When I first encountered Mycenae Alpha, I was immediately grabbed by the music, the very lively and dynamic textures struck a chord in my head. I had always heard compositional ideas swirling around my brain, but had never heard anything like it in the real world. Mycenae Alpha was the first time I heard something that paralleled the music in my head. When I learned about how the music was made, my conception of how to make was transfigured. Western music theory and composition was unrelated to these musical ideas, and computer music software of the time was perpendicular to my creative process. I wasn't able to get access to a UPIC machine so I had to begrudgingly lay those compositional ideas to rest and find a way to get there. Shortly after, building upon my frustration of working with computers as well as inspiration by their possibilities, I spent a year working on software to control computer music synthesis in realtime using joysticks. This was another approach to an interface that enables exploration along the lines of the UPIC. The final chunk was filled when I discovered Pure Data and its graphical structures, allowing me to combine the immediacy of the joystick with the graphical score of the UPIC. This lead to my piece Solitude. With Solitude, I had an interface to play with shapes that generated sound. The shapes control the layered playback of samples and allow flexible quoting of passages from the sampled sounds. Mycenae Alpha showed the expressiveness possible with only synthesized sounds, exposing sonic possibilities only feasible via exploration. By fusing such explorative synthesis with visual sample control like in Solitude, I aim to extend Xenakis' dream as expressed in UPIC and tie it directly into vast body of recorded music to sample from.

Hans-Christoph Steiner spends his time designing interactive software with a focus on human perceptual capabilities, building networks with free software, and composing music with computers. With an emphasis on collaboration, he has worked in many forms, including responsive sound environments, free wireless networks that help build community, musical robots that listen, software environments that allow people to play with math, and a jet-powered fish that you can ride. To further his research, he teaches and works at various media art centers and organizes open, collaborative hacklabs and barcamp conferences. He is currently teaching courses in physical interaction design NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program.