Very few women applicants to electro-music 2008

[Acoustic Interloper]

I think the electro-music events we are looking at are a distillation of distillations of populations. My daughter Sierra wrote the spoken word passages that she allowed me to sample and process for Ordinary Machinery that I performed at EM2008. She is very happy with piece, but is not interested in supplying me with fresh material, because this is, "my thing, not hers" (her words). She is very independent and creative, she just ain't into electro.

My son Jeremy was the chief sound engineer in room 2 at EM2008, and he was my chief collaborator at the Kutztown University Planetarium Computer Music Seminar just the other week, but again, electro is not really his bag of choice. He has a lot going on and has to set his priorities so he gets time to do some things that interest him. No complaints from me there.

They both do nice work.

I am into my fourth year of university teaching. I have had only 1 student in addition to Jeremy sign up to do computer audio related independent study work with me. It was very successful, our work was published at this summer's 2011 Intl. Computer Music Conf. in England, but it was not a performance piece. It was algorithm work, and this student is not a musician, but he did an admirable job getting this project coding started.

Despite Scrabble-to-MIDI gigs where students got to travel and play gigs by playing Scrabble while I mapped the game state to music (or in some cases they did), not one student was at all interested in composing, improvising, or performing computer music in any follow-up format. The music dept. at our university is pretty conservative, and although there is one prof interested in electronic instruments, it's mostly for playing classical pieces. Not one prof from either music or visual arts, where there are 3 people doing video art including one that uses music, attended the on-campus planetarium event where Michael O'Bannon performed his amazing visuals on the dome, and they never respond to my invitation emails inviting them and their students to attend. I am a pretty friendly guy. I just don't think they care about anything that won't directly get them tenure, promotion, or in the case of students, credits and grades.

Dr. Phill Reed of Astronomy, who volunteered the planetarium, and helped with pre-event sound, video, and streaming network checks, and who helped us set up on event night, was an absolute God send of a professor Phill really appreciates what we can do using the planetarium as an immersive electro-music performance environment, especially after the September 7 seminar, thanks to the excellence of the contributing performers and student volunteer for running the stream.

So, there's the distillation of electro-music at Kutztown University going into year four. One gray-haired old-fart comp. sci. prof. who was inspired by talking with mosc and seeing his MIDI banjo in 2005, into integrating my string picking and electronics/software skills after 35 years of keeping them separate. The population space is too disparate to see any real trends. Women are underrepresented in undergrad comp. sci., a situation we are working to improve at KU, but if that is the sample space for likely students to sign up with me, it's not going to help.

Trying to get our female musician friends interested in this, and working with females already attending EM events, are two ways to bolster female performer numbers. With only ~100 people total attending the event this year, it's not too hard to improve percentage points!

[Acoustic Interloper]