part 1 auto-sequence examples and analysis The following examples process a set-palette created from a harmonic reduction by Emilios Cambouropoulos of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End…
jitterbug is a four-movement four-channel work/album for computer, with or without improvising musicians. It is documented more generally but in detail in another blog post. Here I’m going…
(aka four views of a rhythmic-structural procedure based on iterated proportions of 6:3:5:4) jitterbug is a four-movement four-channel work/album for computer, with or without improvising musicians….
Composed in 2010 but not released until some final polish was applied in 2015, Music for Parallel Consumption is a 4-channel digital composition made for delivery and playback via a custom…
It was a pleasure to be invited to Seda Röder’s inaugural Sonophilia event on August 15th. This took place just outside of Salzburg, Austria, at the Cultural Centre…
No, this isn’t a polemic against complex rhythmic notation or the New Complexity. Since the 80s I’ve been a fan of such music, even if as a composer…
Update, January 2016: This project has now been released on bandcamp It’s a lovely word but a little overused by self-help and marketing gurus: serendipity. Those familiar…
Artists Colin Lawson and Chante Inglis are working on a video using Colin’s paintings as visuals alongside my 40-minute piano and computer piece for rei as a doe. This…
All the transcriptions are done, the analysis is complete, and now we have Shradha Jain’s video of the project I did in Delhi at the end of 2014:…
My hyperboles project saw a new iteration in Quebec last month. Performances of hyperboles 4 (“insomniac rain”) took place in Canada, on February 25th courtesy of the festival Mois Multi 2015…
Experiencing this sound installation involves stepping into a custom-built soundproofed box (the mNAP) and listening to the twelve-minute piece I made on stereo headphones. Simple feedback on the…
5.15am, December 23rd, 2014. Tharangambadi, Tamil Nadu, India. Pitch black. The dead of night. Except that the stillness that accompanies those well-known phrases is all too conspicuously missing….
You’d be forgiven for looking at this stunning photography by Shradha Jain and thinking that we’d found ourselves in idyllic surroundings full of the sounds of nature in…
This was a great find: a step well in the heart of Delhi, namely Agrasen Ki Baoli–see recordings location map. Not only did this have some interesting sonic…
Another shot of me with that far away look–no idea where that comes from because whilst recording these ambiences I feel very focussed on the present moment. In…
I’m looking forward to working at the Unbox Festival in Delhi at the end of this month on a collaborative project funded by the AHRC. I’ll be leading…
Self-mastery is the supreme victory–– much more to be valued than winning control over others. It is a victory that no other being whatsoever can distort or take…
There are natural limitations of the human voice which present us with challenges. Amongst these are the difficulty of pitching by ear—as opposed to most instruments’ fingering or…
In response to Russell Snyder’s request for my code to generate double harmonics (natural) on the viola d’amore, I’ve abstracted the following from my piece 24-7: freedom fried….
Since August 2013 I’ve been working on hyperboles, a series of pieces that allow musicians to tweak the algorithm parameters that are used to generate the work’s score, sound…
Gianpaolo Antongirolami and I premiered my new piece for baritone saxophone and computer their faces on fire in San Marino on June 20th 2014. It’s 100% algorithmically generated, and…
Some facebook posts and resultant comment threads are worth saving. This one, prompted by having to grade some film music composition, is, in my opinion one of those, mainly…
If we look back to the compositional world surrounding Bach and Handel, or Mozart and Haydn, most people will see more stylistic commonalities than divergences. Is this merely…
This course, from the University of Edinburgh’s Reid School of Music (recently ranked first in the UK), is suitable for those who have never studied music academically. It will introduce you…
On August 18th 2014, edimpro—the free improvisation group I started at the University of Edinburgh in 2009—played at an Edinburgh Festival live broadcast concert for the BBC’s Jazz…
My 40-minute algorithmic composition for piano and computer came out on the Aural Terrains label this month. Rei Nakamura premiered it in London (partial version) and Stockholm (complete version)…
On December 6th 2013, along with some colleagues and old students, I contributed to a PechaKucha evening in Edinburgh devoted to New Music. The 20x20second slide format is a…
A new release of freely improvised music featuring me on saxophones and electronics, Christos Michalakos on drums and electronics, and Jack Weir on electric guitar is now available…
The self-similar properties of visual patterns generated by Lindenmayer-Systems can be apprehended holistically almost instantaneously. Even simple rules can generate pleasing patterns of the sort you might see…
Rigobert Dittmann’s Bad Alchemy 75/12 review of my slippery chicken release has to be the best I’ve every received. Not because it’s the most flattering, but because the writing style…