James Dashow, an internationally recognized pioneer, has been making music with computers since 1968. He composed the first computer works in Italy in the 1970s). His awards include commissions and grants from the Bourges Festival, Guggenheim Foundation, Linz Ars Electronica, Rockefeller Foundation, La Biennale di Venezia, Fromm Foundation, RAI (Italian National Radio/Television), Koussevitzky Foundation at the Library of Congress, Prague Musica Nova, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, Il Cantiere Internazionale d'Arte di Montepulciano, National Endowment for the Arts, Harvard Music Association (Boston) ... His technical research includes the development of MUSIC30, a complete language for digital sound synthesis, and the Dyad System, which integrates pitch and electronic sound. His articles appear in Perspectives of New Music, Computer Music Journal, Interface, La Musica ... In 2000, he was awarded the Magisterium Prize at the Bourges International Electroacoustic Music and Sonic Art Festival.

James Dashow lives in Rome, Italy, where he is currently working on Archimedes, a planetarium opera based on the life of the famed ancient mathematician.

The Dyad System
The Dyad System was born from the compositional necessity of integrating digitally synthesized electronic sound into the pitch structure of a work. An effective way was found of using pitches in pairs to produce a wide variety of electronic sounds; by working backwards from the generalized algorithmic expressions for certain kinds of sound synthesis procedures, I arrived at alternate forms of the algorithms that express the procedure in terms of pitch pairs, what I call the generating dyad. The composer now communicates with the synthesis algorithms in terms of the pitches or intervals in the composed work rather than with abstract numbers.