Home › People

Adrian Freed

Email: 
adrian@cnmat.berkeley.edu
Phone: 
+1 (510) 455-4335
Address: 
1750 Arch Street Berkeley CA 94720
Additional Information: 
skype:adrianfreed aim:adrianfreed ichat:adrianfreed

Adrian Freed's first publication in 1975 was a design for electronic doorbell with an unusally compact implementation. This wasn't a particularly powerful musical tool, but in those days access to computational machinery of any kind was exceedingly difficult and dedicated electronic circuits were the only route possible to hobbyists. He continued(unpublished) work in his teens on sound synthesizers exploring a wide gamut of hardware technologies available including a pioneering "drum machine" based on switched resistor VCA/VCF. shift register noise generator and static ram sequence storage. While at the University of New South Wales he developed control sotware for a digital additive synthesizer, the groupatron, built into the chassis of a Fairlight synthesizer. After designing a complete digital synthesizer with Vito Asta at Axis Digital in France he was invited to IRCAM by David Wessel in 1982 where he was responsible for computer systems and secretary of the Scientific Commitee.

He was early to recognize the importance of temporal constraints in music systems, a theme throughout his work at CNMAT. He is author of MacMix a pioneering interactive sound editing, processing, and mixing system, commercialized by Studer-Editec. He developed hard disk audio recording technology and audio post-production user interfaces at WaveFrame. He played a major role in the design and development of the Reson8, a multiprocessor digital signal processing system for music and audio applications. He is the architect of CNMAT's Additive Synthesis System (CAST) and is responsible for its UNIX implementation. He has developed the real-time scheduler used in CAST and novel signal processing algorithms for efficient sinusoidal signal synthesis, for which he holds a patent. He has made numerous contributions to the MAX programming language and more recently contributed new signal processing modules for Max/MSP and OSW. He has written and lectured on efficient use of the C and C++ programming languages for signal processing applications and was a featured speaker on the subject of integrating sound and computer graphics at SIGGRAPH 1996.

During his sabbatical leave in 2000 at itsQuick Inc. he developed new applications of computational linguistics and data mining to Internet applications applied to the music portal HitsQuick which enjoys strong search engine visibility. As leader of CNMAT's Guitar Innovation Group (GIG), he has focussed on hardware and signal processing software to take advantage of separate processing of each string. His lifelong efforts to improve the guitar are documented in sfweekly.

Current activities include:

  • Rapid prototyping sensor and actuator systems for new and augmented musical instrument control
  • Multipoint Touch Sensors
  • Blending structured voculabaries and data mined, community, and individual Ontologies for Ethnomusicology Research and Community Building
  • Computing clusters for low-latency reactive signal processing and live performance
  • Geometric and mechanical design of CNMAT's spherical speaker arrays
  • Generalized interpolator for MSP and OSW

Publications prior to CNMAT:

  • Barriere, J-B, Baisnee, P-F, Freed, A., Baudot, M-D, "A Digital Signal Multiprocessor and its Musical Application", Proceedings of the 15th International Computer Music Conference, Ohio State University, 1989, Computer Music Association.
  • Freed A., "Recording, Mixing, and Signal Processing on a Personal Computer", Proceedings of the AES 5th International Conference on Music and Digital Technology, 1987
  • Freed. A. "Review of 3rd USENIX Graphics Workshop", World UNIX and C, 1986
  • Freed, A. "MacMix:Mixing Music with a Mouse", Second USENIX Computer Graphics Workshop Monterey. December 1985
  • Freed, A., "MacMix: Mixing Music with a Mouse", Proceedings of the 12th International Computer Music Conference, The Hague, 1986, Computer Music Association.
  • C. Douglas Blewett, Adrian Freed, Ross J. Hilbert, Jeff Langer, Richard J. Mascitti, Craig R. Rodine, William P. Weber,"The Aegis System", ATT Bell Laboratories Technical Memorandum 11385-850806-01 1985.
  • Freed. A. "Understanding Time in Distributed Music Systems", International Computer Music Conference - Paris 1984.
  • Vito Asta and Adrian Freed, "The DSY8201 Digital Music Synthesizer", International Computer Music Conference - Venice 1982.
  • Freed, A, "An Audio Oscillator Using Digital ICs", Electronics Australia, January 1978.
  • Freed, A., "Electronic Doorbell", Popular Electronics (UK) 1975.