Sound from a Virtual Planet

The hardest part of getting through a NAMM show is wearing a badge that identifies me with Berklee. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m proud to represent the institution, and while my affiliation opens many doors, there are scores of alums in all aspects of the music industry who love re-connecting with their alma mater. If you want to travel to NAMM incognito, get your badge from Harvard.

The best spokesperson for any product is an artist who uses the product, and uses it well. This year, I was pleasantly surprised to see one of my former students, New York electronic artist Matt Moldover, talking about his work and performing at the Ableton Live booth. While sharing a common school experience with fellow alum Dan Lehrich, profiled in an earlier blog entry, Matt has taken a very different path, establishing a profile as performing artist.

Matt was one of the legion of guitar players that comes to Berklee each year. While most are looking to follow in the footsteps of one fretted deity or another, Matt always wanted to forge his own path, and after getting in the Music Synthesis major, that was combining interactive electronic performance with the guitar. At Berklee he discovered MAX, and soon was on to the idea of extending what he did as a player to sound from electronic sources. Matt didn’t want to play in a band, he wanted to play with sound.

Matt also got turned on to DJ and club culture. Moving to New York after graduation, he found a scene for like-minded electronic performers, and jettisoned his first name, becoming the artist known as Moldover. Being a player and a geek, he was in the right place at the right time when Native Instruments came out with Guitar Rig. The first time I saw him at NAMM, he was the Guitar Rig guy at NI. While he gave knowledgeable and convincing demos, I got the sense a different muse was calling. At a party in LA we had a chance to talk, and I got a glimpse of some of the projects he was working on, the first of which was the Interstellar ReMix Wagon for Burning Man, 2004.

The thing I didn’t quite realize about Moldover was that he was really pretty good at building stuff. His next project was the Octamasher, a performance system fueled by Ableton Live that gave eight “mashers” a tool to communally create a club mix. Social networking and interactive performance might sound like a research project at the MIT Media Lab, but this is a guy with a laptop, hacking a bunch of cheap keyboard controllers and hitting parties…. pretty cool.

Sometime last fall came a new website and the birth of “controllerism.” According the the site, Controllerism is “the art of manipulating sounds and creating music live using computer controllers and software.” Perhaps Matt will be the first to make both YouTube and dictionary.com. But, what I saw from him at the Ableton booth this year was a virtuoso performance that combined electronic music with the spontaneity and inventiveness of a jazz soloist, swapping clips of sound for notes and scales.

Dan Lehrich and Moldover may seem at opposite ends of a very wide playing field, but what really fascinates me is the real passion they both have for creating immersive performance experiences using computers and physical interfaces. While research in the field of interactive music systems continues at the highest levels of academia, it’s really cool to see real innovation happening on the street as well.

I’ve been going to the Winter NAMM show since 1997, and every year when I return I’m always asked “so, what did you see.” Granted, trade shows are all about products, but over the years I’ve come to realize that they’re really about people. I don’t really need to fly across the country to find out about new products; any of us can check a manufacturer’s website after the show closes on opening day and get the dope on their latest and greatest. What’s really cool is the people, and for me, some of the coolest people I meet are students I’ve had over the years. I’d like to highlight a couple of former students from Berklee’s Music Synthesis department, my day gig, who have gone down very different paths and are doing really cool things.

My first day in LA I had the opportunity to have lunch with game developer, Dan Lehrich. I count myself lucky because it seems like getting a mid-week lunch with anyone working in LA, is about as easy getting an audience with the Pope. Dan came to Berklee as a bass player and left as an interactive audio designer. He had a typical trajectory through the core courses in the Music Synthesis major until he found Max. Max is a graphical programming environment for music, and capability expands into audio with the MSP extensions and video with an additional toolkit call Jitter. I recall talking with Dan while he was in school, soon after he had this epiphany, and what really excited him was the possibility of programming the kind of interaction he experienced playing bass with other musicians. Once he got the bug, he got real tight with Max. He worked as a student employee in Synth department office, and became a fixture, tweaking his latest patch, showing his stuff and sharing ideas with anyone who walked past.

Then graduation, and reality set in. There’s really not a big market for interactive computer performance, and we all have to eat somehow. Fortunately, an internship opened up at game developer Electronic Arts in LA, and Dan was in. At lunch, he talked a bit about that first experience. As an audio intern, there’s a lot of grunt work to be done editing and managing files, not exactly glamorous. But, Dan really opened some eyes along the way with a solid knowledge of advanced synthesis techniques that they had never really seen in an intern before. His stock went up. After the internship had ended, he began working for independent developer Seven Studios. As things got busier, he eventually found himself in the enviable position of starting and managing an audio department for them, and was soon able to hire a fellow alum to help meet the mounting deadlines he faced.

Along the way, his passion for interactivity and programming skills continued to grow. One of the big game hits of the last few years has been Guitar Hero and the follow-up Rock Band. On the surface, the attraction of these games may be the engaging 3D animation, but the core of the game play experience comes through, you guessed it, interactive music systems. Dan refers to these as “tempo-driven” games. Seeing an opportunity in the marketplace, Dan put together a demo for a game using Max, pitched it to game producers, and after a series of starts and stops, it’s now in development.

While I’m always up for a good success story, as a teacher, I’m interested in what someone needs to know to be successful. When I posed this question to Dan over lunch, he stressed knowing the basics of digital audio –sample rate, resolution, compression and file formats. While a knowledge of granular synthesis techniques may have impressed his handlers at EA, being able to clearly communicate this basic information got him though the day.