Michael Zbyszynski

Michael Ferriell Zbyszyński is a composer, sound artist, performer, and teacher in the field of contemporary electroacoustic music. Currently, he is the Director of Electronic Music at San Francisco State University, contributes to Make Magazine, and plays with Respectable Citizen.

Dr. Zbyszyński plays flute, saxophones, clarinet, Yamaha WX-7 (MIDI wind controller), and things made from coffee cans and PVC. His 2006 piece News Cycle #2, created in collaboration with video artist Anthony Discenza, was jointly commissioned by the Getty Center and the Montalvo Arts Center, where they were in residence in 2008. In 2004, Zbyszyński finished a  permanent sound installation at Edgemar in Santa Monica, CA, in collaboration with Hugh Livingston. He has appeared, collaborated, or worked with Roscoe Mitchell, Myra Melford, Frank Gratkowski, HPX Multimedia, the Capacitor Performance Group, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (the American premier of John Cage´s Ocean 1-95), Frances-Marie Uitti, and David Wessel, as a soloist with the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra, Composers Inc., UC Berkeley Symphony, Cultural Labyrinth, Berkeley New Music Project, and Common Sense Composer´s Collective, and at the Other Minds Festival, the Oregon Bach Festival, the Montréal Jazz Festival, the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies, Cal Arts, UC Santa Barbara, UC San Diego, University of Washington, Reed College,Portland State University, and The Western Front Lodge (Vancouver). He has recorded and mixed sound for diverse artists, including Debashish Bhattachaya, Amelia Cuni, Fred Frith, DJ Spooky, and Bertram Turetzky. He can be heard on the ARTSHIP Record Label and is included in the Rhizome Artbase.

Dr. Zbyszyński teaches workshops on interactivity programming and sensor design in the San Francisco Bay Area, and has consulted on performances by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra. He has taught composition at Berklee College of Music and Northeasten University, and was a Faculty Fellow in Music Technology at the University of California, Irvine. In fall 2000, Dr. Zbyszyński earned his Ph.D. in music composition from the University of California, Berkeley, having earned his M.A. in 1996. His doctoral dissertation, Labirynt for saxophone and orchestra, draws on minimalist, spectral, and sonorist musical styles; his primary advisor was Jorge Liderman. In 1998 he was awarded a Fulbright Grant to study at the Akademia Muzyczna w Krakówie, Poland with Zbigniew Bujarski. While in Poland, he composed the string orchestra piece Beneath a Liquid Paper Sky, which was premiered by the Penderecki Festival Orchestra, under the baton of Pawel Przytocki, at the Teatr Wielki in Warsaw. This concert was part of the 40^th anniversary celebration of the Polish-American Fulbright Commission, and subsequently aired on TV Polonia 1. In 1992, he received a B.A. in music from New York University, where he studied composition with Louis Karchin and improvisation with Joe Lovano. He participated in the Composers´ Symposium at the 1996 Oregon Bach Festival (studies with John Harbison and Robert Kyr) and the 1998 Académie d´été at Paris´s Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM: studies with Philippe Manoury, Kaija Saariaho, and

Salvatore Sciarrino).

He sometimes refers to himself in the third person.

Get Max 6 to see it in action.

Respectable Citizen started playing about 7:15. Michael Zbysznski on saxophones and electronics, Bruce Bennett on keyboards and their downstream modulation, and Byron Diel laying down one of the most absorbing 45 minutes of trap set drumming I’ve heard.

Like Stockhausen’s improvisatory group, Respectable Citizen starts with traditional musical instruments, feeding their output into a set of software and hardware modules to modulate and shape the sound. Unlike Stockhausen’s group, the musical source for R.C. is improvisatory jazz. However, after laying out some modal Coltrane-like sax riffs that established a musical base for the music, Michael set off in any manner of directions. Of the three musicians in the trio, he was the most continually balanced between music and noise, melody and raw sound, allowing your ears to get into a scale and feel how it provides identify to the notes and rhythms, then electronically modifying the output outside of that established acoustic space so that one saw it, fleetingly, from the perspective of a new sound and rule-set. In this way Michael traveled from acoustic gravity to acoustic gravity, compressing the distance of each journey through his ability to play within a perceivable rule set and immediately jump to another rule set, related by those sonic attributes that defined the edge between them (scale, rhythm, pitch, timbre etc.).

Bruce Bennett played his keyboard and other hand-based interfaces as if he had an axe–carving out rich, full sounds, doing high-definition shaping of timbre and volume that created sound shapes of particular clarity and presence. These worked particularly well in juxtaposition with Michael’s musical riffing and Byron’s shifting percussion patterns. Since between sax and drums rhythms and polyrhythms were already established, Bruce provides sounds and shapes that masterfully moved between being objects set against those rhythms, and a dark acoustic backdrop that surrounded them. It seemed to me what what Bruce provided was a forceful and ever-modulating sound set that morphed between being foreground object and background, providing the spatial basis for the trio’s musical cyclorama.

Usually I don’t like electronic music that has a single percussion track that is sustained throughout a piece. It seems to me mindless, the sort of composition exemplified by paintings of Elvis or matadors on black velvet. It’s not that it doesn’t’ have an effect, it’s that the chief problem of establishing background from foreground is already solved. and set This is one reason why dance music is usually snubbed by non-dance music musicians; solving nothing, it becomes the sugar in our water that rots our teeth as our invested years run out.

However, Byron Diel’s playing avoided that. His trap set playing technique was such that he was constantly modulating between time signatures, length of measures, and polyrhythmic juxtapositions, so that what seemed to be firmament was actually a shifting ground beneath you. While Byron occasionally slowed and sped up tempos, most of his playing did work against a steady tempo, but a steady tempo suspended above a continually re-parsed phrasing.

So what Respectable Citizen presented last night was a set of three musicians, each exploring different musical compositional strategies in parallel, in such a way that each complemented the other, and never became muddied or repetitious. At the California Art Institute/Sunnyvale, the majority of students in the audience were there from a sound design class offered from their Digital Film major. I can’t think of a better presentation of profound and intricate sound design, and I applaud Digital Film Director Christina Ri and Sound Design Instructor Andy Puls for their foresight in having the class attend the performance.

Following Respectable Citizen was “Toaster”, otherwise known as composer/performer Todd Elliot. Todd played a trio of pieces, moving from an ambient droning piece triggered through a MIDI-based instrument called an eigenharp tau, through a sequenced pattern piece, to a very nicely cinematic piece using movie soundtrack and acoustic piano samples (with the note samples either recorded from a distance in a live room, or processed to seem so).

Todd’s performance was recorded and is available on this website, so I’ll recommend listening to it first hand, rather than reading a long description by me. But I’ll recommend the first, ambient piece, which provided a nice example of woven sound textures that move in and out of focus. What sounds static to the unobservant is a constantly modulating set of sounds without sudden attack or decay, but with a gentle undulation not unlike a flag in a breeze, or cross-patterns of ripples on a pond. Similar to early Eno or Riley, it provides a fine and subtle texture for close listening.

Toward the end of Todd’s performance came a couple minutes that were quite unlike the others. The sounds slipped out from the triggered lockstep of the second piece, and the individual sounds away from the sharp definition of the filmic soundtrack spoken word samples. The few sounds slipping by became something of an emulsion, for what was for me a very compelling musical environment. I don’t know how this holds up in the recorded version, but in the acoustics of the room last night, it was a great way to end the performance.

Our next 2nd Friday will be on October 14th. Bring your ears and your heart.

Robert Edgar
September 10, 2011
www.robertedgar.com

PacketWeather is a visualization and sonification of the data traffic that continuously surrounds us. Every second, computers are sending information “packets” out into the ether. These might be low level, such as checking the time on the network, or part of a storm of bits that represent email or html web browsing. While action is initiated by the user in the latter case, it can be surprising how much communication is generated automatically and occurs beneath the surface. Not only are data packets passing around us on wires, they are also passing straight through us as part of wireless data networks that are becoming ubiquitous. PacketWeather exposes part of the ocean of data that we are currently immersed in, but are usually unaware of.

PacketWeather employs Carnivore (officially DCS1000), a network “diagnostic” tool that the FBI has used to sniff out internet packets. Carnivore has been ported to run in Processing, an open source image, animation, and data visualization environment. It is here that the IP addresses and port numbers, of incoming packets are examined, and plotted visually. The spatial location of the plots corresponds to the IP addresses of the sender and receiver, while the color of the plots indicates what kind of traffic that packet represents (blue is html, red is instant messaging, green is email, etc.) Processing then packages this information into the OpenSoundControl, a communications protocol that originated in music synthesis. This protocol is passed along to Max/MSP, a data-flow based audio programming environment. Max keeps a running histogram of what packets have been seen, and uses that to generate a sonic environment based on the current packet climate. Repeated ports become more prominent, and different packet types (UDP or TCP) are identified by individual timbres.

PacketWeather is both site and time specific. Since it picks up all the traffic on the local area network, it can be extremely dense and active on a large network and much more minimal in a home environment. The nature of the prevailing traffic also influences the moment-by-moment evolution of the environment, and is strongly determined by the specific activities of users on the network.

PacketWeather can be installed on a computer with a VGA monitor and stereo speakers, or projected. In the former case, the artist provides all hardware for the installation, the only requirements are electricity and an internet connection.

Hemisphere from Electrotap
Experimental Meyer Array

or you could follow these instructions to build a cheap array out of IKEA salad bowls and surplus automotive speakers. It won’t sound as “accurate” as those other speakers, but it’s surprisingly good and looks pretty cool on stage.

Special thanks and apologies to Dan Truman and the researchers at CNMAT , who’s scientific work directly inspired this project.

Here is the Make Magazine writeup.

Here’s a video from Wired Magazine’s Blog of me making carrot caviar.

Here is my instructable on the topic.

There is a movement in the cooking world called “Molecular Gastronomy.” The term was coined by Herve This, and become associated with chefs like Ferran Adria at El Bulli, Wylie Dufresne at wd~50, Grant Achatz at Alinea, and Homaru Cantu at Moto. Here is an interesting article in the New York Times.

Essentially, it involves applying scientific techniques and methodologies to the cooking process. One of the interesting results is found in the use of common substances to control the texture of foods, often in surprising ways.

You don’t need a chemistry lab to pull off such effects. Jump on board the Molecular Gastronomy train by making up some carrot caviar in your own kitchen.

Click here for more info about Charcutepalooza.

Here is Peter Bill’s rough cut of our performance at “the florence,” an old theater at the base of Smith Tower, that had lain dormant and empty for 14 years.

Bruce Bennett- sound mix, keyboards
Peter Bill – pixel pushing, live paint, source vids
Byron Diel- drums, sound mix
Vance Galloway- guitar, sound mix, tech coordination
Michael Zbyszynski- sax, flute, sound mix

and laralay- live paint, the guy from Big Lebowski on trombone, paul on bass clarinet, and and….

thanks again to Seth for the space!