ABSTRACT
The talk will showcase a group of different electronic musical instruments created by the author over the last decade, and the software that
brings them to life. It will cover the instruments' technical features and how they closely relate to their musical capabilities and foster new music performance paradigms.
Issues related to human-machine interaction such as interface complexity, data feedback and personalization of interaction will be discussed. The challenges of working with ephemeral technologies to create new musical interfaces will be addressed as well.
BIOGRAPHY
Tomás Henriques is a composer, inventor and educator. His music includes pieces for acoustic instruments, both large and small formations, as well as music for electronic and mixed media. They have been performed at international Festivals, including - Musica Viva Festival, the Festival Synthèse, the Logos Festival, the North American New Music Festival, the June in Buffalo Contemporary Music Festival, the Gulbenkian Contemporary Music Festival, the 3rd Practice Electronic Music Festival, the Art Series Now Festival, etc.
Dr. Henriques' creative research is wide in scope. He won First Prize at the 2010 Margaret Guthman Musical Instrument Design Competition, with the invention of the “Double Slide Controller,” a slide trombone-like electronic instrument. His "Sonik Spring", a hand-held interface that translates force and 3D hand-wrist motion information into sound and visual data, was granted two full US patents. From 2010-13 he was the Principal Investigator of the “See-Through-Sound” international research project, aimed at helping visually impaired individuals ‘see,’ using sonic cues. Recently Dr. Henriques teamed up with Yamaha engineers to develop a 52.1 surround sound system installed at Ciminelli Hall, for which he also created the software for complex panning of multi-channel sound.
Dr. Henriques teaches theory, composition and electronic music at Buffalo State where he is the coordinator of the program in Digital Music Production.