Jason Freeman

Freeman got a chance to work with advanced music technology while still in high school. In the 12th grade, Freeman created an outdoor installation on a budget of around $200 and help from "friends and favors." He wrote a program to create music from the i nput of borrowed motion sensors and a temperature probe. The motion of passerbys triggered the sensors, and thus the music.

The summer after his freshman year, Freeman worked on a similar, though better-funded project at M.I.T called "Brain Opera." Freeman was glad to learn how "to work with $1 million of equipment," he said. "It was a great experience." But he also learned some of the hazards of working with such technology. "The primary purpose was to display cool technology," he said. "So much of electronic music is gimmicky."

Freeman has primarily been composing acoustic music for the past year. However, he is now working on a piece for "midi" (musical instrument digital interface) grand piano, in which a performer and a computer, controlled by Freeman's commands, will pl ay a duet. He is also considering creating another piece for a Yale dance group that uses motion to trigger music. "Hopefully in the next few months," he said, "I'll get in touch with these companies and possibly get some donations."

Freeman's recent digital pieces all combine live performance with the digital component. "I'm not interested any more in writing purely electronic music where everything is predetermined," he said. "Performing that kind of music is absurd. You dim the lig ht, press play, the audience hears the piece, you raise the lights, and they applaud." He prefers combining live performers with digital music, in which case, "every performance is different because of the interpretations the performers make."

Freeman believes that computers offer countless new possibilities for music. "A computer directing a piano can play dozens of notes at once, or seven or eight rhythms on top of each other," Freeman said. "It provides a certain level of complexity that you can't get with any number of human pianists."

But in other respects, Freeman said, computers are limited. "Right now the biggest limitation is that the computer is never going to think and feel and interpret music the way a real human being [performing on an instrument] can," he said. "The difficulty is getting that human element in digital music."