Music

I had a lot of formal choral training as a child, but my involvement in music as a performer kind of tailed off through my adolescence, teenage and early adult years. I seem to be coming back to my music now, but as a composer and arranger using digital musical instruments and MIDI technology. A while back I treated myself to a new toy: a Yamaha PSR-510 MIDI synthesizer keyboard, with which I have fallen in love. I think of all this as being a convergence of my musical and computing interests.

Lately I've been doing some more serious composing.

Here's a piece I wrote called Friends in Houston dedicated to some people I love that moved...well..guess where?
And my friend Julie wanted background music for her site, so I wrote this.

Also in the studio: A Yamaha CS1x synth

Dutch ad for Yamaha Synth Image of PSR-510 console

Speaking of the convergence of music and computing, Thomas ("She Blinded Me With Science") Dolby Robertson has joined forces with some other very cool heads to create the Beatnik Audio Engine and Rich Music Format (RMF) file format, which combine compactness of MIDI files with the ability to download and play sampled sounds. Out of this has come the Java Sound API, providing Java with control of sound synthesis, mixing and audio rendering. This API will be implemented with the Java Sound engine, based on Beatnik/RMF technology licensed to JavaSoft by the aforementioned cool heads

. My tastes in recorded music vary widely: Alan Parsons, Pink Floyd, Frank Zappa, Todd Rundgren, Larry Fast/Synergy, Thomas Dolby (see above), Wendy Carlos, David Foster, John Tesh, Suzanne Ciani, Steely Dan, Joe Walsh. Yes, I know: strange bedfellows, indeed...