Jean-Francois Charles

Last year, the contemporary classical music ensemble Alea III performed the première of my composition Viola palustris . It would be fair to speak of Third Stream Music , since the piece is a concerto for a jazz soloist and a classical music ensemble. Watch on youtube: Third Stream Music - Viola palustris by Alea III Alea III, dedicated to new music Alea III is giving his Young Composers' Workshop Concert this Wednesday, January 27th, at 7:30pm in TSAI performance center, in Boston. The exciting program includes new music by the following composers: Graham Dixon (United Kingdom) Kittinger’s Fall Aaron Krerowicz (USA) Asterisk Lina Tonia (Greece) Prismatic Eun Young Lee (Korea) Yeol-doo-dal Mohammed Fairouz (United Arab Emirates) Symphony No. 2 Gon Hwang (Korea) Cosmorleans Concerto Antonis Anestis (Greece) Villa R. (homage à Paul Klee) Miles Bergsma (USA) Phoenix If you are a composer, make sure you check the Alea III's composition competition (you may submit an a...

Next week, Spring courses start at Harvard University . I am very excited to be a Head Teaching Fellow for the course The Physics of Music and Sound , taught by Professor Eric Heller . Eric Heller is a true sound lover, but his interests cross many boundaries, as you can check on the Heller Group page . A Gen Ed course All incoming students at Harvard College must complete, over the course of their undergraduate education, one letter-graded course in each of the eight categories in the Program in General Education . One goal is to ensure that the undergraduate education encompasses a broad range of topics and approaches. The Physics of Music and Sound are in the category Science of the Physical Universe . As Pr. Heller says in the course syllabus: In keeping with the new GenEd philosophy, the class will be made as participatory as possible. Discussions, live demonstrations of experiments, student demonstration of voice and instruments, computer experiments that you can also easily d...

After I wrote the Computer Music Journal article A Tutorial on Spectral Sound Processing Using Max/MSP and Jitter , I made available a number of Max patches designed to study graphical sound processing, time stretching, and spectral audio freeze , and to create new music! Several professors use these patches when they teach the FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) in Max and its musical applications. you'll have to browse down the page to find my name & the associated patches These patches disappeared from cycling74's web site when they revamped it in November of 2009. Good news, the share page is back; download here 16 free spectral Max patches : 1-record-spectrum-in-matrix record sound directly in spectral domain 2-record-play-frame-by-frame schematic playback 3-record-play-speed-control playback slower or faster 4-explore-the-sonogram the sonogram is an essential tool for the modern musician 5-spectrum-your-graphical-transformations build your own graphical sound processing ...

Looking for the studio album? Visit www.electroclarinet.com The draft of Electroclarinet 1 My score for the première of Electroclarinet 1 A serial composition inspired by Steve Vai and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart As you may recall, this title was one of the slides in my Shanghai Max MSP (and beyond) presentation . The Steve Vai influence may be obvious (when I was composing, I discovered his double DVD Where the Wild Things Are .) So I'll try to highlight how the piece is related to twelve-tone serialism and Mozart . The easiest link is Mozart: you might have already recognized that the last minute of Electroclarinet 1 is no more than 18/60 - True Night , a Mozart-inspired minute of music. Now, how is this music serial? Well, it turns out that 18/60 - True Night is not just the last section of Electroclarinet 1, but really a seed for the whole composition. You can see that by comparing the draft above with the score of 18/60 - True Night . We can also trace the three first pitc...

Looking for the studio album? Visit www.electroclarinet.com I recorded my own performance of Electroclarinet 1 in Shanghai. This is the direct sound from the clarinet (do you see the wireless microphone on the picture?) and the live electronics. Shanghai, October 20th, 2009. Hope you like the white clarinet bell! Picture by a member of the festival's organization. Check the program notes on this announcement. Frozen sounds in Electroclarinet 1 It's winter, and although it's not too cold in Cambridge today, it's a good time to talk about audio freeze (the equivalent of frozen frames in video). We can hear two different versions of frozen sounds in this composition: from 2:50 to 3:50, several tremolos (sometimes arpeggios) are immediately frozen, and followed most of the time by a melodic phrase. from 4:48, a high pitch (concert A) is frozen. Later, notes are added to this sound, building into a chord. The first note is added at 5:00, then 5:03, etc. The ice is mel...