slorktastik

we have a chamber concert tomorrow night at the knoll. we perform all new works for laptops, ipad, iphone; all instruments and pieces developed by the members of the stanford laptop orchestra.

we have made a shaker instrument that is controlled by the laptop's accelerometer. there are several gesture based instruments that sound amazing, some drum instruments and of course a reactipad(reactable for ipad.)

more details on the website:

https://ccrma.stanford.edu/events/stanford-laptop-orchestra-pres

modulations at soma arts

modulations is a yearly event organized by amazing ccrma community thanks to carr, sasha and every one. the event is a collection electronic music performances, sound installations, djs and interactive art. please join us tomorrow night at soma arts for this years modulations.

details about the event are posted on:

https://ccrma.stanford.edu/events/modulations-v2.2

http://blog.somarts.org/

work of women artist: barcmut + gray area

come and see us this thursday at gaffta (gray area foundation for the arts) at 7.00 pm.
there'll be julia ogrydziak, cheryl e. leonard, surabhi saraf and me presenting some of our recent works in computer music.
barcmut is a fantastic community of computer musicians and audio geeks in the bay area and i have learned a lot from the experienced people in this community. i'm glad that the event is in gaffta which is an amazing non profit gallery in tenderloin that brings a variety of digital art and culture together.

the political me

my mind has been very busy with all that has been going on in my birthplace in the last six months and it has been very sad to see how people are living under a brutal dictatorship. these days i have been more nostalgic because of the 30th anniversary of the dictatorship in iran and seeing how the government is celebrating 30 years of brutality by putting so many young students in prisons ...

i have a very diverse musical background. studied western classical music since childhood and never practiced persian radif music. one of my heroes was my cousin's violin professor who used to be the tehran symphony's conductor. professor heshmat sanjari has composed some masterpieces of persian symphonic music. one of them is "persian pictures". this was the first symphony i heard live in my life when i was a kid and it brings me back to my childhood. although my favorite movement "dance of dayereh" is a very happy one, it can make me dance or cry at the same time. i took a short excerpt of the theme of this movement and mixed a piece to commemorate students who have been demonstrating in iran in the last six months, who have been in prison and who have lost their lives ...

i also wanted to show my respect to the tehran symphony. i read this article in nyt and felt sorry for them having to represent a government that has been so harsh to them and to music for the last thirty years.

click on the political prisoner to listen to my piece.

inspired by trimpin

on weekend "trimpin: the sound of invention directed" by "peter esmonde" was screened in "red vic movie house" in san francisco. if you don't know trimpin, you should definitely watch this movie. he is an amazing inventor, engineer, sound and multimedia artist and sculptor. i am totally inspired after watching this movie and we are very fortunate in the bay area that he'll be at stanford next year to collaborate with sica(stanford institute for creativity & the arts).

steve reich at stanford

"steve reich" and "beryl korot" were at stanford last night. it was such an honor to see them in person and hearing their talk about their collaborative audio/visual works. reich is one of my favorite composers and i loved to see how modest he and his wife are and i enjoyed their sense of humor.

they mainly discussed "three tales" and "the cave". both works are from 90s. three tales shows concerns on new technology, cloning, wars and weapons ... you can either get the whole dvd or watch parts of it on a dvd of several modern pieces called ohm. unfortunately the video can't show the whole work since there were live performers and singers in addition to several screens of visuals in the live performance in 90s.

the cave is an interesting look at people from different religions. it's interesting to see how diverse the interpretations of different people about the same story could be.

mopho

mopho: stanford mobile phone orchestra had it's first performance of the year last night at ccrma. the variety of interfaces were amazing and it sounds great. comparing to last year when we had only a couple of instruments on iphone making some drone-like sounds; last night's instruments were very diverse and astounding. my favorite piece was vox aeterna by ge. he used human and augmented voices generated by auto-tune of i am t-pain. another interesting piece was nick's wind chimes where he used compass and microphone of iphone to control recorded sounds slowly evolving into surround sound.

another amazing performance was jieun's colorful gathering where she brought all performers together and they jammed on her multi-touch based instrument on iphone.
i uploaded some low quality videos of the event on youtube.