“Baby Reindeer” is a generative music app for iPhone and iPod Touch. See a preview at the Apple iTunes site App in the iTunes Store App web site (details & suport) The “baby reindeer” is actually a toy—the Fisher-Price “Ocean Wonders Soothe and Glow Seahorse.” It was a gift to my son, who cuddled with [...]

The gradual accumulation of additional layers or matter (Norbert Herber & Rowland Ricketts, 2011) can be seen & heard as part of Waveforms, “an exhibition of interdisciplinary art works showcasing sound as the principle component. This exhibition explores, through an examination of creative and artistic practices, the interface of sound and new media technologies. The [...]

Amergent Music: behavior and becoming in technoetic & media arts was accepted by my examiners at the University of Plymouth, UK. I owe much thanks to all of my supervisors (Roy Ascott, John Matthias & Brian Eno), as well as to my colleagues in the Planetary Collegium and at Indiana University, Bloomington. If you want [...]

My chapter ‘The Composition-Instrument: emergence, improvisation and interaction in games and new media’ appeared in the book From Pac-Man to Pop Music: interactive audio in games and new media, edited by Karen Collins in 2007. This chapter is now available by permission of the Publishers of ‘The Composition-Instrument: emergence, improvisation and interaction in games and new [...]

Call for Papers: The Oxford Handbook of Interactive Audio Deadline for Proposals: 1 April 2011 The Oxford Handbook of Interactive Audio is under contract at Oxford University Press. Through a collection of chapters on interactivity in music and sound, the book is meant to offer a new set of analytical tools for the growing field [...]

Writings on music and interaction for digital art, entertainment, and communications. I earned my PhD through the Planetary Collegium at the University of Plymouth, England. www.x-tet.com/blog (formerly blog.x-tet.com) was used to document progress towards my thesis/dissertation in reading, writing, music, art, and media projects.

(originally published July 2009) I wrote a paper “Dérive en Mille Sons” for the 2009 Spark Festival of Electronic Music and Arts. It has just been re-published as “Dérive entre Mille Sons: a psychogeographic approach to mobile music and mediated interaction” in Technoetic Arts: a journal of speculative research. Much thanks to journal editor Roy [...]

I’m currently experimenting with some guitar recordings I made with an EBow. The music is produced with two long drones that are fed through a variety of signal processes. Of these, the most important is the NeuroGranular Sampler designed by John Matthias and Nick Ryan for use in their larger piece The Fragmented Orchestra created [...]

EXCERPT: Norbert Herber, a Lecturer in the IU Telecommunications Department who has worked as a sound designer and composer for video games, finds Ebert’s criticism outdated. “I think (Ebert) is hung up on this romantic idea of art. His conception of art is still in the 19th century, and if he were to update that, [...]

Implicitly or explicitly, Cybernetics plays a role in works of Experimental, Ambient, and Generative music. This talk will introduce Amergent music, a genre that draws from these musical traditions and creates a third-order cybernetic stipulation in works of technoetic and media art. Drawing on the work of Maturana & Varela and Martin Heidegger, Amergent music [...]