Jean-Francois Charles

Dudley House is a very important place for the community of Graduate Students at Harvard. I've been blessed to work with great colleagues, and to make real friends in the house. Energy, creativity, and concern for others , these are qualities that we are all striving to develop. Thank you, Dudley House, and all of the persons who keep this place well alive!

From granulation to spectral processing, with Max & Jitter : this is the title of the class I’m giving this year at the Conservatoire de Montbéliard. It’s 17 meetings (Friday morning, 9-10:30), and the schedule is looking like that: Free sampling (September 17th) Granular “synthesis” (October 8th) Get ready for Halloween: Spectrum study! (October 22nd) Sonograms, back to Max (November 5th) The famous “Forbidden Planet” (November 26th) Christmas market in Montbéliard: Freeze your sounds! (December 3rd) Phase vocoder (December 17th) Old-fashioned vocoder (January 7th) Phase vocoder encore! (January 21st) Software design 101 (February 18th) [poly~]phony (March 11th) Hibernatus: frozen life (March 25th) Phase vocoder: still blurry! (April 8th) From melody to harmony (April 25th) Interactive speed (May 6th) Spectral sound slicing (May 20th) The best of both world (June 10th) It will be my modest contribution to a great composition curriculum. Whether you are looking for a composition te...

On Thursday, I took my first ballet class in France. After my recent composition for dancing clarinetist, electric guitar, and electronic music , I'm eager to continue and learn more in the art of movement. José Mateo Ballet Theater: a great ballet school But let me praise the dance school I left in June. In case you live in the Cambridge/Boston area, I encourage you to check out the José Mateo Ballet School . On January 2nd of this year, I dared push the door and take an adult class. It turned out to be a great new year's resolution. I met with awesome dancers & students, and I was lucky to work with two amazing teachers. One of the beautiful studios, shot by Susan Young , July 2010. First, I must thank Cosmin Marculetiu . Trained in Romania, I guess he inherited a lot from the Russian tradition; he made me discover the masculine nature that I didn't know in ballet. He loves having men in his classes, and he created course reserved to young boys. Thanks Cosmin for a...

I just discovered that Jonathan Ruel posted great pictures of the Acquainted with the night concert. With singer Michael Barrett, we premiered my composition for voice, basset-horn, and live electronics. But as you may recall, four other premières took place during this musical evening. See all of the performers and composers on Jonathan's shots:

During the recent years, a number of musicians have been interested in my article A Tutorial on Spectral Sound Processing Using Max/MSP and Jitter . Great news if you desire to learn more on this topic: I'll be teaching a class on spectral sound processing with Max and Jitter during the Fall. It will be a few hours roughly each other week, and will be part of the composition curriculum in Montbéliard Conservatory. If you live in Paris, Strasbourg, Lyon, and you want to learn more about Max, don't hesitate to drop me an e-mail. Topics will include: Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) with Max and Jitter Filter and denoiser Audio freeze Extreme time stretching Graphically based sound processing Automatic sound slicing Anything related to the phase vocoder Max patches I made available on cycling 74's share page Your related questions & projects! (maybe you already use Audio freeze inside Max for Live , and want to know all about it...) Freeze 1.0, device for Max for Live by Egor...

Yesterday, I jotted down a few notes for a new composition: Benedictus , seventh part of my Arc-en-ciel cycle . It will be for soprano voice, clarinet (or soprano sax), double bass, percussion and live electronics. I have known for a long time that this piece will include latin words: Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini Hosanna in excelsis But I just decided they would be complemented by Charles Baudelaire's poem L'examen de minuit ( English translations ). When it's over, it will be interesting to see how much of this sketch remains in the final version!

In March, I announced the creation concert "Acquainted with the night" , during which we premièred five new musical compositions on Robert Frost's poem . I just posted the live recording. It features singer Michael Barrett (I was playing the basset-horn and live electronics).