David Behrman

David Behrman has been active as a composer and multimedia artist since the 1960s and has created many works for performance as well as sound installations. Most of his music since the late Seventies has involved computer-controlled systems operating interactively with people who may or may not be musically expert. He designs and writes much of the software for these systems.

Among the fine composer-performers who have realized his music are "Blue" Gene Tyranny, Maggi Payne, Tom Buckner, David Dunn, Peter Gordon, Barbara Held, Kazue Sawaii, Leroy Jenkins and Jon Gibson. His works have been presented at venues in North America, Japan and Europe, among them the CBC in Toronto, Metronom in Barcelona, Roulette, Interpretations and the Lincoln Center Summer Festival in New York, and Studio 200 in Tokyo.

Behrman sound installations have been exhibited at the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, The Hudson River Museum, the DeCordova Museum, The Addison Gallery of American Art, Ars Electronica in Linz, La Villette Science and Technology Museum in Paris, Studio Five Beekman and other venues. His recordings are published by Lovely Music, XI, Alga Marghen and Classic Masters.

“In the early 1970s I built a set of homemade synthesizers that consisted entirely of triangle wave generators. Several pieces from that time explored the sounds of many of these carefully-tuned triangle waves as they slowly rose and fell in volume and in pitch, creating complex beats and spatial effects as they interacted one with another.

2000 triangles is a new piece in that early-70s style made on a virtual recreation of those homemade synthesizers. It was realized in 2000 with the MAX/MSP software environment running on a present-day Macintosh.

Bands 3 and 4 are from Maggi Payne's 1999 CD entitled The Extended Flute (Cri CD 807.) These are excerpts from program notes on her CD:

QS / RL was made for Barbara Held in 1994 as a piece that she could run on her own music system. It consists of software for a Macintosh laptop computer linked to a Proteus synthesizer, a pitch sensor and a microphone. It was intended to be performable with a flute or alto flute either in private or at concerts. In QSRL the software listens to what the flutist is doing and responds to changes in the loudness of sustaining sounds within low and high register regions that can be flexibly set during performance. Each of the two parts of QSRL has eight subsections that can be entered in any order and engaged for any duration.   

The present recording was made with Maggi Payne at the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College in November 1995. The software was written in "Formula / Forthmacs", a language developed by Ron Kuivila, David Anderson and Mitch Bradley.”