Cort Lippe appears in his formal photographs to be the serious-minded character he is-a leading figure in the international electro-acoustic music community. He is an assistant professor and director of the Lejaren Hiller Computer Music Studios in the Department of Music, an international nerve center for composition and research in the field of interactive computer music.

That, however, is just part of his story.

	Cort Lippe’s compositions employ traditional instruments whose sounds are manipulated by computer intervention.
	Photo: Stephanie Hamberger

Unlike much of the industrialized, computerized, "anti-music" in vogue today, Lippe's work employs traditional instruments whose sounds tease, seduce, shock and surprise through the use of computer intervention. The instrumental sound becomes something else, or even more of itself. In one such composition, a piano snuffles, snorts, cries, whines like a dog, collapses in defeat, blasts into space, hesitates, is terrorized by what sounds like a T. Rex, then feels its wood split and break as it melts into a long, slow groan.

That's followed by what sounds like a burp.

A critically regarded composer, sound designer and interactive musician, Lippe came to UB after six years at the University of Tokyo and many years before that studying, working and teaching with leading composers.

They include American Larry Austin and G.M. Koenig and Paul Berg at the Netherlands' Instituut voor Sonologie. He spent three years at the Centre d'Etudes de Mathematique et Automatique Musicales, directed by brilliant Greek composer I. Xankis. He since has worked and taught at many of the world's most important facilities in composition and research in music utilizing electronics, notably IRCAM, the world-famous Institut de recherche et coordination acoustique/musique in Paris.

It was at IRCAM that the clandestine and "frightening" side of Lippe's musical personality publicly emerged. It was there that he met fellow composer/researcher Zack Settel, with whom he formed the "Convolution Brothers," an electronic music duo that has appeared in concert in Paris, Japan and the United States, as well as worldwide via live Internet broadcast.

A review of a Convolution Brothers performance by critic Mark Danks speaks of the technical complexity of their compositions, which featured a "real-time convolution of both sound files and their own voices using the ISPW (Integrated Software Processing Framework). One example that raised more than a few eyebrows and laughs was a duet between Mr. Lippe and Mr. Settel, using an Otis Redding song as the convoluted soundfile. The impression they created as they jumped from one sound to the next was that of two kids playing...their performance contained moments of real music and novelty...."

Moments of "real music?"

Lippe's award-winning compositions may sound bizarre and disconcerting to the uninformed ear, but they are nonetheless astonishing and engaging. His instruments include clarinets; flute; oboe; breath; some static; a tuba that sounds at times like a troubled, spitting cow; a trilling harp or two, and assorted keyboards. His work appears on a number of CDs, including many on the CDCM Computer Music Series on Centaur Records. Audio can be found at http://www.music.buffalo.edu/lippe/#recordings.

In differentiating the relationship of his music to the computer as compositional tool, Lippe points out the variety of possible relationships in the world of interactive computer and electronic music today.

"Computer music is a particular field of electronic music," he says, "and interactive computer music is a relatively new area that has grown tremendously since the advent of the personal computer.

"I was, for many years, both an instrumental and electronic music composer. The opportunity to combine the two genres was made possible through the increasing availability and reduced cost of interactive computer programs. So for the last 15 years, I've been able to pursue my creative and research interest in interactive computer music involving live instrumentalists and computers in performance situations."

Lippe says he originally was drawn to computer music because of his particular interest in designing new sounds-something at which computers are very good. He also was interested in exploring algorithmic compositional structures, a compositional activity greatly facilitated by computer simulation.

"Some composers use computers to model or imitate musical instruments," he says. "Some composers of electronic music are interested in replacing instrumentalists with machines by modeling human performance. I'm not interested in replacing either instruments or performers.

"After all," he says, "musicians, with their years of experience on instruments that have often developed over centuries, offer a rich musical and cultural resource for me as a composer-even as a composer working with computer technology. I work to create an interactive environment that articulates sonic design and compositional structures in some sort of interactive relationship with live performers."

Early computer composers had to produce tapes and then drive them-sometimes hundreds of miles-to a computer lab at Princeton or Columbia, where they could be converted. As a result, says Lippe, their task was complicated, enormously time-consuming, expensive and very, very difficult. There were, in fact, very few composers working in the field.

"Then in the '70s, we could work on smaller computers in real time, but had no ability to do complex algorithmic computation," he says. "More useful systems were developed later, but in small numbers.

"Today, we work in real time on highly portable computers-I usually compose on a laptop, for instance-that can accommodate very complex software systems. The change is amazing. Music composition is available to the masses. It's produced a lot of new work, one subset of which is the 'anti-performance' composition that denies the somatic side of music. That's usually done by musicians in their 20s," he says.

"There's no movement, no expression, one performer-not very interesting to me. The ability to freely collect and manipulate sound in complex ways has turned up some intriguing work, however."

Lippe continues his compositional work at UB while instructing graduate and undergraduate music-composition students in the use of cutting-edge software developed for digital audio and electro-acoustic composition.