Turbulence Commission: Quartet With Pyramid Scheme by Jordan Topiel Paul, Eric Laska, Richard Kamerman, Reed Evan Rosenberg:

Quartet With Pyramid Scheme is a streaming online sound installation whose audio content is collected through a sixteen-week pyramid scheme structure. Every two weeks, a new set of participants (recruited by prior participants) submits sound samples that the quartet will selectively work into the stream. The samples are played continuously in unpredictable variations through a Max/MSP patch. By the end of the process, 512 participants will have been asked to contribute.

Quartet With Pyramid Scheme is a 2011 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. for its Turbulence website. It was made possible with funding from the Jerome Foundation.

BIOGRAPHIES

JORDAN TOPIEL PAUL is a musician, artist and elementary educator based out of Queens, NY. Originally an improvising percussionist, he continues to explore improvisation in his current work with sound installation and electronic media. His recent pieces have involved collaborative planning and production, field recordings, site-specificity, FM and Internet transmission, Max/MSP programming and indeterminate processes.

ERIC LASKA is a New York-based musician. Examples from recent work focus on the proliferation of sounds from localized material processes, the arrangement of improvised music for extended periods of time, and composing for electro-acoustic music based on “back-end” principles such as power consumption. In addition he is part of the Internet surf club “Double Happiness.”

RICHARD KAMERMAN’S artistic interest is aimed foremost on the task of magnification. Small sounds, small gestures — made large. Inconsequential events — made important. The vast difference made to a narrative by a small change in focus. Room acoustics, microphone/pickup placement, and amplification are often very important to his live construction of sound, where he places great weight on the embracing of unintended consequences - e.g. errors in translation/format conversion, bursts of feedback, power supply failures.

REED EVAN ROSENBERG is an American multidisciplinary artist working primarily in sound. He programs various digital instruments for each specific project on which he embarks, encompassing the areas of improvised electronic music, extreme computer music, and installation art. Recent projects include an in depth study of chaotic synthesis using Boris Chirikov’s “Standard Map,” systems that hack and trouble auto-tune and phase vocoding, and a musical system using the boids algorithm which simulates the flocking patterns of birds and was most famously implemented in the CG of Jurassic Park.

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