YALE UNION

A Performance
Saturday, January 19, 8pm
$10

Curtis Roads will present a stereo composition with manual upmixing, using techniques of spatialization and diffusion. The audio playback system, eight channels (six loudspeakers and two sub-woofers), will be set up in a surround circle to emphasize the sculptural dimensions of volume.

Roads studied computer music composition at California Institute of the Arts and the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and received a Doctorate from the Université Paris 8. He was Editor and Associate Editor of Computer Music Journal (MIT Press) from 1978 to 2000, and cofounded the International Computer Music Association (ICMA) in 1979. Roads was a researcher in computer music at MIT (1980–1986), and he taught electronic music composition at Harvard University and sound synthesis techniques at the University of Naples. He was appointed Director of Pedagogy at Les Ateliers UPIC (now CCMIX, Center for the Composition of Music Iannis Xenakis) and Lecturer in the Music Department of the Université Paris 8.

Among his books are the anthologies Foundations of Computer Music (1985, MIT Press) and The Music Machine (1989, MIT Press). His textbook The Computer Music Tutorial (1996, MIT Press) is widely adopted as a standard classroom text. He edited the anthology Musical Signal Processing in 1997. His book Microsound (2001, MIT Press) presents the techniques and aesthetics of composition with sound particles. Roads’s new book is Composing Electronic Music: A New Aesthetic, forthcoming from Oxford University Press.