Here are the presentation materials I use for the no-input mixer workshops. A no-input mixer is a great introductory instrument for noise-based electronic music practice.
Google Slides: has links, audio samples, diagrams, etc.
Here’s another version of the tutorial with a bit of performance in the second half
Let me know if you want to invite me to run a workshop. I can bring the necessary gear for the hands-on experience!
Academic Electronic Musician: An Example is a collection of short articles on electronic music composition, performance, and presentation. The collection is useful for the following purposes:
Download and study SuperCollider compositions and tools
The articles and examples in the collection are my research outputs. There is a value in reviewing and connecting works by an individual, different from the value gained from comparing and analyzing works by many. Alvin Lucier’s Music 109: Notes on Experimental Music and Gordon Mumma’s Cybersonic Arts: Adventures in American New Music, for example, gave me insight into an aspiring artist’s electronic music practice spanning decades. I hope this collection of writings serves the same purpose, but from the perspective of a lesser-known yet currently practicing full-time artist.
Academic Electronic Musician is hosted in Zotero, a multiplatform tool for organizing research data. The site allowed me to organize blog posts like a search engine tailored to my work. The site, pictured above, is most useful and effective when using tags and related links. See the linked video for further explanation.
With its interactivity, Academic Electronic Musician may serve as supplementary material for electronic music classes and workshops. For example, if a class is learning about algorithmic composition, teachers can select the algorithmic and analysis tags to find examples with audio, code, and diagrams. Also note that the contents will grow as I compose, perform, and document more in the future.
But on the site, you may not find typical information in other electronic music textbooks, such as
Numerous authors have written about these subjects with examples from well-known works.
Electronic music researchers and practitioners find new theories and practices that could be useful to others. But those findings must be documented and shared. This, the sharing of knowledge, is what academic musicians do best. I hope the writings in the Academic Electronic Musician serve as an example for those who want to study and experiment with uniquely electronic sound in a musical context.
Since 2009, I have been presenting a solo set of live electronic music. Among the many electronic performance techniques, I specialize in creating electronic sounds on stage without pre-recorded samples. I use a combination of digital effect processors coded with SuperCollider to improvise a uniquely electronic soundscape in concerts and recordings. For more than a decade, I have marketed myself as an expert in that specific style. It is represented as a yellow rectangle in the diagram below.
The categorization is not meaningful to anyone else, but it was a useful research goal for me in the 2010s. I share three representative pieces of my solo electronic improvisation for listening and analysis purposes.
100 Strange Sounds (2012-2014) is a set of one hundred short video recordings featuring my live electronic music techniques. Each piece pairs a sound-making object with my SuperCollider code that processes its sound. I invite viewers to notice and enjoy the unexpected relationship between what they see and what they hear. For example, the sound of a cabbage becomes something else with a bunch of effect processors in 100 Strange Sounds #77.
Large Intestine (2013) is a piece I made after 100 Strange Sounds #42. As described in the blog on style analysis, the no-input mixer improvisation enhanced with SuperCollider has been my favorite electronic instrument for more than a decade. Large Intestine, as the title suggests, epitomizes my interest in noise, digital signal processing, and improvisation. I plan to play this work in as many concerts as possible in the future.
Touch (2014) is my kitchen-sink piece that pairs multiple sound objects with multiple effects. It’s a summary of 100 Strange Sounds, in which I bring random objects on stage and improvise the combination and sequence of sounds. The piece opened many doors to career opportunities in the 2010s as an electronic music improviser. The techniques and technologies I learned in performing and refining Touch became a source for future non-improvisational compositions for electronic ensembles.
All three pieces mentioned above use a variation of a single SuperCollider patch, available for download at this link. And this linked PDF explains the hardware and software setup to perform the pieces (warning: it is a little outdated).
When I run the patch, it creates a GUI with multiple buttons that trigger customized effects. I control the number and timing of the effects’ on/off states with a mouse click – No MIDI controllers or control surfaces. A few clicks, probably unnoticed by the audience, are enough because I wanted the listeners to focus on the interaction I have with the non-electronic objects on the stage.
As for the hardware, I use a couple of microphones for Touch, one audio interface, and a laptop. This article explains the gear I used over the past 11 years.
Like other improvisations, the key technique in performing solo live electronic music is listening. I listen for variations that the computer part adds to the acoustic instruments, then respond with another instrument or effects. Because I cannot play a scale or harmony with the instrument (like cabbage), the listen-and-react decisions are often non-musical and raw. “The current sound is long, so I’ll play short sounds next.” “I will go from a simple to a complex texture.” “The sound is very high in pitch. I’ll complement it with a very low rumble.” I also ask questions and try to come up with the best answer on stage. “What happens if I granularize the chattering teeth sound?” “The plastic block sounds harsh. Can I make it harsher?” “What is common between a slinky and a coin sound?”
Free improvisation focusing on reactions and questions is fun, but it can quickly lose control of the length and form. So I plan a specific gesture or sound combination for transitions. The Extension and Connection blog linked earlier has such an example in Touch.
More than fifteen years of experience in improvising with live electronics forms the foundation of my musicianship. I identified myself as a composer after earning a PhD in composition in 2008, but it did not lead to a gig or collaborations when I moved to Philadelphia for my first job as a music technology professor. The dire situation led me to develop a solo set I can prepare and present quickly in any situation. The strategic change, fortunately, worked, giving me ample opportunity to refine my performance and improvisation techniques.
These days, I am comfortable identifying myself as a composer-performer of electronic music. My sound may not be fresh or cutting-edge at this point, but I think I have a bit more to contribute to the current solo setup. Perhaps the contribution is a documentation and theorization. Perhaps it is just one more new piece!
More electronic music composition/performance/practice articles are found at the Computer Music Practice project.
Sans Trou Ni Fin (without hole or end) is a collaborative work with Biba Bell. It was premiered on June 26th, 2025, as a site-specific movement piece. I made the music and designed the playback system. The show was about 45 minutes and had a total of four performances on June 26th and 27th, 2025.
The show has six dancers, one reader, and a Detroit house with a remarkable design. Biba’s program notes below describe the experiences of audience members during the show.
I visited the site a few months before the premiere, took notes and photos, and composed music. I made three different but correlated 10-minute pieces that will be played simultaneously on three sides of the center garden. I have also added a fourth sound that will be played back from a portable speaker. During the performance, a dancer walked with the portable speaker and visited the three sites.
Below is a diagram showing a customized playback system for the show. It consists of three portable speakers, one subwoofer, a multi-channel audio interface, and a PC running Ableton Live.
The tracks in the soundtrack album match the labels in the diagram.
The three places, the Library, Living Room, and Kitchen, each have their own music (tracks 3, 4, and 5), and Traveler intermittently visits them with a fourth sound (track 6, an abbreviated version of the original 30-minute file). The first track, named Sans Trou Ni Fin – Part I, is a simulation of all of the sounds playing together. Sans Trou Ni Fin – Part II is played at the last 10 minutes of the piece, where all dancers gather in the center garden. The windows to the garden are open for the last movement, allowing sound to travel with fewer obstructions. Part II also uses a subwoofer to add a low-frequency thump. During the shows, I was cueing the sound from a storage room, doors closed and hidden from the audience.
The composition process consists of combining new and old techniques. SuperCollider codes used in End Credits, Save Point By The Lake, Tree Breezes, and Hold Drum became the starting points for the pieces. I edited the codes so that the resulting sounds are in the same key, tempo, and duration. For the ending, I added a slow version of Mellotron 7. During the rehearsal, the team wanted a 60-second-long transition sound to be played while the audience moved to another room. I quickly assembled the transition sound with a drone from Living Room. I did not upload the transition music.
Sans Trou Ni Fin was a second collaboration with Biba (info about the first collaboration is here). Biba brings out the beauty of the immobile space with the mobile human bodies. Her work has the best “here-and-now” experience a live performance can create. And the performers, Hunter, Ta’Rajee, Matthew, Elizabeth, Aaron, and Chris, delivered it with 200%. I am grateful to work with the crew.
One of the artists, Matthew Piper, wrote a beautiful article about the performance. Read about it here!
https://www.matthewjpiper.com/post/haunting-the-house-notes-on-dance-and-space
As for the documentation, the two performances are now available on Vimeo
Finishing a composition means the beginning of other work. Posting the audio files on the web is the first step in sharing my music, but it is not the only way to showcase the piece’s best aspects. Music for human performers is meant to be experienced in live concerts. Some generative music’s value is in creating and hearing multiple versions. As an electronic music researcher and teacher, presenting the algorithms, codes, and other relevant findings may be as important as sharing the music.
I do the above to present my work to reach a wider audience. In the Presenting section of Computer Music Practice, I provide more concrete examples of my efforts to do so. Electroacoustic performers interested in promoting their works, as well as curators interested in adding electronic music to their events, may benefit from reading the articles in this section.
Live electroacoustic music, the genre of music in which I excel, is not well-known. It has relatively little historical context and resources for evaluation, or I am asking people I don’t know to attend a concert where they may not see the relationship between the performer’s actions and the sound. One way to mitigate this inherent challenge is to provide as many opportunities as possible to listen, create, and play electronic music. It requires more effort, such as running workshops and sharing tools. The entries in the Presenting section are my version of such efforts.
Computer Music Practice (CMP) is an interactive and personal example of computer musicianship. Click each entry in the chart to read and listen to Joo Won Park’s computer music research.