(Grinstead 128 is in the inside hallway going north from the foyer to Hart Recital Hall.)
- Seth Andrew Davis
MacGyver’s Swiss Army Knife
(20+10 mins) - Ryan Gaston
Legitimacy and Its Alternatives: Unpacking Donald Buchla’s Contrasting Design Ideologies
(20+10 mins) - Teresa Díaz de Cossio
Resonant Fragments
(20+10 mins) - Jiayue Cecilia Wu
Democratizing Electric Sound: Open Futures through OER and Open-Source Tools in Music Technology Education
(20+10 mins)
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Seth Andrew Davis
MacGyver’s Swiss Army Knife
: Against Gear & Tech Fetishism and Towards a DIY/Practical Approach towards Music Tech Pedagogy
MacGyver’s Swiss Army Knife is a historical deep-dive into a range of approaches toward performance and recording that have gone against the standards of the time period in which these works were created, while raising questions around tech fetishism, music tech pedagogy, industry standards, and self-reliance in creative pursuits. Looking into artists as wide ranging as Bruce Springsteen, Pavement, The Microphones, Car Seat Headrest, Steve Lacy, and many more, this presentation and paper highlights artists who have made influential works through risk taking, self-reliance, and technological useage that were considered ill-advised. These approaches are highlighted to show practitioners, educators, and students that other approaches are possible.
Seth Andrew Davis is a performer, composer, improviser, technologist, scholar and educator from the Kansas City area. Davis is involved in the improvised music/free improvisation, experimental, and electronic music scenes in Kansas City. Davis’ music runs the gamut of compositions for orchestral and chamber ensembles, performances with free-jazz/free improvised music ensembles and large groups, solo performance, collaborations with dancers and video artists, and the design and collaboration of autonomous and interactive artificial life agents and 3D environments. Davis is a co-founder of Mother Brain Records. In 2021, Davis co-founded EMAS (Extemporaneous Music & Arts Society) along with Evan Verploegh. EMAS is an improvised music & arts collective based in Kansas City that is dedicated to advancing creative work in Kansas City. Davis currently is an adjunct instructor at the University of Central Missouri teaching Applied Music Technology and at the Kansas City Art Institute teaching music technology courses.
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Ryan Gaston
Legitimacy and Its Alternatives: Unpacking Donald Buchla’s Contrasting Design Ideologies
In the late 1970s—already over 15 years into his career as an instrument designer—Donald F. Buchla believed that he and others were only on the cusp of creating so-called “legitimate,” “real,” and “useful” instruments.
In part, he saw his own work up until that point as a series of attempts to produce highly generalized instruments: research platforms through which truly satisfying and meaningful performer-instrument linkages could be discovered. They aimed to sidestep the development time and technical skill required to design new instruments, granting composers and researchers a meta-toolkit for rapidly testing ideas about human-instrument interaction. But to Buchla, their adaptability came at the cost of “legitimacy”—hindering the possibility that they could be broadly adopted in new musical literature.
In this presentation, we will explore how the duality of “legitimacy” vs. “generality” manifests in two Buchla designs from c. 1980: the Model 360 Programmable Octal Signal Source and the Touché, developed in collaboration with D. N. “Lynx” Crowe and David Rosenboom, respectively. At a glance, these devices seem quite different; the 360 was a module for the 300 Series system, while Touché was a self-contained keyboard instrument. However, internally, they each use much of the same generative hardware, presented to the end user in quite different forms.
We will discuss the commonalities and differences in their hardware and software design, working toward a sense of what Buchla considered a “generalized” vs. a “real” instrument. Finally, we will briefly discuss how the 360 and Touché paved the way for later works that approached the question of “legitimacy” from a different angle.
Throughout, we will present newly-recorded video and audio of the only known functional 360 and Touchés, currently housed at the Buchla Archives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
Ryan Gaston (b. 1990) is a performer/composer, instrument designer, and writer who makes devices and music that combine sonic elements of noise, free improvisation, and experimental electroacoustic music.
Gaston’s creative work explores temporal perception by using chaotic, unpredictable electronic structures as the conceptual basis for both electronic instruments and musical compositions. His writing focuses on the history and techniques of experimental electronic music and electronic musical instrument design, with a special focus on American west coast trends in the second half of the 20th century.
Gaston holds an MFA in Music Composition and Experimental Sound Practices from the California Institute of the Arts (2016) as well as a BA in Music Composition from Hendrix College (2012). His writing and instruments have been featured at the New Interfaces for Musical Expression conference, the Canadian Electroacoustic Community’s eContact!, the Southern California Institute of Architecture’s Offramp, the CalArts Digital Arts Expo, and elsewhere. He is the editor of and frequent contributor to Signal, an online publication managed by California-based electronic musical instrument retailer Perfect Circuit. Since 2023, Gaston has also worked closely with The Buchla Archives, an organization dedicated to the preservation and documentation of the life and work of instrument designer, composer, and sound artist Donald F. Buchla.
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Teresa Díaz de Cossio
Resonant Fragments
Alida Vázquez and the Sonic Archive of Modernism
This presentation explores the life and work of Alida Vázquez (1924–2015), a Mexican composer whose practice in electronic music and education traversed Mexico City and New York during the second half of the twentieth century. Through a blend of feminist historiography, decolonial lenses, and creative practice, the project reconstructs how Vázquez mobilized technology, pedagogy, and community to articulate new forms of authorship and belonging within and beyond institutional frameworks such as the Columbia–Princeton Electronic Music Center. Drawing on archival research, oral histories, and performative re-engagements with Vázquez’s materials, scores, and recordings, the paper examines how her work illuminates broader questions about gender, migration, and the politics of modernism in electronic music. Rather than treating her as a peripheral figure in electronic music, I frame her creative practice as a transnational site of resistance, where tape, sound, and voice function as media of care and self-determination.
The research unfolds through listening as a historiographic method, one that activates the archive through sound-making and performance. By re-sounding fragments of Vázquez’s electronic works alongside new compositions that respond to her materials, the project bridges scholarship and artistic inquiry, proposing that the act of listening can itself serve as a form of critical recovery and feminist world-building. Ultimately, this paper situates Vázquez within a constellation of women and diasporic artists whose use of electronic media reshaped the sonic imaginaries of the Americas, offering a decolonial re-mapping of electronic music history grounded in resonance, care, and transnational exchange.
Teresa Díaz de Cossio is a flutist and active member of in^set, a flexible chamber ensemble committed to creation, improvisation, experimentation, and collaboration. She has performed with Los Tigres del Norte and has been awarded fellowships at the Banff Centre, the Darmstadt Summer Institute, Curating Diversity (Sounds Now, Finland), the Density Fellows program, Boulanger Initiative and the Future of Music Faculty Fellowship (Cleveland Institute of Music, Sphinx Foundation). As a scholar, Teresa has presented her research on composer Alida Vázquez at Unsung Stories: Women at Columbia’s Computer Music Center and the International Musicological Society in Greece. Her work has been published in Radical Sounds of Latin America and in the Musicians’ Migratory Patterns series by Routledge. Teresa holds a Doctor of Musical Arts from the University of California San Diego. She is currently a co-producer of Neofonía, Festival de Música Nueva in Ensenada—a space for exploration and collaboration across communities—and teaches at the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California. She is committed to making meaningful contributions through both her artistic practice and scholarly work.
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Jiayue Cecilia Wu
Democratizing Electric Sound: Open Futures through OER and Open-Source Tools in Music Technology Education
Open Futures through OER and Open-Source Tools in Music Technology Education
This presentation examines the ways Open Educational Resources (OER) and open-source tools can expand access to music technology education, promoting equity, inclusivity, and sustainability in higher education. Developed from a course at the University of Colorado and funded by Colorado State, the course replaces expensive commercial software and instruments with open-source platforms—including VCV Rack, GitHub-based coding modules, and accessible digital audio workstations. With support from the Colorado Department of Higher Education, CMS/ATMI, and the NAMM Foundation, this initiative illustrates how open-source ecosystems can empower students from diverse and underrepresented backgrounds to explore sound design and modular synthesis without financial barriers.
In addition to its pedagogical impact, this work connects to the presenter’s research on embodied sonic practice, contemplative media arts, and equitable technology design. Evaluations of student learning through both quantitative metrics and qualitative feedback show high engagement and creative fluency in modular synthesis, as well as a strengthened understanding of audio signal flow, sound design, and sound transformation. Students reported strong satisfaction with the course, and 77% indicated they plan to continue exploring electroacoustic music beyond the classroom. Pilot results suggest learning outcomes are comparable to or exceed those of traditional software-based courses, with an estimated annual student savings of $245,567.
By integrating artistic research with inclusive teaching strategies, this project demonstrates that open-source sound technologies can serve as both creative tools and research instruments, bridging theory, practice, and social impact. A public web platform has been developed and maintained to make course materials widely accessible, supporting the goals of open education and fostering a global community that values diversity, creative agency, and technological resilience.
Dr. Jiayue Cecilia Wu (AKA 武小慈) is a scholar, composer, vocalist, multimedia technologist, audio engineer, and meditation teacher. Originally from Beijing, she earned a B.Sc. in Design and Engineering in 2000 and spent over a decade as a professional musician, producer, and consultant with EMI Records, Universal Music Group, and Shazam Entertainment. In 2010, she released her original album of spiritual electronic music, Clean Your Heart. She later earned an M.A. in Music, Science, and Technology from Stanford University’s CCRMA (2013) and a Ph.D. in Media Arts and Technology from UC Santa Barbara (2018), studying computer music with Dr. Curtis Roads. Dr. Wu’s work bridges music technology, culture, and healing. Her music and multimedia projects have been performed and exhibited across Asia, the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia, South Africa, and Brazil, including at the National Museum of China, AES, IEEE, and the Denver Art Museum, which houses her piece Mandala in its permanent collection. She has published 27 peer-reviewed journal articles, three book chapters, two books, and created over 100 multimedia compositions, installations, and exhibitions. Her honors include recognition as a U.S. National Academy of Sciences Sackler Fellow, an AES grant recipient, fellowships and awards from the California State Assembly, Stanford University, and the University of California, and fellowships and grants from the College Music Society, NAMM, and the State of Colorado. Currently, she is a tenure-track Assistant Professor and Graduate Program Director at the University of Colorado Denver’s College of Arts and Media, President of the Association for Technology in Music Instruction (ATMI), Chair of the AES DEI Committee, and a Board Director of the International Computer Music Association, shaping global dialogue on music, technology, and social impact.
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