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When teaching Music 9 last term, I wast telling students about my first assignment in the Intro to Electroacoustic Music class I took during my undergrad at Brandeis. Our assignment (while learning tape-style editing techniques) was to transform provided recording of a some speech into another phrase. Since some of the students seemed surprised by this assignment I thought I would post my version (I will admit, I could probably do a lot better job at this now, but I posted my original version of the assignment). I was asked to transform the following sentence: "One thing you can always be sure of is the stupefying anger of field mice." into: "Bee stings are no fun. You can always ice them. Sugar."

On Monday I drove over to Worcester with John Aylward to talk to his undergrad composition students about live electronics, free improvisation, and the performance of Vincible they heard a week before (and a little about Sad Mac too). I heard from John that the Monday after the concert they had a discussion about the piece in his class. While a number of his students were fascinated by this new type of music they had been exposed to, some were skeptical about the musical validity of the piece, whether it was music or performance art, etc. I went into the seminar hoping that to have to justify the validity of my music--I guess I've been to too many composition colloquia with graduate studets where they really ripped appart the composer's ideas. It was good they turned out to be so respectful/receptive, since we had a lot of topics to cover in a very short amount of time (we ran over a half hour, and most of them didn't seem to mind!). Overall it was a fun day. Right away instead of sharing there true reactions of the piece, they were asking questions about how the score worked. When the students heard the Vincible examples appropriately mixed, it cleared a lot up for them. Having the score explained and then hearing the best examples of how it worked from the concert they started get/hear the form of the piece (it was pretty cool seeing that click in some of their minds). Before I came in, there was one student who was planning on learning Max over the summer for an installation project he is planning, but by the end of the seminar it seemed like there were a few more of the students that were interested in diving into Max-land. There is one bit of sad news that came out of this Clark visit. When John and I went to lunch between his classes, he brought along a prospective student from Switzerland who had come to meet with him. The sad news is that even she had heard about Brandeis' VERY poor decision to close the Rose Art Museum and sell parts of the collection.

During the Spring 2008 semester, I designed the curriculum and was the primary lecturer for Music 231B: Graduate Seminar in Max/MSP (the first course in Max/MSP to be taught at Brandeis University). At the end of the semester I told some of the students that I would post the example files I had made for the class on another website once classes start in the fall and the old course site is removed. Recently, I wanted to show some of these examples to a friend in a lesson and realized it would be a lot more convenient to have these examples listed in a public place. These examples were made to aid lectures and not to be tutorials on their own. Perhaps sometime in the future I may adapt some of the files into real tutorials. I have only made some of the files available until I have a chance to retest all of the patches. The Examples

Commuter Rail -> Bus 558 -> Riverside -> Back to Bed