Curd Duca

Curd Duca (born 14 March 1955) is an Austrian musician, composer and producer of electronic music.

Life and Work

He has played (1982–1991) in the experimental groups "Auch wenn es seltsam klingen mag / even though it may sound strange)","8 ODER 9 / 8 OR 9" and "Skin" (accordion, guitar, vocals, percussion). Starting in 1992, he has been working mainly on solo projects with electronic instruments (analog and digital synthesizers, computer).

Curd Duca is known for his work with audio samples (i.e. snippets of digitized audio material) that get altered, cut-up and "re-contextualised" (cut-up artist - Spin Magazine). The audio is taken from analog sources (acoustic instruments, orchestras, vocals, noise, bird calls, et al.) and mostly used without beats. Rhythmic structures are created, originally by loops, more recently by micro-cuts and improvisation with parameters of "granular synthesis". From 1996, his albums were released on the experimental/techno label Mille Plateaux.

Genre / style (All-Music.com database): instrumental, electronic, lounge, ambient, sample-based, contemporary, experimental, clicks & cuts, cinematic, electro-acoustic ...

IRCAM

IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique, or Institute for Research and Coordination Acoustic / Music in English) is a French institute for science about music and sound and avant garde electro-acoustical art music. It is situated next to, and is organisationally linked with, the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The extension of the building was designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers.

A centre for musical research

Several concepts for electronic music and audio processing have emerged at IRCAM. John Chowning pioneered work on FM synthesis at IRCAM, and Miller Puckette originally wrote Max at IRCAM in the mid-1980s, which would become the real-time audio processing graphical programming environment Max/MSP. Max/MSP has subsequently become a widely used tool in electroacoustic music. Many of the techniques associated with spectralism, such as analyses based on fast Fourier transforms, were made practical by technological contributions at IRCAM. For instance, researchers at IRCAM have developed a special microphone capable of isolating each of the cello's four strings for separate amplification or electronic treatment. Along with tools for sound synthesis and analysis, IRCAM has played an instrumental role in developing programs for visualization of musical form with the creation of Open Music, a Lisp-based visual programming language.