Peter Kirn at Ex’pression
Peter Kirn visited Ex’pression College on Tuesday to speak to students about audio-visual interactivity. There was a true buzz in the air and the packed room exhibited the interest of the subject and Peter’s unique perspective.
Bio
Peter Kirn is a composer, live visualist, technologist, and writer. As an advocate of real-time digital performance, he has worked in venues from clubs to modern dance. He writes about technology for his award-winning sites createdigitalmusic.com and createdigitalmotion.com, and contributes to Make, Keyboard, Macworld, and Computer Music magazines. He is the author of Real World Digital Audio (Peachpit Press), a book on music production, and regularly teaches music and visual technology, most recently at the Massachusetts College of Art, Motion Graphics Festival, Dublin Electronic Arts Festival, Harvestworks, and South by Southwest Interactive. As instigator of the monthly Handmade Music series in Brooklyn, he gathers a new, emerging community of DIY music technology to share their work, science-fair style, as featured in Time Out New York, Popular Science, and Current TV. He has studied composition with Tania Leon and is finishing his PhD in Music Composition at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His dissertation research explores ways in which a software framework can map interactive virtual space to generative musical composition.
Lecture Topic
A new convergence is bringing the real-time environments used for games to artists working in other media – and visa versa. With generative graphics, sound, and music, the basic engine underlying a game can become as fluid as a musical instrument might be, but using live media or data in place of sounds. Artists are just beginning to develop work in these areas, but the potential they bring could have a transformative impact on both art and game design, one that has been a long time coming. By generating graphics and music, rather than “scoring” them as pre-defined assets, the line between music, motion art, and game design begins to blur.
Digital media blogger and technologist Peter Kirn spoke about this evolving realm, multi-platform open source tools that can work in the area, and their relevance to game graphics and music. He also talked about his own research into building a live framework for music that would map compositional materials to interactive 3D graphics, as well as performance projects in the field.
