Curator Statement

INTERFACING SOUND Concert

This concert presents a historical overview of computer music works created at the Center for Research in Computing & the Arts (CRCA), University of Calfiornia San Diego during the past 20 years. The program represents computer music that walks the fine line between music and noise.

As computing technology has become more pervasive in the production and presentation of music, our individual and collective concept of noise has evolved. Upon first hearing computer music most listeners have difficulty finding a musical or lyrical handle by which to respond. Upon listening to a broad range of computer music compositions and performances it is difficult to hear musical distincts and nuances unless the listener is trained in contemporary music practice. The level of creativity by the musician or composer, and their level of skill with software and computing devices, must be high or the works will tend to a range of similarity. This concert seeks then to break through the conventional computer music event by arranging a listening program of pieces that have been designed through reductive, destructive, minimalist or explosive techniques to integrate or showcase that ‘thing’ that most people would not equate to music: noise.

The University of California has supported the involvement of musicians and composers in research activities for over 30 years. UC San Diego is home to one of the oldest arts research units in existence, CRCA, the Center for Research in Computing & the Arts, which evolved from a long and established history as for Music Experiment. CRCA is an organized research unit of UCSD, whose mission is to facilitate the invention of new art forms that arise out of the developments of digital technologies. Current areas of interest include networked multimedia, virtual reality, computer-spatialized audio, and live performance techniques for computer music and graphics.

• The concert is curated by Carol Hobson who has been the administrative and production manager of CRCA for over twelve years. She has supported and presented the development of computer music from the days of the Computer Audio Research Lab (CARL) under the direction of F. Richard Moore, to the spatialized sound compositions of Roger Reynolds, to more recent works developed by Miller Puckette’s Pure Data “Pd” software.

Full document (PDF) p. 51