Presenter: Martin Gotfrit

Monday, February 22
1:45 - 2:30 pm
Calit2 Auditorium

Ghost in the Machine (GitM) represents 30 years of fascination with musical automata. It expresses my interest in exploring the nature of the constraints that I believe govern my own compositional process. It mirrors how I value spontaneity and improvisation. It is based upon the notion, so well expressed in the work of the composer John Cage, that through the use of indeterminacy one can reflect the current state of the cosmos. I have used the system to sketch out compositional ideas, generate an accompaniment for MIDI guitar and provide music for a variety of music, theatre and dance performances.

GitM is an autonomous real-time composition system I have been developing since 1994. It is all written in Max/MSP/Jitter - an object oriented graphic based programming environment. The system began as an accompaniment tool to be used with a MIDI guitar. As processors and software improved synthesis, sample playback, signal processing has been added. There are a variety of interfaces or "handles" for the system: some optimized for live performance, others for composition and others for control via data from sensors or machine vision systems. At the heart of it all is an algorithmic "engine' that generates events optimized for music: a pitch, an entry delay or time between notes (rhythm), a duration for the note (staccato/legato), a dynamic (often loudness or silence), a pitch offset or bend (ornamentation, alternate tunings) or control data for other parameters of the sound generating systems (filter settings, granulation parameters, delay times, etc).

See also:
Ghost in the Machine