Portrait of Jeff Carey
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Jeff Carey

Awards Received

Individual Artist

2020

About the Artist

Jeff Carey is an electronic music composer, performer and curator from Anne Arundel County, Maryland. His music is abstract and sculptural, full of shapes and gesture, colored by noise bursts, percussive glitches and shifting resonance. In performance he incorporates lighting and laser projection to explore the space between visceral and external embodiment of sound. He builds physically controllable custom software synthesis instruments and is interested in exploring immediate and flexible sound production with virtuosity. He collaborates with acoustic musicians, dancers and visual artists to create multidisciplinary performances, multi-performer instrumental systems, installation art works and in improvisational settings.

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Artist's Statement

The compositions submitted use the latest generation of my custom developed physically controlled software instrument design. He has been composing and performing music using variations of this instrument for just over a decade and is interested in creating immediate and flexible sound production with virtuosity. Focusing on the connection of physical effort to computational processes, he explores the use of timbre and gesture as the basis for material development in compositional frameworks. His recent work incorporates lighting and laser projection to explore the space between visceral and external embodiment of sound.

Featured Work

Photos

ctrlKey is a physically controlled software synthesis system. Jeff Carey started developing gestural interfaces for computer music at an artist residency at the Studio for Electro Instrumental Music (STEIM) in Amsterdam during 2002. The latest developments in this instrument development exploring immediate and flexible sound production for virtuosic control of sound synthesis.

Videos

  • Precursor to Hypercube

    See more information about Precursor to Hypercube
    Precursor to Hypercube is an immersive music installation that hovers between a thrill ride and a fever dream. Inspired by the mathematical concept of a 4-dimensional square, known as a hypercube, the composition explores the notion of multi-dimensional music by articulating musical phrases physically and visually.

    Precursor to Hypercube was made with support from the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance Rubys Artist Grant program and Recombinant Media Labs. Premiered at Recombinant Festival 2017.

    Seat-belted into bass activated chairs, holding a panic button, wearing headphones in a darkened room, visitors hear, see and feel a composition that is articulated by synthesized sound, strobe and laser lighting. Heightened by the effect of transducers on the seating, sound transmits through visitors bodies, and the experience becomes totally visceral. Strobes flash and beams of laser light fill the field of vision.
    Medium: Visual music installation
    Year: 2017

  • EXT

    See more information about EXT
    Original composition performed by Jeff Carey on an instrument of his own development. The electro-instrument ‘ctrlKey’ is specialized for interpreting combinatorial logic states of keypresses to select variations of sound synthesis functions. The software was developed in the audio open source programing language SuperCollider 3.
    Medium: Music
    Year: 2019