IDM Seminar -- Dr. John Thompson and Dan Overholt



The Overtone Violin
Dr. John Thompson Postdoctoral Researcher Electrical and Computer Engineering UC Santa Barbara	Daniel Overholt Media Arts and Technology UC Santa Barbara
Date: Friday, April 20, 2007 Place: Buchanan 1930 Time: 2:00 pm — 3:00 pm Abstract: The topic of this presentation is collaborative work on performance systems for the Overtone Violin, a highly enhanced musical instrument for the control of interactive audiovisual software. The violin will be demonstrated and described, and Sonofusion, the first multimedia composition for the instrument will be presented. In the piece, the instrument interactively manipulates audio, video, and three-dimensional graphics. The performer journeys through a series of virtual spaces, each with their own set of underlying processes which are controlled through gesture and sound. We will discuss the collaborative role of performer and composer in the exploration of expressive capabilities made possible by new musical interfaces. JOHN THOMPSON is a composer and media artist. He holds a PhD in music composition from the University of California, Santa Barbara where he studied music and media arts with JoAnn Kuchera-Morin, Curtis Roads, Stephen Travis Pope, and Marcos Novak. While at UC Santa Barbara, he worked as Technical Coordinator of CREATE (Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology) and as a Teaching Associate in music composition. He is currently a National Science Foundation IGERT postdoctoral scholar in Interactive Digital Multimedia at UC Santa Barbara. In the Fall of 2007, he will join the Music faculty at Georgia Southern University as an Assistant Professor of Music Technology. DAN OVERHOLT is a PhD candidate and Lecturer in the Media Arts and Technology program and theCenter for Research in Electronic Art Technology at UC Santa Barbara. He studied electronics engineering and music (violin performance) at CSU, Chico, and has a Masters from the Media Laboratory at MIT, where his thesis focused on the development of a novel interface called the MATRIX. He has published and presented work at many academic conferences, such as ICMC, NIME, AES, CHI, and SIGGRAPH, and was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to STEIM in 2004, and a National Science Foundation IGERT fellowship at UCSB. He composes and performs internationally with new human-computer interfaces and musical signal processing algorithms, and gives workshops in interaction design for new performance interfaces and interactive installations at a variety of institutions with the CREATE USB Interface. He has also worked as a consultant in the industry for companies such as Eventide, E-mu, and Echo Audio.

The Overtone Violin