Paul Lansky began his musical career, after graduating from Queens College in 1965, playing french horn in the Dorian Wind Quintet for two years. His first compositions, which were entirely acoustic, date from this period. In his pieces from this period Lansky was mostly concerned with expanding on George Perle's ideas of twelve-tone tonality.

Lansky returned to school, and received a PhD in composition from Princeton University, where he has taught since. In the early 1970s, Lansky continued his use of Perle's technique in his instrumental writing, but also began to compose music solely for tape, such as mild und leise (1973). In this piece Lansky uses a few ideas which were to become very important in his later development. For example, timbre is used as a structural element (similar timbres tie together parts of a piece, much as a returning melody helps the listener with the structure of a classical piece). As well, Lansky uses previously written music as a jumping-off point for his work, a hallmark of his later style. In this case the music is that of Wagner (whose "Liebestod" aria from the end of Tristan und Isolde begins with the words Lansky uses as the title of this piece), and specifically the "Tristan chord," a half-diminished seventh chord.

The Six Fantasies on a Poem by Thomas Campion, completed in 1979, mark a turning-point in Lansky's career. Since this piece, Lansky has written almost solely for computer-generated. There are several compositional and technical concerns, which have become central features of his music, which made their first appearance in this piece. Lansky based this piece on a reading of the poem "Rose-cheekt Lawra" (published in 1602). The reading is by Lansky's wife Hannah MacKay, who has been the original voice upon which a large proportion of Lansky's music is based. Lansky has written that he sees a strong similarity between the reading of a text and the performance of a musical score, so that he uses both as sources for his computer-generated extrapolations. All his music after the Six Fantasies is based in some way on the manipulation of previously generated sound: usually a musical performance or reading of a text, although Lansky often uses conversations as well. The Six Fantasies also marked the first time Lansky used the Linear Predictive Coding (LPC) algorithm to alter his given sonic material, and this technique has been common in his music since. LPC, which has also been used by other composers (Andy Moorer and Ken Steiglitz, for example), was originally developed at Bell Telephone Laboratories to compress speech for efficient transmission; it is designed especially for modeling and manipulating the human voice, and so fits naturally with Lansky's compositional concerns.

Jason Carr studies music theory and computer music at Temple University. He is interested in the macro (musical space) more than the micro (note events). Etude (a title given after the fact) is a work in progress.

He dislikes writing program notes.

Maurice Wright (www.mauricewright.org) was born in 1949 in Front Royal, Virginia, a small town situated between the forks of the Shenandoah River and near the Blue Ridge Mountains. He attended Duke University and Columbia University.

Described by the New Grove Dictionary as "extremely prolific," Wright's work is a synthesis of his diverse interests: vocal and instrumental music (new and old); technology and acoustics; and drama and film. Critics note elements of originality and beauty in Wright's work: "…a level of wit and invention that makes you wonder why the music isn't better known…modern and fresh and completely natural.”

Many outstanding ensembles and soloists have performed his work, including the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Emerson String Quartet, the American Brass Quintet, the Riverside Symphony, and the Berkshire Music Festival at Tanglewood. Six CD recordings on New World, Innova and CRI include his compositions. Wright is Laura H. Carnell Professor of Music Composition at Temple University's Boyer College Of Music and Dance.

Heidi Jacob's first class in electro-acoustic music was over twenty-five years ago at Temple University, under the direction of Clifford Taylor.  Crude in comparison to the techniques now available, the class used splicing techniques with the now antiquated reel-to-reel tape as well as resources from a Moog Synthesizer.

Since that time her life went in many different directions, including that of cellist and conductor.  Inspired by her first work in the genre, a work manipulating the voice of her now deceased and beloved cat Norman, she has been lusting ever since that first experience to return and learn the powerful new techniques now available through the use of computer.

Ms. Jacob a student of Matthew Greenbaum in the D.M.A. program in Composition at Boyer. She is an Associate Professor of Music at Haverford College, where she teaches chamber music, serves as Director of the Haverford/Bryn Mawr College Orchestra and as Director of Instrumental Studies. 

Salome Revisited was inspired by Richard Strauss's opera Salome, drawing on audio files from several sections of the opera (primarily the Dance of the Seven Veils and the beginning of Act II), re-processed themes performed on the cello, as well as spoken texts from the libretto.

Originally scored for violin, french horn and electroacoustic sounds, the work was written for Randy Moon, violin and Ben Greenfield, french horn, students at Haverford College. The version presented this evening includes processed computer realizations of the original horn and violin lines.

Daniel Pruger is a music composition major at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. His Symphonie für Waschmaschine was a winner of the 2004 Jeu de temps / Times Play (JTTP) competition. JTTP is a multi-leveled project which aims to encourage and foster the production of electroacoustic works by emerging Canadian composers and sound artists using a unique jury process: a call for compositions is announced; submissions are received and are mounted anonymously as mp3 files onto the Canadian Electroacoustic Community’s (CEC) website; an international jury reviews the pieces and comments via the internet, then scores the works. The results are tabulated, rendering a ranking of the pieces and all of the composers' names are revealed, with the top 5 pieces being announced as recipients of monetary awards. The top-ranking (8-14) works are recorded on a limited edition CD, and played in royalty-paying venues in Montreal and Vancouver.

Aria Adli, born on December 29th 1972 in Germany and from Iranian descent, stands on a hybrid ground between music and linguistic theory. Since October 2004 he is affiliated to the Department of Linguistics of New York University with a postdoctoral research fellowship of the German Research Foundation. He studies privately composition with Matthew Greenbaum. His first steps in electronic music were taken as a guest student of Marco Stroppa at the Musikhochschule Stuttgart (Germany) in 2001. He got a Ph.D. in linguistics at the University of Tübingen (Germany) in 2003, an M.A. in psychology at the University of Bonn (Germany) in 2000 and an M.A. in linguistics at the University of Toulouse 2 (France) in 1998. He was a fellow of the art, science & business program of the Akademie Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart, Germany) in 2004 where he first got the idea of Kalame Phonetica.

The piece Kalame Phonetica uses speech recordings made during linguistic fieldwork in Tehran at the beginning of 2005 and explores and plays with the limits of speech perception and combinatory phonetics (kalame means “word” in Farsi). The original material consisted of fragments of a narrative, fictional detective game played with randomly chosen Farsi native speakers from Tehran. http://pages.nyu.edu/~aa1329/