Ian Baxter
Between 2012-2020 I completed my PhD at the University "Sonification as a means to generative music"
My music making began with guitar lessons and an apprenticeship in several high school rock bands. My earliest experiments in composing were making collages of guitar tracks with my Amiga 500 and 8-bit sampler and carrying out primitive overdubbing experiments by linking 2 tape decks together. This became serious around 1999 with a birthday present of a 4-track recorder. I started to produce cassettes of music in a post-rock vein (under the influence of Mogwai and David Pajo's M projects) fascinated by the facility to layer many sounds together. Around 2001 I was blown away by the discovery of Brian Eno and his ambient experiments (particularly Discreet Music and Music for Airports) and picking up on his influences led me to the world of experimental music, including Cage, Feldman, Reich and others. Whilst ostensibly studying sociology, I was frequently in the music department library reading books on experimental music and look at Stockhausen scores.
My musical interest shifted away from traditional rock instrumentation and towards creating gradually changing soundscapes made with sound materials assembled and manipulated in the studio. The fascination with layering remained but the source sounds had changed. Parallel to this I had a career in several rock bands, most notably playing drums in The Yell. We toured in transit vans, played dingy venues and even recorded in a real studio down in London. I have since retired from rock and roll.
My earliest efforts almost exclusively went for instrumental sources such as guitars and other acoustic instruments but my palette now looks to other sources of material such as field recordings, electronics and software. I don't associate myself with electronica or dance music, despite using a computer for the majority of my work. I see my relationship to electronics and technology in the tradition of what Thom Holmes has called "soldering composers", building my own equipment and devices that hark back to an era when composers got their hands dirty with wires and circuits or more recently, computer code.
Despite some trepidation, I have alighted on sound artist as an appropriate definition of what I do and have also used experimental to describe my music after Cage's definition - that is, composing music where the outcome is not necessarily foreseen. There is usually some element to my work that has been arrived at by chance and this is at the heart of my research into sonification - using it as a determinant of chance.
My music has made it into the public domain by traditional (and increasingly anachronistic) album style releases, concerts and gallery installation and I have enjoyed several collaborations with other artists, including poets, film makers and visual artists and dancers.
Supervisors: Dr Adrian Moore
My music making began with guitar lessons and an apprenticeship in several high school rock bands. My earliest experiments in composing were making collages of guitar tracks with my Amiga 500 and 8-bit sampler and carrying out primitive overdubbing experiments by linking 2 tape decks together. This became serious around 1999 with a birthday present of a 4-track recorder. I started to produce cassettes of music in a post-rock vein (under the influence of Mogwai and David Pajo's M projects) fascinated by the facility to layer many sounds together. Around 2001 I was blown away by the discovery of Brian Eno and his ambient experiments (particularly Discreet Music and Music for Airports) and picking up on his influences led me to the world of experimental music, including Cage, Feldman, Reich and others. Whilst ostensibly studying sociology, I was frequently in the music department library reading books on experimental music and look at Stockhausen scores.
My musical interest shifted away from traditional rock instrumentation and towards creating gradually changing soundscapes made with sound materials assembled and manipulated in the studio. The fascination with layering remained but the source sounds had changed. Parallel to this I had a career in several rock bands, most notably playing drums in The Yell. We toured in transit vans, played dingy venues and even recorded in a real studio down in London. I have since retired from rock and roll.
My earliest efforts almost exclusively went for instrumental sources such as guitars and other acoustic instruments but my palette now looks to other sources of material such as field recordings, electronics and software. I don't associate myself with electronica or dance music, despite using a computer for the majority of my work. I see my relationship to electronics and technology in the tradition of what Thom Holmes has called "soldering composers", building my own equipment and devices that hark back to an era when composers got their hands dirty with wires and circuits or more recently, computer code.
Despite some trepidation, I have alighted on sound artist as an appropriate definition of what I do and have also used experimental to describe my music after Cage's definition - that is, composing music where the outcome is not necessarily foreseen. There is usually some element to my work that has been arrived at by chance and this is at the heart of my research into sonification - using it as a determinant of chance.
My music has made it into the public domain by traditional (and increasingly anachronistic) album style releases, concerts and gallery installation and I have enjoyed several collaborations with other artists, including poets, film makers and visual artists and dancers.
Supervisors: Dr Adrian Moore
less
InterestsView All (6)
Uploads
PhD Thesis http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/27591/ by Ian Baxter
Papers by Ian Baxter