“When a violinist plays, which is incidental: the arm movement or the bow sound? Try arm movement only.” — Yoko Ono, ‘To the Wesleyan People’, 1966. [I’m grateful to Dawn Weleski for finding this quote]. The BBC orchestras have been getting an unusual and highly conceptual workout of late. I have been mulling over the […]

I’m grateful to Stewart Butterfield for making me aware of this quote by John Adams, which I here repost from his Sylloge blog, for the purposes of my own reference and safekeeping: I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics […]

Criteria for a Music School Head Search. In early 2006, our School of Music was about to conduct a Head Search. Although my appointment at Carnegie Mellon University is in the School of Art, and not within the School of Music, I was nonetheless concerned for the outcome of the search, and so I drafted […]

/* Processing (http://www.processing.org, v.1.0.1) Java program for Approximating a circular arc with a cubic Bezier curve. Reasonably accurate for angles up to a quarter-circle or so. The solution is taken from this PDF by Richard DeVeneza: http://www.tinaja.com/glib/bezcirc2.pdf linked from this excellent site by Don Lancaster: http://www.tinaja.com/cubic01.asp Note: written for clarity; not optimized! */ void setup(){ […]

This afternoon, I created three tiny Processing programs to serve as educational tools for exploring different relationships between video and time: time-lapse recording, stop-motion animation, and slit-scan imaging. These programs were created for students in my new course, “Interactive Technologies for Live Performance”, which I’m teaching this spring in collaboration with Matt Gray from the […]