time, what a piano really is and how it generates sound. It can lead our existing concept of the piano to become unfrozen and pliable. As you might imagine composing for such a system is both daunting and liberating, but always fun! You have recently completed a Musical Research Residency at IRCAM in Paris. IRCAM is one of the best centre in the world enterely dedicated to contemporary music research: could you share with our readers your experience? Per Yes, it was an amazing experience! The Musical Research Residency program (now expanded to the Musical and Artistic Research Residency Program) is a relatively new program directed by Arshia Cont, who is involved with a variety of really interesting things over there. My understanding is that the original purpose of the residency was to provide an alternate avenue for composers to become involved with IRCAM, and a way for the people at IRCAM to reach out to a wider variety of composers. The traditional compositional route through IRCAM entailed moving through their two-year sequence of classes, after which Captions one might6 remain connected in various ways. Unfortunately for me spending 1-2 years in Paris to participate in these classes was never really an option. The Research Residency was designed to allow composers such as myself, who may have had no previous direct contact with IRCAM, to spend time in house working with the researchers. It’s a remarkable program, and really an amazing opportunity to work with some incredible people doing incredible things. Every year they put out a call for project proposals. In response, artists such as myself propose research projects to be carried out in conjunction with a specific team of IRCAM researchers. A few applications are accepted per year, and each research resident works closely with the pertinent members of that team. Thus one is free to propose a project requiring a much higher level of technical proficiency than one currently possesses. The project I proposed involved the creation of a physical model of the interaction between an electromagnet and a resonating body (an abstract can be found here). This was essentially a way for me to learn more about the very complicated interactions created by the Electromagnetically-Prepared Piano device.
For a project like this I would clearly need to bring the whole thing there in order to be able to measure its response, which would allow me to introduce it to the IRCAM community. It seemed promising as a proposal as it would allow me to build on their existing physical modeling software, called Modalys. I had some experience programming in Common Lisp, which is the control language for Modalys, and I was eager to jump back in and improve my skills. During the course of the residency I worked primarily with Joël Bensoam, a physicist, and Robert Piéchaud, who handled the code, as well as various other members of the Instrumental Acoustics team. By the end we had developed a new component to Modalys that mimicked the sonic behavior of the EMPP. A few details about it can be found here. It really was a fantastic experience all around. The chance to work for an extended period of time (in my case 5 months) in such an environment is an exceptional opportunity, one that I highly recommend for anyone interested. Thanks for sharing your time and thoughts. What's next for Per and Arie? Have you a particular collaboration in mind ? Per Nothing right now, unfortunately. We have discussed the possibility a number of times since working on Graveshift, once for a small project, and again for a bigger one that didn’t end up working out. It would be great to work together again on something though, hopefully our schedules will align again soon! Arie Yes, unfortunately we do not have anything in mind currently. As we neared completion of our graduate degrees, we tried to collaborate but I soon realized that completing my doctoral degree impeded my ability to effectively collaborate with any other artist. Now that my formal education is complete, I definitely look forward to working with Per once again and am sure that any collaboration with him would fully engage my artistic talents. Currently I am designing and developing digital video software to help motion designers and video editors create data-driven video at DataClay, a company I founded.