As a person who cut his teeth in early music, I’m only slowly getting acquainted with tools for working with recorded sound as a primary text of analysis. I first became aware of the great things happening in this area through the CHARM project (see the Links page) and in particular the program Sonic Visualizer they made freely available to annotate and compare multiple recordings.

In this same vein, but with an eye particularly towards electroacoustic music, we now have Eanalysis, a program that seems remarkably flexible for analysis as well as being able to generate cool visual “scores” similar to that Rainer Wehinger made for Ligeti’s landmark electronic piece “Artikulation.” If any of you end up using the program, let me know; I’d love to see what you come up with.

I just became aware of the fascinating “Tales from Babel” project being conducted by the early music vocal ensemble The Clerks. Taking its inspiration both from early polytextual motets and psychoacoustical research interested in how people parse sound into different intelligible streams (ie. things like “the cocktail party problem”), the program is a beautiful marriage of musical creativity and empirical thoughtfulness. Plus, in doing this the Clerks have made some marvelous new pieces– Check out the “Lament on the Death of Michael Jackson” on the “Audio” page.

For the musicologically minded in the Champaign-Urbana area, you won’t want to miss this year’s Bruno and Wanda Nettl lecture, which will occur on Friday September 4th at 5pm in Smith Memorial Hall, Room 25. I look forward to seeing you there!

Welcome to my new webspace, which hopefully will serve as a launchpad for those interested in themes near to my heart as well as my teaching, performance, and research. If anything sparks an interest or an urge to talk more, please feel free to get in touch at cmacklin@illinois.edu.

In addition, I’ll try to keep people informed of fun and relevant events both undertaken by myself and others, and flag short pieces by myself and others that might be of interest.

In the meantime, welcome, and enjoy!