Music Technology Group

Music Department, College of Architecture, Georgia Institute of Technology

Jason Freeman

Bio

Jason Freeman's works break down conventional barriers between composers, performers, and listeners, using cutting-edge technology and unconventional notation to turn audiences and musicians into compositional collaborators. His music has been performed by the American Composers Orchestra, Speculum Musicae, the So Percussion Group, the Nieuw Ensemble, Ensemble Surplus, Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, and Evan Ziporyn, and his interactive installations and software art have been exhibited at the Lincoln Center Festival (New York), the Boston CyberArt Festival, the Transmediale Festival (Berlin), and the NTT Intercommunication Center (Tokyo) and featured in the New York Times  and on National Public Radio. N.A.G. (Network Auralization for Gnutella) (2003), a commission from Turbulence.org, was described by Billboard as " ...an example of the web's mind-expanding possibilities."


Freeman graduated summa cum laude from Yale University with a B.A. in music and received his M.A. (2001) and D.M.A. (2005) in composition from Columbia University.


Current/Recent Research

Flock

Flock, a ninety-minute work for saxophone quartet commissioned by the Carnival Center for the Performing Arts in Miami, was conceived to directly engage audiences in the composition of music by physically bringing them out of their seats and enfolding them into the creative process. During the performance, the musicians and 60-80 audience members move freely around the performance space. A positioning system, created in collaboration with GVU professors Frank Dellaert and Tucker Balch under a GVU seed grant, determines the locations of the musicians and audience members and uses that data to generate performance instructions for the musicians, who view them on wireless handheld displays. (Jason Freeman, Martin Robinson, Mark Godfrey)

Glimmer

Glimmer, which was commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra and premiered at Carnegie Hall in 2005, engages the concert audience as musical collaborators who do not just listen to the performance but actively shape it. Each audience member is given a battery-operated light stick which he or she waves back and forth over the course of the piece. Computer software analyzes live video of the audience and sends instructions to each musician via multi-colored lights mounted on each player’s stand. (Jason Freeman)

Graph Theory

Graph Theory seeks to connect composition, listening, and concert performance by coupling an acoustic work for solo violin or solo cello to an interactive web site. On the web site, users navigate among sixty-one short, looping musical fragments to create their own unique path through the composition. The navigation choices which users make affect future concert performances of the work. Before each performance, the soloist prints out a new copy of the score from the web site. That score presents her with a fixed path through the piece; the order of the fragments is influenced by the decisions that recent web site visitors have made. Graph Theory was commissioned by Turbulence.org and created in collaboration with designer Patricia Reed and violinist Maja Cerar. (Jason Freeman)

iTunes Signature Maker

iTunes Signature Maker (iTSM), a software artwork commissioned by the Rhizome division of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, uses a feature-driven audio editing algorithm to rapidly generate a short sonic signature of an iTunes music library. iTSM stitches together small segments of songs, driving a concatenative algorithm with spectral features intrinsic to the audio files themselves and with environmental features which describe how those files have been used. (Jason Freeman)

Listening Machines

Listening Machines is a concert series featuring pieces by the faculty and students from Georgia Tech's Music Technology group. The concert series explores concepts of machines listening and improvisation and musical human-machine interaction. (Gil Weinberg, Jason Freeman, Parag Chordia, Frank Clark, Chris Moore, Scott Driscoll, Travis Thatcher, Mark Godfrey)


Publications

2007


Freeman, J. "Glimmer: Creating New Connections." Transdisciplinary Digital Art: Sound, Vision and the New Screen. Communications in Computer and Communication Science. Springer, 2008 (in press).









Freeman, J. "Graph Theory: Linking Online Musical Exploration to Concert Hall Performance." Leonardo 41/1, 2007.







Freeman, J. “Graph Theory: Linking Online Musical Creativity to Concert Hall Performance.” Proceedings of the 6th ACM Creativity and Cognition Conference (Washington, DC), 2007.







Freeman, J. “Graph Theory: Interfacing Audiences Into the Composition Process.” Proceedings of the New Interfaces for Musical Expression Conference (New York), 2007.







Freeman, J., Cerar, M. “Graph Theory and the Virtual Composer Residency Project.” Proceedings of the Spark Festival of Electronic Music and Art (Minneapolis), 2007.







2006




Freeman, J. “Composer, Performer, Listener.” In Komponieren in der Gegenwart: Texte der 42. Internationalen Ferienkurse für Neue Musik 2004.ed. Jörn Peter Hiekel. Saarbrücken, Germany: Pfau Verlag, 2006.







Freeman, J. “Fast Generation of Audio Signatures to Describe iTunes Libraries.” Journal of New Music Research, Vol. 35, No. 1, 2006.









Freeman, J. "Glimmer: Creating New Connections." Digital Art Weeks (Zurich), 2006.







2005




Freeman J., Ramakrishnan C., Varnik K., Neuhaus M., Burk P., Birchfield D. “Auracle: A Voice-Controlled Networked Sound Instrument.” Organised Sound, Vol. 10, No. 3, 2005.


Freeman J., Ramakrishnan C., Varnik K., Neuhaus M., Burk P., Birchfield D. “The Architecture of Auracle: A Voice-Controlled Networked Sound Instrument.” Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference (Barcelona), 2005.


Freeman J. “Large Audience Participation, Technology, and Orchestral Performance.” Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference (Barcelona), 2005.


2004

Freeman J., Ramakrishnan C., Varnik K., Neuhaus M., Burk P., Birchfield D. “Adaptive High-level Classification of Vocal Gestures Within a Networked Sound Instrument.” Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference (Miami), 2004.


Freeman, J. “N.A.G. (Network Auralization for Gnutella).” In Proceedings of ACM Multimedia (New York), 2004.


Varnik K., Freeman, J., Ramakrishnan C., Burk P., Neuhaus M., Birchfield D. “Tools Used While Developing Auracle: A Voice-Controlled Networked Instrument.” In Proceedings of ACM Multimedia (New York), 2004.


Ramakrishnan C., Freeman J., Varnik K., Birchfield D., Burk P., and Neuhaus M. “The Architecture of Auracle: A Real-Time, Distributed, Collaborative Instrument.” Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (Hamamatsu), 2004.

Music Department, 840 McMillan St., Atlanta, GA USA, 30332-0456 TEL: 404.894.8949  FAX: 404.894.9952