Noah Thorp

Artist, Connector, Consultant, Event planner, Idea generator, Musician, Producer, Project manager, Technologist, Web guru

I performed music at TED 2009 to accompany the Capacitor dance troupe. The original music I performed on laptop was composed in collaboration with classical musican gone renegade Kristina Forester as part of our music project Rabbit's Rum (rabbitsrum.com). In addition to performing at TED with capacitor, Kristina and I were recently pleased to discover that Rabbit's Rum is a 2009 Independent Music Awards finalist http://tinyurl.com/6mtzfh In 1998 my love of cutting edge music, technology, and community lead me to found audio think-tank and record label Listen Labs (listenlabs.com). Early Listen Labs projects included work with Capacitor and supporting musicians for Beck, Tom Waits, Meat Beat Manifesto, Meshell Ndegeocello, Antibalas, and Steve Coleman. Also of note were late 90s laptop performances and authoring algorithms to convert EEG and geophysics density data to music (resulting in a presentation at the Subtle Technologies conference and a Meet the Composer Grant). More recently, I started the Bay Area Computer Music Technology Group (barcmut.org): a forum for learning new audio engineering techniques, writing open source software, finding collaborators, and making visible what's happening in studios, labs, and live work spaces around the Bay Area. We have over 400 members and held 25 events in 2007 ranging from workshops by Ge Wang (Stanford Assistant Professor) on the Chuck audio programming language to presenters such as Jaron Lanier (Virtual Reality thought leader), and Paul Hudak (Yale computer science director, Haskell comittee, Haskore). Our presentations have been graciously hosted at UC Berkley CNMAT, Stanford CCRMA, Dolby, Digidesign, Maker Faire, and many more locations. My cross-disciplinary approach began at the age of six when I started programming music in BASIC on the Commodore 64. I took piano lessons from my Julliard trained grandmother and guitar lessons from my Aunt. I completed studies in Computer Music at the Five College Consortium (Hampshire, Amherst, Mount Holyoke, Smith, UMASS) where I studied Jazz with Yusef Lateef and Andrew Jaffe and programmed Artificial Intellegence music systems in the C and LISP computer languages. My interest in ethnomusicology led me to study West African drumming with master Drummer David Locke. Later I spent 6 months in India studying Buddhist philosophy, North Indian classical sitar music with R. N. Goswami and Danye (Tibetan Lute) at the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts. Also, I traveled to Germany to attended courses with Karlheinz Stockhausen and privately studied music theory and composition for several years with harmonic theorist W.A. Mathieu (author of Harmonic Experience and arranger for Duke Ellington).

Computer music & Music without computers Cross-disciplinary collaboration Community

Music is as much about community as it is about sound. The value of music in the future may be found more so in the communities it creates than in DRM protected audio files.

Computer Music Technology, Project Management, Software Development

Tai-chi and qigong