tara rodgers | writing

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Tara Rodgers

writing:

"Butterfly Effects: Synthesis, Emergence, and Transduction." Wild Nature and the Digital Life Special Issue, Leonardo Electronic Almanac 14, no. 7-8 (2006). Available here.

Abstract: This paper describes a four-channel computer music composition in SuperCollider, inspired by monarch butterfly behaviors and migration patterns and the "butterfly effect" of chaos theory. Generative sound synthesis becomes a metaphor for life processes and a means of destabilizing culturally constructed notions of nature.

Guest Editor, "Sound and the Social Organization of Space." Special Section, Leonardo Music Journal 16 (2006): 49-50. Available here.

Abstract: How can cultural or natural patterns produce sounding spaces or inspire musical form? How might we read sounds and silences as indicators of social practice and implicit power structures? This section features artist statements and recent work from Carrie Bodle, Beth Coleman & Howard Goldkrand, Chris Kubick & Anne Walsh, Trevor Paglen, and Matt Volla; solicited and with an introduction by Tara Rodgers.

"On the Process and Aesthetics of Sampling in Electronic Music Production." Organised Sound 8 no. 3 (2003): 313-20. Available here.

Abstract: Many scholars writing on the use of samplers express anxiety over the dissolution of boundaries between human-generated and automated musical expression, and focus on copyright infringement issues surrounding sampling rather than samplists' expressive practices. Moving away from this emphasis, this essay addresses some musical and political dimensions of sampling by drawing on interviews with musicians and examples from underground electronic music genres.

teaching:

History of Sonic Art: Lecture course at SMFA Boston (2004-05)
Sound 1: Studio course at SMFA (Spring 2005)