My work in electronic music began in the early sixties, as a part of
the San Francisco Tape Music Center with Morton Subotnick, Ramon Sender
and Pauline Oliveros. Possibly the most formative experience came in 1967-8
as the composer-member of a resident five-artist group at the National Center
for Experiments in Television, established by the Rockefeller Foundation
to explore the possibilities of television as a logical extension of each
artist's craft. It was a heady time, with major figures such as Charles
Olson, James Rosenquist, and Robert Creely passing through to participate
in our debates (Is television unique or simply a means of broadcasting film-
or theatre-like experiences to other parts of the community? What is the
cognitive difference between television's direct light and the reflected
light of virtually all other visual experience?) and our creative work.
As a part of the Center, I composed Linearity--a Television Piece for
Harp and Live Electronics (1968), in which the television system's extensive
processing and memory capacities were employed. Incorporating instructions
for cameramen and control room, the score is composed in two passes, the
first of which lays cues for the second, which overlays it. The result can
be broadcast but not performed on a concert stage.

Around the same period, I wrote Glossolalia for baritone voice,
percussion, organ and tape, a work which attempted to use the electronic
medium with the same fluency and musicality of gesture as acoustical instruments,
while addressing cognitive questions by employing "documentary"
sounds as the material to modify (organ bellows, singer's voice) and phonemic
deconstruction of the Latin text for timbral transfer to the instruments.
Most of my music for the next decade and a half involved electronics.

Acoustics and architecture are my two other passions. In the early seventies
I wrote Galactic Rounds, an orchestral work which used rotating
trumpets and trombones dispersed throughout the orchestra to create Doppler
shifts. Interest in acoustics led to an interest in non-Western instruments
(In Celebration of Golden Rainfor Indonesian gamelan and organ;
Opus One CD #155 which addressed the problem of multiple simultaneous tunings)
and my encounter with David Wessell and cognitive psychology during a year
at IRCAM in the eighties led to my efforts to create CNMAT after my return
to Berkeley. In the nineties I developed a seminar in advanced orchestration
based on psychoacoustics.

Architecture is a field to which sound can contribute creatively just
as light does, but it is not studied with this in mind and architecture/music
combinations are rare as course topics. An exception is my colleague Marc
Treib, who has repeatedly asked me to participate in his studios when he
has devised a music-related problem for his architecture students. Those
collaborations led to his book, Space Calculated in Seconds: The Philips
Pavillion, Le Corbusier, Varèse (Princeton University Press),
to which I contributed an analysis and commentary on newly discovered manuscripts
of the Poème éléctronique.