Composers & Computers

Bethany Beardslee Winham and Chris Winham

Followers of this podcast will remember two central characters from Season 1: Milton Babbitt, the Princeton Music professor and avant-garde composer who was an early devo

Haydn Seek

In this episode, Stanley Jordan does something remarkable: He recreates a lost computer music composition, and premieres it here for the first time. Part Pac-Man, part s

That Magic Touch

Stanley Jordan was about to play The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and with seconds go before cameras rolled, the sound wasn’t coming out of his guitar. His guitar tec

Stanley Jordan Pulls Out All the Stops

Stanley Jordan ’81 grew up in Silicon Valley, making circuits as a kid, watching his father become one of the world's first professional computer programmers. But it wasn

"Composers & Computers" is back: Stanley Jordan, computer musician

Stanley Jordan. Innovator of the two-handed touch technique to coax a sweet, percussive sound out of an electric guitar. After graduating from Princeton University in 198

Episode 6: Dance Me to the End

In our epilogue episode, we look at how an engineering professor, Naomi Leonard, is collaborating with dancers to show how birds fly in a flock without bumping into each

Episode 5: Laptop Orchestra

Has digital music reached the point of diminishing returns? Has it all been done, and heard, before? At the start of a new millennium, a crew of Princeton engineers and m

Episode 4: Idle Chatter

Paul Lansky is the most celebrated and musically influential of the computer musicians at Princeton, and it isn’t only because he was famously sampled by Radiohead on the

Episode 3: The Converter

Imagine using a computer to synthesize music, but not being able to hear it as you built it. That's how it was in the 1960s - musicians only heard what they were composin

Episode 2: Composers in the Computer Center

When the Computer Center opened along with the Engineering Quadrangle at Princeton in 1962, who knew that the Music Department would be one of its biggest users? The comp

Episode 1: Serial(ism)

This episode is the story of what happened when a Princeton composer, who was inspired to create some of the most challenging music ever written, decided it could be most

Welcome to "Composers & Computers!"

A revolution in music happened in the Princeton Engineering Quadrangle, but chances are, you don’t know the story. Sixty years ago, some music-loving computer engineers h