Web: http://faculty.kutztown.edu/parson
Office: 484-646-4296
Fax: 484-646-4129
Make sure to visit Electro-Music.com!
Check out the annual Electro-Music Festival in September.
Here are links to some out-of-this world planetarium photos and the recorded musical performances and technical talks of planetarium events from September 2011 and March 2012 and September 2012.
Above is a photo of yours truly in the guise of Acoustic Interloper, performing a composition entitled Speck of Dust for processed banjo and the Scrabble-to-MIDI synthesized music generator at the Electro-Music 2010 Festival in upper New York state.
This one is a shot of Michael A. Williams, Nelya Storozhyshina, Radhika Vunnam and Dylan Schwesinger demonstrating the Scrabble-to-MIDI system at the October 2010 PACT Conference for the PA State System Trustees and Board of Governors.
RECORDINGS:
| "Unit
Impulse" is my
five-movement solo piece from
the Electro-Music March 2013 Equinox webcast. It
consists of a single note from my five-string banjo
processed in a large variety of ways over the course of
32 minutes. It was inspired by a banjo note's loose
proximity to the idealized concept of a Unit Impulse in signal processing. |
|
| "The
Cheese
Stands Alone" is my solo Zero-Input Mixer piece
from the Electro-Music 2012-2013 New Year's Eve webcast.
There is a short
write-up
about
it here. |
|
| Here is my
solo
session
of a piece entitled "These Voices" performed on
the Yamaha MG124cx Zero-Input Mixer, with effects and
recorded samples via Ableton Live, laptop-based software
in the mixer's feedback path. Zero-Input Mixer is a new
instrument for me this year. Jeremy Parson and I will
perform this piece at the September 5, 2012 planetarium
seminar. Sierra Parson rearranged and recorded the vocal
sample for this piece, near the end of the piece. There
are
two
related
pieces posted here, a Four-Person / Zero-Input
Mixer Collaboration from September 7, and my solo
performance of "These Voices" on September 9, both
performed at Electro-Music 2012 in Huguenot, NY. The
collaborators were Bill Manganaro, John Driscoll, Jeremy
Parson and Dale Parson. |
|
| Here is the
electro-solo
of
an
Untitled Piece in Db
Minor
(melody by Jeremy
Parson, see below) that I performed on Godin xtsa guitar synth
and assorted electronics and software, at the Electro-Music
2011 Festival near Huguenot, NY on September 11.
Scrabble-to-MIDI appears extensively in this piece,
sometimes talking with a Pacarana
/ Kyma device, acknowledgements to the K.U.
Research Committee for providing the latter music
hardware / software system. |
|
| Here is the electro-solo of Passing Storm (see below) that I performed on 5-string banjo and Yamaya acoustic guitar and assorted electronics and software, at the Electro-Music 2011 Festival near Huguenot, NY on September 11. | |
|
|
| Here is the electro-duet of an Untitled Piece in Db Minor that Jeremy Parson and I performed on Godin xtsa guitar synth (me), Fender Strat electric guitar (Jeremy), and assorted electronics and software, at the September 7, 2011 Grim Planetarium seminar. Scrabble-to-MIDI appears briefly in this piece. | |
| Passing Storm, Electro Version is a processed acoustic guitar and banjo piece that I wrote and performed for the 2011 Summer Solstice Webcast at http://radio.electro-music.com on June 18. It uses the scale G A Bb C# D F F# G. | |
| Crater Dust (in
Just Intonation) and Passing are pair of compositions
for the 2010-2011 New Year's Eve Webcast at http://radio.electro-music.com.
Crater Dust was
written by Art Cohen and Steve Bowman. I wrote Passing, using some
custom software for both of these laptop performances. |
|
| A Speck of Dust
is my processed banjo + Scrabble-to-MIDI performance
from Electro-Music
2010 in the photo above. This one turned out
fairly well, I think. |
|
| Here
is
a
Live
Mutilation of the above performance of A Speck of Dust by
PHOBoS,
who
mutilated
it
remotely from the Netherlands during my
performance via the streaming Internet feed at http://radio.electro-music.com.
This mutilation is very well done! |
|
| Crater Dust
(Cohen and Bowman) from Electro-Music
2010 was performed by Steve Bowman, Richard
Lainhart, Mel Morley and myself. They were on keyboard
synths and laptops. I used my Godin + Roland GR-33
guitar synth and laptop on this one. |
|
| Emergent Blues is my Summer Solstice composition for http://radio.electro-music.com, built in part from ideas not used at our Pocono Skies collaboration in May 2010. | |
| Take Cover is my Scrabble-to-MIDI + guitar synth + banjo composition for the 2009-2010 New Year's Eve Webcast at http://radio.electro-music.com. The synchronization of the stringed instruments with the Scrabble game work well on this one and A Speck of Dust above. This version of Scrabble-to-MIDI uses "synthesizer mode" on the MacBookPro to generates sounds. My students and I have played this software as an ensemble numerous times and places. | |
| Here
is
a
processed
banjo
+
MIDI
guitar
version
of
49th Winter,
a piece I originally wrote for banjo in March 2003 after
cross-country skiing in a very quiet snowstorm in the
woods. This performance is from the Fall 2009 Equinox
webcast at http://radio.electro-music.com. I also performed this piece with Howard
Moscovitz at the September 30, 2009 computer audio
seminar at Kutztown University, and solo at the end of
October at Electro-Music 2009. |
|
| Here is my Untitled Piece for Scrabble-to-MIDI from Summer Solstice 2009 at http://radio.electro-music.com. This was the public debut of Scrabble-to-MIDI a month after it became an instrument. This early version uses "sequencer mode," which gives somewhat less precise timing than the "synthesizer mode" added later, but it has some of its own unique metric qualities. | |
| Appalachian Stream is my banjo + Ableton Live composition for the 2008-2009 New Year's Eve Webcast at http://radio.electro-music.com. | |
| Ordinary Machinery
is my banjo + Ableton Live
composition from 2007, written by Sierra Parson, Jeremy
Parson and myself. I performed a live version of this
piece at Electro-Music
2008 in Kingsport TN. I am still hoping for Sierra
to write me some more prose to use in this way. |
|
| Opposing Force is a chromatic piece I wrote for 5-string banjo a few days after George W. Bush was reelected in 2004. Jeremy Parson is on electric bass and I am on my guitar synth + a lot of custom software for the effects in this recording. I also performed this in an ensemble at Pocono Skies collaboration in May 2010. | |
| Polarized Shuffle
is a short (~1 minute) piece synthesized with the
StringStudio software synthesizer using data captured,
extracted and algorithmically altered from my MIDI
guitar playing in testing software for the 2006 paper
below. |
RECENT PAPERS ON COMPUTER MUSIC AND AUDIO:
|
"Quantum
Composition
and
Improvisation," Proceedings of the First International
Workshop on Musical Metacreation (MUME 2012), Stanford
University, October 9, 2012, http://www.metacreation.net/mume2012/.
Here are the slides
for the talk.
|
|
D. Parson & P. Reed, "The
Planetarium as a Musical Instrument," Proceedings of the 12th
International Conference on New Interfaces for
Musical Expression, paper and interactive demo,
University of Michigan, June 4-6, 2012.
|
| D. Parson & R. Panuski, "Real-time Grammar-based Parsing and Restructuring of Musical Streams," Proceedings of the 2011 International Computer Music Conference, Huddersfield, UK, July 31 - August 5, 2011. |
| "Algorithmic Musical Improvisation from 2D Board Games," Proceedings of the 2010 International Computer Music Conference, New York City and Stony Brook, NY, June 1-5, 2010. |
| J. Baguyos, D. Wetzel, M. Boyle, B. Lander, S. McLaughlin, S. Hewitt, K. Martynes, D. Parson, A. Cole, "A Summary and Transcript of the ICMC 2010 UnConference UnSession on Computer Music Performance," 2010 International Computer Music Conference, New York City and Stony Brook, NY, June 5, 2010. |
| "Chess-based
Composition
and
Improvisation
for Non-musicians," Proceedings of the 9th International
Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression,
p. 157-158, paper and interactive demo, Pittsburgh, June
4-6, 2009. |
| “Real-time Detection of Finger Picking Musical Structures,” Proceedings of Ninth International Conference on Digital Audio Effects, Montreal, September, 2006. I also presented an invited talk and guitar synthesizer demo of this topic at the Second Annual Electro-Music Festival in Philadelphia, June, 2006, http://event.electro-music.com/. |
RECENT EVENTS AND PERFORMANCES, with thanks to Dr. Phill Reed for being a gracious host in Grim Planetarium:
In April 2012 two students (Matt Basta & Jeremy Parson) and I performed the HexAtom game, that we had premiered in Grim Planetarium on March 20 (see above), at the 2012 PACISE Conference at Millersville University.
In April 2010 several Java Programming students and I performed Scrabble-to-MIDI for the 2010 PACISE Conference (PA Computer & Information Science Educators) at West Chester University of PA. I also gave the talk and performed with Millersville students at their annual Computer Science Symposium in April 2010.
September 30, 2009 Audio Seminar: Howard Moscovitz and I hosted a computer audio seminar in the evening, including a performance of Scrabble-to-MIDI by Raphael Francis, Ryan Huber, Steve Solomon and myself, that my Java Programming students and I wrote in Fall 2008 and Spring 2009. Here is a Reading Eagle second-page news article, including a photo, on the Scrabble-to-MIDI project. We also got a first-page lead-in with a photo of Ryan's game board GUI.
I hope to create a laboratory for multimedia processing research and courses at Kutztown University over time. Please let me know if you would like to work in this area. We may be investigating integrating the Processing language into a course soon.
