Welcome

Welcome to the home page for Timothy Place. I am a composer of both acoustic and electronic music, as well as a developer of both software and hardware for musical expression.

Since 1999, I have been teaching in some capacity at the University of Missouri - Kansas City's Conservatory of Music. Information about the courses that I've instructed can be found on my courses page.

In 2004 I established a new company, Electrotap, L.L.C., with friend and colleague Jesse Allison to distribute the software and hardware that we have both been developing. Electrotap aims to provide tools for creating interactive art and music to make the process friendlier to composers. It is also a method for us to fund the research and development of new technologies.

 

News

My blog is located at http://www.electrotap.net/blog/

[2004.11.15-17] Invited to present on several different topics at Louisiana State University's new LCAT center.

[2004.11.10] Electrotap began shipping our new sensor interface and sensors. More information is available on the Electrotap website.

[2004.11.01-06] ICMC 2004, Miami Florida. Dandelions, for Alto Saxophone and Interactive electronics presented on concert 6. Paper presentation on the Teabox sensor interface (with Jesse Allison) on paper session 12.

 

Additional

KromoZone is the result of my collaboration with Stephan Moore. The idea behind it is that musical instruments, which are connected via a network, may yield some interesting new paradigms in musical performance. I spent some time with Stephan recently, building some spherical speaker arrays.

I am also involved in an on-going project with Jesse Allison focusing on Gestural Transfer Interfaces. This includes upcoming papers, photos, and instruction on how to build practical interfaces for transducing gesture from performers in realtime.

The web version of my presentation on Silicon Performer (Jade) contains some preliminary info about my (then) upcoming software release.

Also some follow-up from my presentation at ASU on May 10 is here.

For my performance rig that I've been working on, I am using a Yamaha MFC10 Foot Controller. It comes from the factory with two modes: one for sending program changes, and the other (function mode) for sending other types of data. Because I want to know when the pedal has been lifted (not just depressed) I reprogrammed the function mode banks. The sysex dump, should you want to use my settings, has the pedals mapped to MIDI note numbers - pressing on the pedal sends a velocity of 1 and lift will send a noteoff (velocity of 0). [NOTE: To download, right-click and then select download to disk]

I also just added a highly compressed quicktime movie of my Marimba & Interactive Electronics piece Dark Forest for viewing [about 21 MB]. The piece uses a video camera to track the mallets used by the percussionist to derive gestural controls for the software. The electronics are completely handled (including the video sensing/tracking) by my performance environment, Jade