"For those bored with free jazz and straight-ahead classicism, Interfaces opens a doorway, through which it plunges headfirst." — Ken Micallef, JazzTimes [Link]
"For fans of free jazz and electronic ideas, it just doesn’t get any better than this, as Morris and company illustrate an ultra creative vision and an improvisation approach that no one could parallel." — Take Effect [Link]
"…adds a perpendicular level to his music, as if he were not just revealing a new music but also a new language.… On some tracks he works with the intimacy of a surgeon… A remarkably powerful work of the contemporary avant-garde." — Doklands [Link]
"What we sometimes consider an extravagant experiment today will tomorrow become a natural and quite familiar tool for many. Jeff Morris, this scout for the music of the future, loves to go far ahead." — Jazz-квадрат (translated from Russian) [Link]
"A
"Jeff Morris's piece was one of the most intriguing we received, and Tim was keen to spend some time looking at the issues it raised… a delight to play and very well written… His interest in the piece was clear by the extraordinary amount of homework he had done…" — Tim Jackson, Composition Today [Link]
"Morris uses technology more as an instrument unto itself by using his own skills in improvisation to respond to the performances of the music as it progresses. In this respect, the music is a natural outgrowth of third stream jazz.…a rather intriguing exploration as Morris deconstructs and reconstructs our expectations for what sound and music can be." — Steven Kennedy, Cinemusical [Link]
"This is an attractively wild collection of genuinely improvisatory electronic music."—Stuart Kremsky, Mr. Stu's Record Room [Link]
"Highly advanced music for jazz aficionados and an audience way beyond." — Andreas Rathmann, Nitestylez (Germany) [Link]
“…visitors heard music shaped by their own movements.” — Suzanne Volmer, Sculpture Magazine.
"The sensuality of sound and its behaviour is celebrated here" … "Convincing work that foregrounds first-principles in a manner that is creative and engaging (simple systems/complex music)" — New Interfaces in Musical Expression international conference
"Jeff Morris’s improvisation, while more firmly rooted in academic electronic music, was… evocative with its wide variety of sound sources and quick pace." — Jacob Gotlib, Array (International Computer Music Association), reviewing the Bellingham Electronic Arts Festival (BEAF) [Link]
"Because of [his] manipulations of samples, electronically produced sounds don't come across as like something alien in combination with a violin but serve as complicated contra point." — Roman Stolyar, The Improvisor, reviewing the International Society of Improvised Music (ISIM) conference [Link]
"…an interesting and
"…brought an
“His work is fascinating. His music responds to my painting movement and we create a ‘loop’ of sound and color together.” — April Zanne Johnson, interviewed by
"Quite interesting and, dare I say, entertaining" — Conference on Computation, Communication, Aesthetics & X (xCoAx)
Other Media Mentions
CODAmagazine: Technology + Art IV (2017) — The Collected Solo Piano Works of Ferin Martino, As Conjured by Your Presence displayed first among featured works. [Link]
Newsroom (2017). Interviewed in Colby Conway, “Does Productivity Suffer from New and Creative Technologies?” [Link]
The Iris (2017). International Association of Synaesthetes, Artists, and Scientists. Interview with collaborator April Zanne Johnson features my work with her first among others. [Link]
CODAmagazine: Interactive Art II (2017) — Sonic Glimpses selected among featured works. [Link]
CODAmagazine: Light as Art IV (2017) — GemTones selected among featured works. [Link]
Narrabase — content | code | process: Authoring Electronic Literature (2016). Electronic Literature Organization conference preview features Tell the Story first among all exhibition entries. [Link]
Synthtopia, "No Input Mixing Tutorial" takes a large excerpt from my PerfTech knowledgebase article on the subject. Reader comments include, "One of the coolest things I’ve seen on Synthtopia!" [Link]
Mentions in Scholarly Literature
My work has provided useful definitions and models for live and emergent performance practices appearing in leading fora including the International Computer Music Conference and the New Interfaces for Musical Expression conference.
International scholars from a variety of fields have used my work, including improvisation, liveness, posthumanism, computational creativity, networked performance, user interface design, informatics, and engineering.
Additionally, my work has been used as key examples along with seminal works from John Cage/Merce Cunningham’s circle (Behrman, Tudor), the Sonic Arts Union (Ashley, Berhman, Lucier), and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Collins), and Grammy and Pulitzer awardees (Danger Mouse and Reich, respectively), as well as writings by Kim Cascone (collaborator of David Lynch and Thomas Dolby).
Details:
- Brandtsegg (Norwegian University of Science and Technology), et al., “Live Convolution with Time-Varying Filters.” Applied Sciences 2018, 8(1). [Link]
- My work is used to define live sampling before tracing its development from Mauricio Kagel (Cologne Conservatory) to Michel Waisvisz (artistic director, STEIM). (p. 3)
- Kollias (Université de Paris VIII), “Overviewing a Field of Self-Organising Music Interfaces: Autonomous, Distributed, Environmentally Aware, Feedback Systems” in Joint Proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Intelligent User Interfaces (ACM IUI) 2018 Workshops. [Link]
- Takes a quarter-page to outline my feedback instrument model. (pp. 3–4)
- Petrucelli, John T. “Beyond the Sound Barrier: Improvisation, Repertoire and Narrativity in the Wayne Shorter Quartet, 2000–2015.” PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2018. [Link]
- “To borrow a term deployed by Jeffrey Morris, by highlighting the selected live recordings through their presentation on an album, we are also made aware of the disappearance of whole live concerts. Morris states that, ‘[T]he liveness of the original moment is highlighted through its disappearance in the mediatized version.’” (pp. 125–126)
- Omry, Keren (Stanford University). “Bodies and Digital Discontinuities: Posthumanism, Fractals, and Popular Music in the Digital Age.” Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 43, No. 1, Digital Science Fiction (March 2016), pp. 104–122. [Link]
- “Where Jeff Morris. . . claims that ‘[h]uman values of presence and authenticity can allow us to find ways to be human despite the mediation of so many screens between us,’ I would go further and suggest that in the twenty-first century this mediation rather perversely ensures our humanity, and this shift makes us posthuman.” (p. 112)
- Pairs my Weblogmusic project with six-time Grammy winner DJ Danger Mouse for examples: “Although unprecedented and ground-breaking, ThruYOU is not the only example of digitally mediated collaborations that alter the scope and nature of the author, composer, and listener. Notable examples are Weblogmusic (see Morris) and DJ Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album (2004).” (p. 119)
- Ramsay and Paradiso (MIT), “GroupLoop: A Collaborative, Network-Enabled Audio Feedback Instrument.” In Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME), Baton Rouge, LA, USA, May 31–June 3, 2015, pp. 251–254. [Link]
- Pairs my work with Nicolas Collins (Editor-in-Chief, Leonardo Music Journal (MIT Press) and chair, Sound Department, School of the Art Institute of Chicago): “Composers like Jeff Morris and Nicolas Collins have created platforms that inject a range of effects, manage the mixing of multiple acoustic paths. . . ” (p. 251)
- Pairs my work with Steve Reich (Pulitzer-winning composer): “. . . complex and time-varying acoustic systems like those described in Reich and Morris.” (p. 252)
- Battey, Brett (De Montfort University). “Creative Computing and the Generative Artist.” International Journal of Creative Computing, Volume 1, Issue 2, 2016, pp. 154–173. [Link]
- Lists award from the Fresh Minds Festival I created among notable honors. This paper presents the awarded work and uses it to propose a model for creating generative art. (p. 1)
- Weaver, Kaitlyn. “Entering a Musical Haze: How Music Festivals Have Created Their Own Culture.” BA thesis, California Polytechnic State University, 2014. [Link]
- “Jeffrey Morris says a quote that I believe sum up the answers to the question ‘Why live?’. . . ‘Because some things are meaningful only when experienced live. . . ’” (p. 25)
- Blain, Martin (Manchester Metropolitan University). “Issues in instrumental design: the ontological problem (opportunity?) of ‘liveness’ for a laptop ensemble.” Journal of Music, Technology & Education 6, no. 2 (2013): 191–206. [Link]
- Groups my work with Caleb Kelly (née Stuart, University of New South Wales) and Kim Cascone (David Lynch, Thomas Dolby): ‘. . . key issues that have challenged the spectator when attempting to engage with laptop performances. For a further discussion of some of these issues see Stuart [20], Morris [13] and Cascone [4].” (p. 67)
- McKinney and Collins (University of Sussex). “An Interactive 3D Network Music Space.” In Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME), 2013, pp. 400–405. [Link]
- Cites my work together with Pedro Rebelo (Director of Research, School of Creative Arts, Queen’s University Belfast) and duo Bodycoder (University of Huddersfield): “Controllers and interfaces are a popular solution for computer musicians to reestablish or reimagine the performance characteristics of traditional instrumentalists [25, 28, 38].” (p. 400)
- Ferguson, et al. (University of Technology, Sydney). ”A corpus-based method for controlling guitar feedback.” In Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, 2013, pp. 541–546. [Link]
- Uses my feedback instrument model and definitions as a basis for the discussion to follow. (p. 541)
- Ikeshiro. “Studio Composition: Live audiovisualisation using emergent generative systems.” PhD diss., Goldsmiths, University of London, 2013. [Link]
- Lists his award from the Fresh Minds Festival I created among notable honors. (p. 13)
- Holopainen, “Self-organised sound with autonomous instruments: Aesthetics and experiments.” PhD diss., University of Oslo, 2012. [Link]
- Groups my work with Alvin Lucier (Wesleyan University) and Douglas Repetto (Columbia University): “As an example, Morris (2007) mentions the process of starting with white noise and iteratively applying noise reduction. Other examples of such a process, including Alvin Lucier’s I am sitting in a room, will be discussed below… A striking example of the importance of choosing an appropriate network topology in feedback-based art is provided by the electronic sculpture crash and bloom by Douglas Irving Repetto (2004).” (p. 164)
- Dedicates a full paragraph to my work, following a single paragraph discussing such major figures as Agostino Di Scipio (Conservatory of Naples, IRCAM, Sibelius Academy), Nicolas Collins (Editor-in-Chief, Leonardo Music Journal (MIT Press) and chair, Sound Department, School of the Art Institute of Chicago), Robert Ashley (Director, Mills College Center for Contemporary Music; Whitney Biennial), David Behrman (Mills College, Merce Cunningham Dance Company), David Tudor (Director, Merce Cunningham Dance Company), and Ron Kuivila (Wesleyan University): “The frequency shifting and pitch shifting techniques as described above have been used in a musical instrument by Morris (2007), where the purpose is not to avoid audible feedback but to impose pitch contours on the sound. Morris also experimented with many other techniques. . . ” (p. 166)
- McKinney and Collins (University of Sussex), “Liveness in network music performance.” In Proceeding of Live Interfaces: Performance, Art, Music, Leeds, UK (2012). [Link]
- Cites my work together with Pedro Rebelo (Director of Research, School of Creative Arts, Queen’s University Belfast) and duo Bodycoder (University of Huddersfield): “Electronic music performers have often sought to enhance perceived performer liveness through the usage of controllers and interfaces, engaging the audience by recapturing the role of a traditional instrumentalist [14, 15, 25].” (p. 1)
- Graugaard, Lars (Aalborg University Esbjerg). “Providing Rhythm Patterns in Sound Synthesis.” In Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference, 2016. [Link]
- Pairs my work with Eric Lyon (Virginia Tech): “Very few reports on generalized integration of independent rhythm structures into sound synthesis are available. In (Lyon 1997) an approach is described that incorporates rhythm matrices into an audio processing schemata for separate processing of each sonic event. A more elaborate work on pattern generation is described in (Morris 2004), but sound synthesis is soundfile playback.” (p. 1)