Dr. Matthew Wright is a media systems designer, improvising composer/musician, computer music researcher, father of an energetic 5-year-old, and CCRMA’s Technical Director. His computer music career began in 1990 in a class from David Wessel at arch-nemesis UC Berkeley’s Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT), where he joined the staff as a researcher from 1993-2008, before and during his CCRMA PhD. Matt’s home team lost the Big Game all 10 years he was enrolled at either school. He later worked at the University of Victoria and UC Santa Barbara. His research has included real-time mapping of musical gestures to sound synthesis, helping develop and promote the Sound Description Interchange Format (SDIF) and Open Sound Control (OSC) standards, computer modeling of the perception of musical rhythm, and musical creation with technology in a live performance context. As a musician, he plays a variety of Middle Eastern and Afghan plucked lutes, Afro-Brazilian percussion, and computer-based instruments of his own design, in both traditional music contexts and experimental new works.

John Schott: My early music training was courtesy of the Seattle Public Schools. During high school I was also able to take private lessons from the great Jazz bassist and composer Gary Peacock. I went to Cornish College of the Arts and studied with Bay Area ex-pats Roger Nelson, Thomasa Eckert, Janice Giteck, Jerry Granelli and Julian Priester. While studying classical composition in college, I was also playing Jazz gigs around the Seattle area. In 1988 I moved to Berkeley, and soon formed the band Planet Good, with Scott Amendola and Trevor Dunn, and then T.J. Kirk with Charlie Hunter and Will Bernard. T.J. Kirk got signed to a major label, released three records, and toured for a year or two. Meanwhile Junk Genius had formed, with Trevor, Ben Goldberg and Kenny Wollesen, and this group toured in Europe and released records on Knitting Factory and Songlines. Other people I played with during these years include the Rova Sax Quartet, John Zorn, Tom Waits, Ledisi, and Peter Apfelbaum. I have four records under my own name, on Tzadik, New World Recordings, and my own label Smash the State! In 2002 I taught for a year at UC Berkeley, including an upper-division seminar on Duke Ellington. I’ve been a frequent guest with the Paul Dresher Ensemble, including performances all over the United States of Steven Mackey and Rinde Eckert’s opera Ravenshead. Other current bands include the Baguette Quartette, Sarah Wilson’s Kaleidoscope, and the Compositions of John Coltrane Band. My group The Actual Trio plays the first Sunday of every month at the Actual Café in Oakland.

Matt and John will craft yet another improvised journey through decades of tunes, textures, chords, transpositions, interaction strategies, and inside jokes. From “scrubbing” a 2001 SDIF file with a Wacom Intuos2 tablet on a 2011 MacBookPro running OS X 10.7.5, to the newest explorations in conducted feedback network instruments, dissonant chords, suboctave throbbing, effects pedals, and looping like you’ve never seen before, we’re sure to visit a variety of musical textures and ideas.

Matt Wright will give a colloquium in the CNMAT main room 3pm, April 28.  Details here.