John Grey

I started playing piano when I was seven, after listening to my grandmother play by ear for years. I studied music at UCLA where I played analog Moog for awhile before discovering how to get sounds from a computer. That was in the 1960s. Soon after, Roger Shepard (inventor of that tone) became my mentor and enabled me to use the Stanford AI Lab to play with digital sound creation and do psychoacoustic research on it. Then that turned into cofounding CCRMA, the computer music center at Stanford, where I started digitally sampling orchestral instruments and engaged in analysis and resynthesis. It was an adventure of exploring what new, compelling, and naturalistic, musical timbres could be digitally created. We were also leading the way with digital recording and production technologies. This also helped in the development of FM synthesis, and presented opportunities to hang with Pierre Boulez and Luciano Berio to help shape the founding of IRCAM. Lately, I have been coproducing vocal arrangements and creating solo piano pieces with Ableton Live and an assortment of sample libraries.

Tags