Event

Joe Paradiso and his Massive Modular Synth

Saturday
April 7, 2012

Location

MIT Museum

Description

Join Together Boston and the MIT Museum in celebrating the work of Joe Paradiso, professor at the MIT Media Lab. RSVP now to see Joe talk about his Massive Modular Synthesizer, currently housed at the museum and streaming patches online (http://synth.media.mit.edu/). This will be the last event before the exhibit is removed, so don't miss it!
RSVP for one of 40 spots at the event. You will receive free admission, and reserved seating at the talk. Once the passes are all gone, you may still attend the event by purchasing your own admission to the museum ($8.50), but be advised that there will be standing room only for non-pass holders.
My Past Life as a Teenage Synth Hacker: Building a Huge Modular Synthesizer in the 70s and 80s.
"In this talk, I will describe my modular synthesizer system and discuss its origin in the DIY electronic music scene of the 1970's. My synth is a patchable system composed of circa 125 modules (both analog and digital, most with unique capabilities), for sound production/modification/control. Six commercial keyboard synthesizers are also subsumed into the synthesizer's architecture through multi-parameter interfaces, and the system has recently been augmented with a controller that allows remote online participants to interface with the patch. This device is likely the world's largest home-built and independently designed modular synthesizer system and an excellent example of an earlier period of DIY electronics."

Biographies

Joe Paradiso is an associate professor at the MIT Media Lab, where he directs the Responsive Environments group, which explores how sensor networks augment and mediate human experience, interaction and perception. He received his PhD in physics from MIT in 1981 and a BSEE from Tufts University in 1977. After two years developing precision drift chambers at the Lab for High Energy Physics at ETH in Zurich, he joined the Draper Laboratory in 1984, where his research encompassed spacecraft control systems, image processing algorithms, underwater sonar, and precision alignment sensors for large high-energy physics detectors. He joined the Media Lab in 1994, where his current research interests include embedded sensing systems and sensor networks, wearable and body sensor networks, energy harvesting and power management for embedded sensors, ubiquitous and pervasive computing, localization systems, passive sensor architectures, human-computer interfaces, and interactive media. His early Media Lab work on electronic music controllers is well known, and he has been designing electronic music synthesizers and systems since the mid 1970s. He has also done noncommercial radio for decades (now serving as a faculty advisor to WMBR) and is still probably one of the world's most serious authorities on avant-edged progrock.

Host/Chair: MIT Museum

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