Junya Oikawais a sound-art artist born in Sendai, Japan, 1983. The keyword of his creation : material of his inner-memory/time and 3D/the sense of touch/sensory organ/synesthesia/imagination-space. He is active by international Contemporary Art Festival and Sound Art Festival now. Some of his awards include: Special Prize, SFC Digital Art Awards, Japan, Finalist, 34th Bourges International Competitions of Electroacoustic Music and Sound Art ,France. 2nd Prize,4th International Acousmatic Composition Competition "Metamorphoses2006", Belgium.

When I sought a creative material in sound/sounding body in everyday-environment, I found myself fascinated by sound itself. Simple actions such as rubbing and hitting evoke my childhood memories of playing with sound, which made me realize that if I pursue my starting point of audio-experience (memories of sound) and re-create the everyday-environment behind it, it could enormously broaden my repertoire of creative expression. This work constitutes the project of exploring the root of my sound, clarifying my inner self in relation to playing with sound and wakening up my unconscious.

Jesse S Clark, aka Agents Del Futuro and member of Pineresin, is a San Francisco-based musician, composer and producer. Visit his website jsclarkstudios.com for a live video feed from his recording studio as well as hours of his music, video art and other media.

"Babayaga's Chicken Dance" is created solely from a recording (using a Canon Elph camera) of a shadow puppet troupe's rehearsal.

Christy Carew is a Canadian-American composer and pianist. She holds a BM from Loyola University New Orleans and a MA in Film Scoring and Composition from New York University, where she studied with Deniz Hughes. Christy also has a diploma from the EAMA composition program at L'Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris. She lives in Los Angeles, CA where she writes for film and concert, with several films she has scored going to festival. She is now scoring the independent feature film “Manhattanites.” Christy recently arranged additional music for “Sex and the City: The Movie.” She interns with Sharon Farber.

As a composer of African descent – Zimbabwe and South Africa, to be exact – I greatly enjoy writing African music and exploring my heritage musically. “Mother Africa” uses the traditional West African instruments of kora, a stringed instrument similar to a harp, and balafon, a tuned percussion instrument similar to the vibraphone or xylophone. Fedounoum hand drums, cruche, shaker and a wooden rain stick provide the rhythm, with the voices of women and children highlighting the string section. It is a brief, uplifting, and rhythmic journey into the world of African music and instrumentation.

A native of Los Angeles, Bettie Ross is a composer, arranger, songwriter, pianist, organist, synthesist, and choral conductor. Her diverse career began at the age of 4 with piano lessons through Trinity College, England. At the age of 10, Bettie began accompanying vocalists and small choral groups, and at 14, Bettie accepted her first professional job as a church organist. By age 16, she was also playing in rock n’ roll bands, a musical duality that plays a large roll in Bettie’s musical life to this day.

Noah Gideon Meites is a composer and trumpet player born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. He is presently a doctoral candidate in composition at UC Santa Cruz where his current teachers include Paul Nauert, David Evan Jones and Peter Elsea. This spring, Noah's recent composition "A Gleaming, May Rain" (scored for "Imaginary Gamelan" of pianos, electric guitars, mallet instruments, and electric bass) will be premiered at UCSC's April in Santa Cruz new music festival. Noah graduated with honors from Brown University in 2005 where he studied composition with Gerald "Shep" Shapiro and improvisation with Edward E. Tomassi.

Elegy for an Hour Lost (2.0) is a "remix" of a chorale for string quartet in which changes of rhythmic duration are noticeable, yet not readily quantifiable. Various synthesis processes combine to create a vocoder-like effect upon the original acoustic recording of the piece. These processes superimpose a syncopated 16th note pulse on an otherwise rhythmically static texture while highlighting the extremes of its harmonic and spectral ranges. The title derives from the restlessness and melancholy I feel at the onset of winter and its attendant loss of sunlight. -NGM

Katie McMurran is a sound artist and composer who currently resides in Los Angeles, where she works for a public radio station. She studied music at U.C. Berkeley and Calarts.

"For Keith" was composed/performed on a Fender Rhodes stage piano.

Ann Cantelow is a thereminist and composer in Boulder, Colorado. She studied composition at the University of California at Davis from 1967-1970, and was influenced there by John Cage, who taught there for a semester, Larry Austin, and Richard Swift. Martha Graham was also influential to her work.

Music notation software was used to develop 4 MIDI sub-sections for this piece. The sections were then brought into music track manipulation software, and cut, repeated, arranged and adjusted for effect. All the notated parts are out of range for their instruments, too fast to play live, and/or too boring for living and breathing musicians to play.

otonomiyaki is a collaborative sound project of Alan Nakagawa and Kio Griffith exploring found sound, field recordings and invented instruments. Alan Nakagawa has been creating eclectic inter-disciplinary work about Los Angeles both as a solo artist and co-founder of LA art collective Collage Ensemble Inc. His work has been multifaceted orchestrations portraying the urban fabric through collaborative process and multi-media experimentation. Kio Griffith is a sound artist creating compositions from built instruments and field recordings with cross-cultural emphasis.

Hakone compositions are a child's play of music box feeds played over field recordings of various public settings. The hakone is an instrument that is a boxed three stringed harp with a music movement attachment that allows hole punched tape to be fed through.

Mark Stanford studies at Music at San Jose Sate University under Prof. Belet and Prof. Furman.

Mechanical Wind is composed entirely out of a sample of a harp melody. I used Kyma to create the sonic events and Sonar to arrange them in an organized temporal fashion. All editing of sound files was accomplished in sound forge. The piece is a realization of hocket between sounds to create a uniform yet interesting character.

Maggi Payne is Co-director of the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College, in the San Francisco Bay Area (USA) where she teaches recording engineering, composition, and electronic music. She also freelances as a recording engineer/editor and historical remastering engineer. She has had performances of her works throughout the Americas, Europe, Japan, and Australasia. Her works are available on Starkland, Lovely Music, Music and Arts, Centaur, Ubuibi, MMC, CRI, Digital Narcis, Frog Peak, Asphodel, and/OAR, Ubuibi, and Mills College labels.

I built this stormy miniature landscape using a Moog IIIP's pink noise oscillator through the Moog's highly resonant filter, a voice resonating through a grand piano, a mechanical transport, a ball bearing, dry ice, paper, and tapping on tuning pins of a piano. In its brevity, it is almost as if one is looking through a window into another world for a moment.

B. Emerson Scott is a Philosopher/Composer reclusively residing in the Pacific Northwest, currently in Portland, Oregon. His work focuses upon the evolving, reflective, expressive relationship between internal philosophical growth and sonic composition.

The composer prefers not to have recourse to words in order to attempt to describe or explain compositions, operating under the premise that not just his but all compositions ultimately “speak for themselves”.

John Schappert's formal education and background is in music, the computer sciences and systems engineering. He has been a musician, chef, computer operator, database and systems administrator, systems engineer, house-husband, caretaker, and home-school teacher. His life-long passions for electronic and Electro-acoustic music, Christian spirituality, art, and systems engineering have now come together to create a fusion of unique sound design and construction as inspiration, technology, and opportunity present themselves. He owes whatever talents and opportunities he may have to God and to his wife, and offers to them his eternal gratitude for their endless patience and inspiration.

My name is Sean Luciw and I’m a music-aholic. I thought the guitar was my holy grail - but then I got a computer and now I am living in hell!

Beware! “Altered Reversal” brings guitar and fractal synthesis together into a orgy of acidic brevity.

Cheyenne Hendersonfirst remembers establishing his own taste when he secretly obtained hip-hop tapes with explicit lyrics at age 11. He fortunately (but barely) continued piano lessons so when he discovered jazz at 13, he had a foundation to work with. A graduate of UCLA with ethnomusicology and psychology degrees, Cheyenne is currently studying with Dan Becker at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in the master's program. He continues to play jazz around the bay area as well. He received the ASCAP Louis Armstrong Jazz Composition Award, the David Abell Jazz Piano Award, and the Elaine Krowne Klein Award.

Having sadly spent extended periods of time in a hospital recently, the core of this piece comes from sounds that I actually imagined were there, despite the numerous beeps and noises that are constant in a hospital. I became simultaneously fascinated and unnerved at the relentless drip of the I.V. and wondered what those drips might sound like if a tiny microphone were placed inside the plastic casing. Eerily, heart monitors no longer make noise and show only a graphic representation of the beat, so I imagined this sound as well and put it in the piece.

Julian Cartwright is currently a second-year composition student at Oberlin Conservatory. He attended the BUTI Tanglewood composition program for two summers, where he met Ben Dorfan. He studied composition with Ira Taxin at Juilliard pre-college for 4 years, and played violin in the pre-college orchestra. His piece "In a Being" was premiered by the Juilliard Pre-College orchestra. Julian is a violinist and guitarist who is equally at home playing classical music, recording eclectic pop songs, and free-improvising. "Grasshopper," a collaboration with his brother Vaughn was featured in the 2005 60X60 lineup.

Ben Dorfan (b. 1987) began studying music theory, mathematics and composition at UC Santa Cruz while still in high school. After a brief stint at Cornell University, he transferred to Oberlin Conservatory, where he is pursuing a double major in composition and TIMARA. At Oberlin he has studied with Lewis Nielson, Tom Lopez, Peter Swendsen, Gary Lee Nelson and Derek Keller. Ben has presented his work at the SPARK Festival and the SEAMUS National Conference, and was the recipient of the 2008 Allen Strange Award. In his spare time, Ben enjoys bicycling, cooking and cloud watching.

And They Had Big Circular Windows is a spontaneous composition for electric 5-string violin (Julian Cartwright) and electronics (Ben Dorfan). The initial throaty, yowling timbre subsides as the piece gently arcs downward, revealing an instrumental texture of pizzicato and harmonics. Sharply irregular instrumental attacks are juxtaposed with the even pulse of multi-tap delays, turning the visceral moment into a hypnotic meditation.

Author, educator, and composer, David Dvorin has had numerous performances and screenings of his multimedia and electro-acoustic compositions around the U.S.A.. He has collaborated extensively with such musical luminaries as composer Terry Riley and the Kronos Quartet, and been an active member of the Nevada County Composers Cooperative since 2000. He is currently a professor of music composition and electronic music at California State University, Chico.

Purposeful and direct, One Minute of Lust is transmuted electro-acoustic music born from a one minute guitar improvisation.

Brian Belet lives in Campbell, California, four miles from the San Andreas Fault. His interest is in composing music which does not yet exist and which would not exist without his intervention. He performs using Kyma, bass, guitar, and viola; and his research interests involve algorithmic composition, real-time software synthesis, real-time computer improvisations, and microtonal theories. He pays the bills by working as Professor of Music at San Jose State University. When Allen Strange died on 20 February 2008 I was called upon to write two brief obituary statements: one to distribute to the greater EA community through the SEAMUS, ICMA, and SCI news lists; and also a brief testament for the local newspaper. For this 60x60 miniature, I read an excerpt from my newspaper statement, and processed it live using a Kyma TimeLine running seven simultaneous algorithms. The number 7 relates to Allen’s final composition NGate, and so I enjoyed sending him this musical tribute and farewell.

Originally from the U.K., Julia currently resides in the San Francisco Bay area, where she teaches voice and composes vocal music for live theatre and solo voices. She draws her inspiration from the emotional heart of a subject and uses extended vocal technique to seek out the edges of discomfort, irreverence and harmony. In using her voice as a compositional instrument she has finally found the vocal freedom she always craved. Previous 60X60 pieces are ‘WBQ’ (2004) and ‘Space-time’ (2006) both were included in the Pacific Rim mixes. In 2007 she released a full length CD ‘Lullaby Island’.

I often find myself drawn to repeating patterns and close harmonies, but in dealing with this material I decided to also be as honest as I could about what I was ‘missing’, but not only did that encompass way more than 60 seconds would allow, I also didn’t feel brave enough to bare my soul though words, so I disguised my feelings a little. Thanks to Reinsamba for the ‘evening in the forest’ sample which I found on ‘Freesound.org’.

Richard Festinger, M.A. and Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley. Founder of the Earplay Ensemble. Music published by C.F. Peters, and recorded on the Bridge, Centaur, CRI and CRS labels. Major awards from the Jerome Foundation, the Fromm Foundation at Harvard University, the Koussevitzky Foundation in the Library of Congress, the Barlow Foundation, the Mary Flagler Cary Trust, the Pew Charitable Trust, the Guggenheim Museum, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Recording grants from the Copland, Argosy, and Ditson Funds, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

In China. Korea, and Japan, at least as recently as 100 years ago, perhaps even more recently, I don’t know, certain types of insects were prized for their singing qualities. Friends who grew up in China speak of old men heading off to the teahouse with cages containing song birds, and very much smaller cages containing crickets. Perhaps one can still find this in more remote rural areas. Entomology II is a constructed insect “soundscape” unlike any that would occur in nature, my intent was that it should sound natural in its evolution.

Frasch, is a composer of acoustic and electro-acoustic music, improviser, sound installation artist, and experimental flutist. She is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of California, Berkeley where she studies composition with Edmund Campion and Cindy Cox, and works on interactive electronic music at CNMAT (Center for New Music and Audio Technologies) with David Wessel. Her music has been performed at festivals and concerts worldwide such as: SICMF in Korea, Acanthes Festival in Luxembourg, and the Electroacoustic Listening Room Project, among others. Heather will attend the curses at IRCAM in France this fall. Also, Heather holds a Silver Medal from the Conservatoire Nationale de Region de Lyon and a Bachelor of Arts from Temple University.

Ice Texture ’59 is an electroacoustic miniature is the first in an anticipated series of miniatures whose sound sources are based on conflict in the real world and yet, harmony in the artistic space. In this piece the sound sources, are melting ice and Styrofoam, symbolizing the destruction of the melting ice caps and the pollution that causes its destruction. However, in this piece they amalgamate to create a beautiful new sonic space. In the ideal listening world, the listener does not know the sound source until after hearing the piece, so that knowledge does not disrupt the surreal listening experience.

Dokuro is a hailstorm of musical influences and talents. Both sound scientists, TNC and Szelag's left and right brains fight it out in the music, inevitably giving way to their sensitive improvisational tendencies. The duo has been compared to Pan Sonic, The Hafler Trio, Supersilent, Pole, múm, & Merzbow. Electronics, voice, & cello collide in a frenzied swirl of noise, pop melodies, improvisation, and lush ambience that transport the listener to blood red moons & dusty corners of the heart.

The Norman Conquest (TNC) is a composer and improviser of music influenced by the art of sound engineering. Feedback is a constant source of inspiration for TNC in both his composition and improvisation. TNC spent his formative years in rural Kentucky learning 4-track recording as a vehicle for his songs and sonic experiments. Agnes Szelag is a composer, performer, and video/audio installation artist. Her work explores the cognitive and aesthetic relationship of sound and visual media in chosen environments. In performance and composition she creates interactive schemes that ride the line between composition and improvisation. Agnes is a Course Director at Ex’pression College for Digital Arts.

Island of Lost Souls is a short piece off of the album The Black Room.

Cenk Ergün is a San Francisco based composer and improviser who produces music for chamber ensembles, live electronics, dance performances, and installations. He is a graduate of The Eastman School of Music and Mills College, and is the Composer in Residence with the multimedia dance company, group A. Ergün has collaborated with artists including So Percussion, Alarm Will Sound, Alvin Curran, Fred Frith, Pauline Oliveros, and Joan Jeanrenaud. 2007 saw the release of “The Art of the Fluke”, with Curran.

The title comes from news I read in the paper at the time of the composition: '...three headless bodies were found on the side of the road...' The two words together struck me as a horrifying image of human violence. The sound source used in the piece is the recording of a baby chimpanzee's screams. The screams were slowed down, processed and layered in real-time using the audio software, Max/MSP.

Thea Farhadian is an interdisciplinary artist and performer based in the Bay Area. Her work has been seen internationally at venues which include the Meridian Gallery in San Francisco, the Center for Experimental Art and the Aram Kachaturyan Museum in Yerevan, Armenia, the Alternative Museum and Issue Project Room in New York City, Raumschiff Zitrone in Berlin, and the International Women's Electroacoustic Listening Room Project in Amsterdam and Los Angeles. Thea studied Arabic classical music in New York City and in Cairo, Egypt. She has an M.A. in Interdisciplinary Arts from San Francisco State and an M.F.A. in Electronic Music at Mills College.

The phrase, “gah chee gah,” Armenian for “there was and there was not,” is a traditional opening for an Armenian folk tale or fable. A similar phrase is also used in Persian, Arab, and Turkish cultures.

John Biggs was born in Los Angeles in 1932. His father was organist Richard Keys Biggs, and his mother was singer Lucienne Gourdon. He was number 8 in a family of 11 children.. During his youth he received training in acting, singing, piano, bassoon, and violin, and was a member of his father’s church choir. As a performer, he founded the John Biggs Consort, which specialized in vocal chamber music from the Middle Ages to the 20th Century. As a composer, his output is varied, and includes chamber music, vocal music, choral music, orchestral music, and music for the stage.

I had, in the collection of instruments left over from my touring days with the John Biggs Consort, an odd set of Schulmerich hand bells for these pitches: (Starting below middle C and going up) G, C, D, E, F. Because they have such a beautiful sound, I wanted to put them to work somehow, so I decided to add my voice to the mix and I wrote a sustained piece that features my voice in harmony with the bells. The sound of the bells was my “Muse”.

Yoshi Ando was born in Yokohama, Japan. She studied computer music composition and programming techniques with Takayuki Rai, Erik Ona, and Cort Lippe. She graduated from Kunitachi College of Music Tokyo in 1999, and continued her study as SUNY in Buffalo, where she received her Master’s degree. Her live electronics work and tape music are presented around the world at international music festivals and conferences.

Little Whimusique is a remake of the composer’s old work Whimusique. Simple water sounds were given signal processing on MAX/MSP and transformed to various tone colors. Mixing down and additional sound processing were done on ProTools. This short and dense version is finalized on Cubase.

Adam Basanta is a Music major at SFU’s School of Contemporary Arts, studying electroacoustic composition with Barry Truax. In his compositions, Adam tries to preserve a connection to the real world while engaging with acousmatic techniques, and attempts to explore lyrical phrasing while using sounds that are not normally considered lyrical. Other interests include indeterminate composition and interactivity.

Shiva Creates, Destroys was inspired by the Indian myth of creation, in which Shiva breathes the world into life, then eventually destroys it. I have attempted to convey this process over a minute of music using several sound images including bird and insect wing-fluttering. As the minute passes by, the sound images begin to blur and fuse together. Eventually the natural imagery disappears into the vacuum and is replaced by Shiva herself, represented in an ethereal drone.

Robert Allaire is a composer of choral, chamber, and electroacoustic music residing near Los Angeles. He is currently an MFA candidate at the California Institute of the Arts studying under Michael Jon Fink. In addition to more traditional forms, his current work focuses on creating immersive musical environments as well as music for interactive media. Scientific testing has proven Allaire to be a good time at most parties.

Ballad tells a story. Or does it?

When I hold my breath for one minute, I feel my heart accelerate and the muscles in my lungs trying to salvage what little oxygen there is. In this automatic neuromuscular response, the body fails to realize that survival is a process of control and submission. In this work, we hold our breath for one minute and let our body feel panic as it struggles to maintain its own life. Eventually we submit to our need, and the minute ends. Primal Violets is a progressive textural development illustrating this gesture with granular synthesis algorithms in CSOUND.

Peter Swanzy (1980) was born in Seattle, Washington. He earned his BFA in performance and composition from the College of Santa Fe. As a multimedia composer, he focuses on a variety of electronic and acoustic media for performance. Mr. Swanzy's work has been commissioned by Ebb and Flow Arts and Santa Fe New Music and is performed around the world. Since 2004 he has been living and working in Hawai'i as a film editor, composer, and educator. He studied with John Kennedy, Steven Miller, Robert Pollock, David Dunn, Kevin James, and Oliver Prezant.

The unfortunately opportunistic lives of the resident composers at BCO have conspired to create a tapestry of sound and visual performance that could be summarized best in one word: Suffering. One can only speculate the kind of internalized torture and abuse that manifests itself in such intense depressing anguish. A mere descriptive review describing the actions of the cast, crew and musicians' interactions or the sets and lighting effects would fail to convey the tension and despair of this display of self mutilation and abuse. It would equate for example, to giving a simple visual report of an automobile crash without any consideration to the tragedy of the event on the lives of those involved.

Here we used positron-emission tomography to demonstrate that prefrontal cortex was activated when the learned and expected stimulus associations that guide behavior were violated, requiring inhibition of the prepared response and redirection of the focus of attention, in variants of a classic task of visual spatial orienting of attention

James Brody, a student of Franz Kamin and Iannis Xenakis at Indiana University, has composed numerous electroacoustic and instrumental works. Some of these compositions have been performed at ICMCs, a SEAMUS conference and at many venues in the US and abroad. He recently taught composition at York College of Pennsylvania where he also designed a course to teach non-musicians to listen to 20th century music. Brody currently resides in Espanola, New Mexico.

ZAZON60 The title of this work comes from a dream of a train station where the name of the town was ZAZON. The dream had to do with certain memories of childhood and some of the work’s material recalls early sources: a whistle that my mother gave when she wanted us to come home; the sound of an attic door in a childhood house. Recordings of many sounds: everyday, household, musical, natural, human voice, percussion, etc. are subjected to sound metamorphosis tools and composed using Adobe Audition.

Daniel Blinkhorn is a composer and digital media artist who was born in the Blue Mountains, just west of Sydney, Australia. His works have been performed at numerous international festivals and events. In addition to working on new pieces he is a both a student and teacher in Sydney where he currently resides.

wash is a short meditation on bathing in a stream.

David Litke (b. 1977) holds degrees in composition from the University of Toronto and the University of British Columbia, having recently completed doctoral studies at the latter under Dr. Keith Hamel. He has been the recipient of numerous awards for his work in composition, including a first prize in SOCAN’s Young Composer Competition as well as commissions from the Ensemble Contemporain de Montréal and the National Arts Centre Young Composer’s Program. His music has been performed at Vancouver’s Sonic Boom festival, Toronto’s New Waves festival, and at the SMC conference in Greece.

“Fenestration” pokes holes in the real auditory environment, allowing the listener brief glimpses of an imaginary sound world.

I graduated from the University of Virginia in 2006 with a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics. At UVa, I gained a new perspective on bridging the principles of math with music. I studied traditional music theory, jazz improvisation and guitar, and computer music techniques. I interned at Crystalphonic Recording Studios in Charlottesville,Va, learning various recording skills ranging from optimal microphone distance to mixing/editing. Presently, I am a graduate student at Mills College pursuing my Master of Arts degree in music composition. My studies include compositional techniques, Post-Tonal Analysis, Gamelan music, and computer music utilizing the language SuperCollider.

ila is written in SuperCollider. I developed a system of randomly selected twelve noise Ugens with their duration, volume and speaker output parameters also assigned to chance. With no preset time frame established, I decide when to begin recording the indeterminate sonic environment using a programmed SynthDef. After four ten-second samples have been recorded, I have several compositional choices to make: play/stop previous noise Ugens; play the ten-second samples in (random) sequence; or load/play the samples in a Granulator. No two sessions are identical due to the constantly shifting nature of the noise Ugens.

Herb taught music at Bethany College and San Francisco State University where he founded the Pro Music Nova and created and directed the electronic music studio. He has written music for instrumental ensembles, piano, harpsichord, choir, electronics, opera, band and orchestra. His SPECTRUM for Band and Tape was composed during his CMP (Contemporary Music Project) residency in Houston from 1964 to 1966. Since 1991 he has been a free-lance composer and pianist. He is a member of the Ilona Clavier Duo and founding director of Sounds New, a Bay Area new music ensemble.

SNORE is a self-automated analog "patch". I had created several of these in the 70s and 80s. Some were sent by telephone to San Francisco State's closed circuit television station and broadcast as background sound to accompany the university's information stream. Viewers were invited to call the synthesizer (!) directly using a different phone number. That call went straight into the Buchla patch signal sensors spreading control voltages into the massive patch affecting its settings and musical character. No actual phone talk came through. This all happened after midnight in a unattended, dark, closed and locked studio.

Kraig Grady, a recent Self Deportee to Australia, has worked since 1975 exclusively in Just intonation. He has built two ensembles of acoustic instruments which has consumed most for his compositional fun. He is also the director of The Shadow Theater of Anaphoria which he considers encompass his most important work.

Burma Cries this afterward titled piece came about by experimenting with exactly the same part transposed to different midi ‘instruments’. In this sense it follows the practice in that part of the world of compositions based on nuclear melodies. The result reminded myself with the often, to our ears, disjointed music of Burma, one of my favorite musics. So the title is an empirical reaction to the resulting piece.

I have a Diploma of Audio Engineering from SAE in Brisbane, a Diploma of Music Technology form the Queensland Conservatorium of Music, and a Bachelor of Music (Sonology) from Griffith University QLD. I currently teach Music Technology at Newcastle TAFE. I am a member of the Australasian Computer Music Association and am also involved with a number of electronic and electro acoustic composers in New Castle and the Hunter Valley Australia.

Spatial Artifact was created using Reason – no actual notes were entered into the sequencer but lfo’s were connected together to create feedback loops tat self perpetuated as the piece progresses. Slight changes in parameters can lead to drastic changes in the pieces outcome. This work is one of a series of 24 pieces al of 40-90 seconds in duration.

Robin Julian Heifetz earned a doctorate in 1978 from the University of Illinois. He served as a composer-in-residence at Stiftelsen EMS Stockholm, Colgate University, Simon Fraser University, Tel-Aviv University, IPEM-Gent and Audio-Digital Laboratories. His anthology On the Wires of Our Nerves: The Art of Electroacoustic Music was published in 1989 by Bucknell University Press. Recent compositions appeared on the record series Electroshock Presents: Electroacoustic Music in Moscow, Russia. In Spring 2008, Electroshock will release his solo CD Out of Kilter. Since 2000, he’s been an adjunct music professor at Antelope Valley College in Lancaster, California.

Jumpstart for Computer was realized in 2007 in the composer’s home studio and master at Woodcliff Studio in Sherman Oaks, California. The hardware was the Macintosh G4 and the principal software was Digital Performer, ReplayPLAYer and Pro Tools. Processing was accomplished through the use of GRM Tools, Waves Enigma, Waves Renaissance Reverb, Digidesign Audiosuite Reverse and the Roland VP-9000 Variphrase Processor.

Shinichiro Toyoda, born 1976 in Tokyo, goes in for interaction design study especially for computer music. On a parallel with research activities, he also improvises computer music around Tokyo.

This work “night train” was created in march, 2008. This work expresses the scenery of night trains. Night trains can be considered to be a device that changes not only scenery but also soundscape dramatically. To make the sound of various sceneries stand out, I did various processing such as the combination of train sound and DSP techniques. By using these techniques, I expressed various sceneries that the train potentially had.

Cole Ingraham is in his first year of the MFA in Electronic Music here at Mills. He holds a BM in Music Composition from University of the Pacific and written a number of acoustic and electronic works including various audio/visual installations. He has studied at the Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt, Germany in 2006, and the Ecoles D'art Americaines De Fontainebleau, France in 2007.

Expansion grew out of an interest I have in creating sounds which have their own inherent character. Through a rather unconventional system of oscillators modulating each other, I constructed a sound which could be controlled only on a very limited scale. The result is a sound which has a life of its own and refuses to be "played" like a traditional synthesized sound. This sixty second rendering was realized by slowly changing frequency spread of the sound to gradually bring out its inherent qualities.

Travis Johns is currently of the inclination that his life can best be described as a continual western progression on a spherical plane, leaving him approximately 2954 miles from his initial point of origin. For some reason he seems to make various experimentally-derived sounds during this circumnavigation, but has also been know to bake cheesecakes when the money gets tight. He generally tends to have asymmetric hair, possesses a degree or two in electronic music from various musical institutions and professes to know a thing or two about the Appalachian mountain dulcimer. However, if you actually met said individual, you'd probably not believe any of this ilk…

A Persimmon is any of a number of species of trees of the genus Diospyros, and the edible fruit borne by them. It has absolutely nothing to do with the nature of this composition. However, to title a piece "Reduction of late night improvisation in resonant stairwell in Oakland, California featuring ARP Synthesizer, home-built electronics, analog delay boxes and flute, further processed via intuitive aesthetics on digital recording software" just seems rather droll, now doesn't it?

Lee Rosevere's creates imaginary soundtracks and avant-garde experiments. He's also composed themes for websites, radio programs, podcasts, and short films. He works professionally in radio, runs an indie label, contributes music to Creative Commons projects and won a New York Award in sound design.

Cygnus is a one-minute trip to the edge of the unknown.

"Composer, guitarist, teacher and singer, Nick Vasallo has been heavily involved in music since a teenager. Though he had received no formal music training before the age of 23, he composed and performed music in a variety of styles and platforms. His autodidactic early musical training and first experience in composition began as a teenager playing guitar, singing, and writing songs for Heavy Metal and Punk bands. His academic musical training began in 2003 at California State University East Bay in Hayward where he studied Music Theory, Harmony, Composition, Counterpoint, and Form & Analysis with composers: Frank LaRocca, Jeffrey Miller, and Rafael Hernandez. Vasallo was a prolific composer during his years at Cal State and even composed music for feature length films while writing for the university and his band, Antagony.

Evanescent Revolutions are 3 tempo and rhythmic etudes. I try and convey emotion into whatever I write, even when attempting to produce mechanical feats.

Originally from Sweden, S. J. Pettersson resides in Los Angeles where he teaches and composes music. An autodidact of sorts, he privately studied counterpoint, orchestration and orchestral scores by composers as diverse as Bach, Prokofiev, Weil, Nyman and Bernard Herrmann, eventually forging his own unique style - an anachronistic blend of 20th century minimalism with romanticism, classicism and jazz. In 2007 he finished a ballet based on the architecture of Antonio Gaudi called: "Gaudi - Dancing About Architecture" where the diverse nature of Gaudi's extraordinary buildings is mirrored in a series of vignettes of dreamlike music.

"Prelude from A Dream Play" is the opening movement from an opera in progress based on the play of the same name by the Swedish playwright August Strindberg. It is the first non-linear play ever written and tells the story of the daughter of the God Indra who visits Earth as a human being and experiences first-hand the difficulties we face on a daily basis throughout our lives.

Michael John Mollo is an accredited composer for music for film, television and the concert stage. Before scoring his first film, Mollo earned a Conservatory education writing for jazz groups and the concert stage. Mollo has also spent time touring the U.S. as a rock musician as well as performing with an electronic music ensemble. In 2007, Mollo received a postgraduate advanced certificate from the prestigious USC film-scoring program. Mollo currently works with film composer John Powell and serves as CEO and director at Q6 Studios in downtown Los Angeles.

CWT 1M3 Strange Days to Come is from a short film by B. Madole entitled "The Curse of Wally's Tears". The film depicts a philandering insurance claim adjuster who is bewitched by a gypsy. With this curse the man bursts into uncontrollable tears every time he commits a morally reprehensible act. To cure the curse, the man attempts to remove his tear ducts with a safety pin, to no avail. The film ends with the man's head exploding into a pool of water.

Katrina Wreede is currently on the faculty of the John Adams Young Composer Program, an American Composers Forum "Composer in the Schools", conducting "Comprehensive Musicianship Program" classes for the San Francisco Community Music Center, and traveling around the country leading workshops in composition and string jazz. In other words, she's teaching a lot this year.

Slough-a swamp or stagnant body of water. "A Slough of Violas" uses a slew of violas to create a buggy, muddy swamp.

David S. Lefkowitz received his BA from Cornell University, his MA from University of Pennsylvania, and his Ph.D. from The Eastman School of Music. As a composer David S. Lefkowitz has won international acclaim, having works performed in China, Japan, Hong Kong, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Canada, and Israel, and winning National and International Competitions, including the Fukui Harp Music Awards Competition (twice), and the American Society of Composers, Authors, & Publishers Grants to Young Composers Competition. In addition, he has won prizes and recognition from the National Association of Composers, USA (NACUSA), the Guild of Temple Musicians, Pacific Composers' Forum, Chicago Civic Orchestra, Washington International Competition, Society for New Music's Brian M. Israel Prize, the ALEA III International Competition, and the Gaudeamus Music Week. He has also been a Meet-The-Composer Composer in Residence.

Doubles for a Minute? is so named because most every note is repeated (doubled), most every note is a double stop, and the entire movement should take exactly a minute to play. An alternate title for the work could be "Cello, Anyone?".

Published by Activist Music, Alex Shapiro’s works are heard weekly in concerts and broadcasts across the U.S. and abroad, and are found on many artists’ recordings. Educated at The Juilliard School and Manhattan School of Music as a student of Ursula Mamlok and John Corigliano, Alex has received awards from American Music Center, ASCAP, California Arts Council and The MacDowell Colony. Her life and music were the subject of the one-hour radio show American MusicMakers, airing in February 2006 on public radio stations across the U.S. Alex procrastinates on her next piece by updating her website.

Life is short. Fleas are short. This piece is short. Three terrific Los Angeles musicians of moderate height make these performing insects dance for you: clarinetist Berkeley Price, violinist Nancy Roth, and pianist Deon Nielsen Price.

Professor Song Ming-zhu, Director of the Composition Department of Sichuan Conservatory of Music is an expert with special allowance form the China’s State Council. He has been awarded numerous prizes in China’s top competitions held by the government and associations. As a scholar as well as judge, he has been invited to Japan, Korea, Philippines, Poland, USA and Hong Kong etc. He was also awarded the Excellent Music Education Award and the first prize of Sichuan Higher Education Achievement by both China’s Education Ministry and Sichuan provincial government.

Charm on Strings was composed with the “Movable Chinese Penta scale System” on D to render a new flavor. According to the characteristics of the instruments. The zheng is tuned with microtonal tuning, while the piano extends its register boundaries on either ends.

Larry Matthew Gaab (b. 1950) is a native of the United States where he creates music at his studio in Chico, California. His body of works are for tape alone and for mixed acoustic and electronic instruments. His musical language focuses on various abstractions of sound, but especially the elasticity and transformational aspects. Composed in the studio, his works are in part improvised, part composed, and part computer generated.

"Partially Invaded by Flying Fish" is a rhythmic piece with nebulous patterns. Silence reveals contours. Trying to make sense. Dissonance just beyond recognition. Unsettling, yet captivating. Vague, yet vivid. Not quite so. Partially.

Jennie Hammett is a composer and choreographer living in Northern California. She spent many years in San Francisco, studying and performing in various shady venues. She toured Europe, performing in more shady venues. Well, and cathedrals. She LOVES the short-short genre also in literature, and has published multiple stories one paragraph long. She recently founded an award-winning dance company, Black Phoebe, which uses only original dance and music. Currently, Jennie is working on a violin method book for tiny children and performing acupuncture on whoever will hold still.

This is not the only piece I wrote about shoes (though it is the only piece I have written about not shoes). While some would argue, it is never really about the shoes. I sang this when I had a head cold, which added, er, texture.

David Reeder self-identifies as a composer focused on interactive electronic performance and instrumental music. His interest in absolute music is balanced by the belief that inter-disciplinary collaboration is an essential aspect of the creative process for all the arts. His collaborative projects include and/or combine elements of spoken word, dance, choreography, and motion tracking. He is an advocate of an artists' collective called Fraseggio, which is focused on inter-disciplinary collaboration.

Q.E.D. was inspired by an interactive work for voice and electronics between Elizabeth Wyatt (poetry Ph.D., UC Irvine) and myself. We used Max/MSP to manipulate her live reading, paying close attention semantic and symbolic detail. In preparation we generated a large body of recorded material. By removing the poems, I discovered a "doughnut hole" in the recordings -- a wealth of speech events, not intended for performance, ranging from talk about the poetry to verbal reactions in our environment. Q.E.D. is constructed from these fragments of life that come of my collaboration with Ms. Wyatt.

Warren Burt is a composer, performer, instrument inventor, writer, and video artist living in Wollongong,Australia. His most recent CDs are “The Animation of Lists and the Archytan Transpositions” (XI Records, New York), and “Poems of Rewi Alley (Sonic Gallery, Melbourne). He likes to have fun with language and sound, and hopes his audience shares that desire.

11 Short Anagrammatic Chance Poems was written using computer programs to produce anagrams of the initial three phrases. The resulting poems were recorded, and then played on a computer, which followed the patterns of the voice to control percussion and piano sounds, which were further processed. All the music is derived from the sound of the voice reading. Meaning takes a powder, but syntax still maintains some charm.

Rodrigo Sigal born 1971 in Mexico City is the Director of the Mexican Centre for Music and Sonic Arts and the artistic director of the Visiones Sonoras Music Festival. Has a PhD in composition from City University in London and BA from CIEM. Studied with Smalley, Alvarez, Lavista and Donatoni. Received awards from FONCA, CIEM, ORS and LIEM and 1st. Prize for Cycles and honorary mentions for Tolerance and Twilight in the Russolo Prize, and for Twilight at Bourges. His works are available on 14 CDs and his music has been performed in more than 20 countries. Member of DAM and RedASLA.

Exploring sound...in short....a way of transforming sinapsis into something I can share.

Chris Ward resides in Portland, Oregon. His day job is working on electronic design for renewable energy systems. His late-afternoon job is a concoction of music composition and of practicing bass, guitar, vocal and drums. Most of his previous work appears on the internet (or on a Sharpie inked CD-R) as "Errol Morris Candidate", but some of it inks as "Merle" or "Stygggurkan."

Ryan Wiggans began his electro-acoustic compositional career when he was admitted into the Future Music Oregon program in 2006. He is currently a junior in the music technologies program at the University of Oregon where he creates multichannel digital audio compositions primarily using MaxMSP and Kyma. He is also interested in integrating electroacoustically generated sounds and instruments with more popular music forms. Recently, he transformed sampled audio of a small organ and mapped the resultant sounds to a MIDI instrument, which he performed with his band, Superdream.

Leaping Logic is a self-appointed compositional assignment written specifically for the 60x60. In the piece, I wish to express my deeply complex emotions of the Iraq Conflict and exhibit lessons which we as citizens of the United States should remember. All sounds are generated from recorded presidential speeches modified through Kyma and assembled on ProTools.

Growtree Project (1) is a collaborative made up of Nathan Jenkins, Yuan Liu, Jason McClinsey, Benjamin Wynn and Jeremy Zuckerman. All collaborators are Los Angeles-based artists, with the exception of Jason McClinsey, who resides in Westtown, New York. Growtree is a collaboration among musicians, composers, producers, sonic artists, sound designers, and sonic architects. Jeremy Zuckerman conceived of the project. The task: to pass around a sound file and watch it evolve. The goal: to allow the collaborative process to evolve free of expectation. A complete piece may or may not be realized. There are two important guidelines: 1) All material must be derived solely from the source file. 2) Each collaborator must use the previous collaborator's contribution.

'Boop!' is the first Growtree project. The source file is a recording of a brief human glottal utterance.

Munich-born, L.A.-based composer Kubilay Uner has bounced around the planet and through many musical genres, which explains a thing or two about his individual approach to music. With numerous features and other music-to-picture scores to his credit, as well as a number of concert music works performed, Kubi is as comfortable in the concert hall as he is on the dubbing stage. "My goal is to deliver an intense experience, one that completely immerses and transforms the listener. I believe a good piece of music should take you on a journey. That's what I want to achieve."

"War Radio" was inspired by a 60 second video collage of the same name by filmmaker Alex Fazeli. This visual poem looks at how war reporting by audiovisual news media inevitably turns war itself into a form of entertainment.

Prent Rodgers studied music and composition at Bennington College with Henry Brant, Gunnar Schoenbeck, Vivian Fine, and Lou Calabro. He earned a Masters in Music at University of California, San Diego in Composition, where he worked with Pauline Oliveros and Bert Turetzky. His early explorations into instrument building lead to a life-long fascination with microtonal music. His current work uses the 53-tone-equal-temperament scale and Just Intonation based on the Partch Tonality Diamond to the 15 limit.

Spring8 is scored for bassoon, dry spring, and wet springs. It was realized using a Csound sample based instrument. The dry and wet springs are electro acoustic instruments I made in the 1970's. The dry spring is made from sitka spruce with an assortment of objects glued to the surface, with a contact microphone to pick up the sounds. The wet springs are made with piano wire twisted into a variety of shapes, with magnetic pickups. They sound like bells or steel drums. The intonation is 53 tone equal temperament, although the enharmonic content of the wet springs extends outside 53. The rhythm is 13 over 8, with random alterations between 3 3 3 2 2 and other combinations of 3 & 2 totaling 13. The scale is the overtone series to the 15 limit.

Benjamin Boone’s life -- thus far -- in 85 words: Born in Statesville, NC in 1963; related to Daniel Boone; father was a traveling glue salesman and mother a homemaker; youngest of five sons; moved all over since; recorded rhinoceros vocalizations in Zimbabwe; was a Music Manager in New York; plays sax all over the U.S.A. and Europe; compositions performed all over the world and on numerous CD’s; loves to ski, play saxophone, compose, read, teach and play with his wife and kids; teaches theory and composition at California State University, Fresno; loves "30 Rock.” For complete biography, discography, sound files, educational resources and more, please visit

Here are some numbers that effect our lives...

Educated at Brown University, the New England Conservatory of Music, and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, David Hahn received the doctorate in historical musicology at Stanford University in 1993. He has composed over ninety pieces of music, many of which have been commissioned and performed by established professional ensembles and soloists. Mr. Hahn's music has been performed throughout the United States, and internationally in Canada, Chile, Turkey, Croatia, Cuba, France, Germany, Cyprus and Bolivia. It has been released on Centaur Records, is available at CDBaby.com, and is regularly broadcast on independent radio programs.

While sitting in a cafe at 8:30 am, I noticed a mother and her 3-year-old daughter. The girl happily wore the whipped cream of her hot chocolate all over her face. Realizing, however, that the offered donut was not of adequate size, she began to complain. Her dissatisfaction quickly escalated into a full-blown kicking-and-screaming tantrum, while her mother—scratched and fully distressed—had to make a hasty exit. Immediately I thought, "My goodness, this is Dick Cheney!"...or perhaps a microcosm of our consumer culture.