Category Archives: Experimental Music
John Cage, the Student: Time at Black Mountain College
This is from my talk at the Black Mountain College ReVIEWING conference in November of 2021. That year’s conference focused on John Cage’s ideas and practices. The annual conference draws scholars from around the world to Asheville, North Carolina, near … Continue reading
Deliberately Disorienting Design
Deliberately Disorienting Design: Using the Scientifically Sound Principles of Experimental Psychology to Create a Confusing Musical Instrument Elliot Inman Pint of Science at Indendiary Brewing, Winston-Salem, NC May 22, 2019 As we strive to optimize every aspect of our lives, … Continue reading
The Makerspace as 21st Century Bauhaus: A Black Mountain College in Every University
At the 10th Annual Black Mountain College ReVIEWING conference (September 2018), I moderated a panel with three innovative makerspace leaders — Adam Rogers (NCSU), David Romito (UNC), and Lauren Di Monte (U of Rochester). We talked about how the modern … Continue reading
Musical Circuits Goes to Moogfest 2018
From Digital Bits to Analog Waves: Breadboarding an 8-bit Synth Using only digital logic and handful of wires and resistors, we will breadboard a circuit that creates complex analog sounds. Theoretically speaking, we will wire an R2R (resistor to resistor) … Continue reading
Four Four Time @ CDI
An interactive, collaborative constellation of four MIDI sequencers, each of which can play four notes in its own time with variable pitches, note lengths, and tempos. Participants can join in the real time creation of complex musical patterns working at … Continue reading
A Postmodern Drum Machine
“How does time function in postmodern music? Postmodernism is profoundly temporal, but it uses, rather than submits to time. Its music shapes time, manipulates time. Time, like tonal sounds and diatonic tunes and rhythmic regularity and textual unity, becomes no … Continue reading
Silence, Chance, Cage, Code
“Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard.” ~ Stéphane Mallarmé, 1897 John Cage is well known as the composer who formalized the use of silence as a compositional element on par with any other note or sound. He was … Continue reading
Musical Circuits @ KNOBCON 2016
Experimental Music: Composition with an Arduino MIDI Controller Knobcon Chicagoland, September 2016 With an Arduino, a breadboard, and a handful of parts, you can build a MIDI controller that works as a sequencer or a classic beatbox. But the same … Continue reading
Musical Circuits 
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