"Point, Line, Cloud" is an outstanding example of the most current computer music, a great listening experience, based on academic research & technologies, with a huge impulse on various scenes and environments beyond all boundaries.


Curtis Roads studied music composition at California Institute of the Arts, the University of California, San Diego (B. A. Summa Cum Laude), and the University of Paris VIII (Ph.D). From 1980 to 1987 he was a researcher in computer music at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He then taught at the University of Naples "Federico II," Harvard University, Oberlin Conservatory, Les Ateliers UPIC (Paris), and the University of Paris VIII.
Roads' Award of Distinction winning composition „Point, Line, Cloud“ features granular and pulsar synthesis, methods he developed for generating sound from acoustical particles. These microsonic particles, pinpoints of sound, remained invisible for centuries, like the quantum world of the quarks, leptons, hadrons, gluons, and bosons. Recent technological advances let composers manipulate this domain.
„Point, Line, Cloud“ is divided into four parts: „Half-Life“, „Tenth Vortex“, „Eleventh Vortex“, and „Sculptor“. „Half-Life“ (1999) explores the birth, replication, mutation, and decay of sound particles. The composition is the fruit of a long period of experimentation with microsound. The piece is divided into two sections: Sonal atoms and Granules. The first version was premiered in May 1998 in the large hall of the Australian National Academy of Music, Melbourne, with sound projection over 28 loudspeakers.
„Half-life“ is dedicated to the memory of composer Ivan Tcherepnin. The source material for „Tenth Vortex“ (2000) and „Eleventh Vortex“ (2001) were created on the same evening. These consisted of granulations of a single sound file: a train of electronic impulses emitted by the Pulsar Generator program.
Curtis Roads: "I divided the „Tenth Vortex“ into nine sections, tuning and editing on a micro time scale. The work proceeded rapidly. I linked the sections into the final version on Christmas Eve 2000. The „Eleventh Vortex“ called for more non-linearity in the macrostructure. I divided it in to over 80 fragments, which resulted in a more complicated compositional puzzle that took months to assemble. The „Eleventh Vortex“ has a more idiosyncratic structure, alternating between coalescence and disintegration."
The final part of „Point, Line, Cloud“ is „Sculptor“.
Curtis Roads: "The source material of „Sculptor“ was a monaural percussion track by the group Tortoise, sent to me for processing by John McEntire. I granulated and filtered this material, which disintegrated the beating drums into a torrent of sound particles scattered across the stereo field. I shaped the river of particle densities, squeezed and stretched the amplitudes of individual particles and particle clouds, carved connected and disconnected frequency zones, and twisted the spatial flow."

A composer, researcher and professor, Curtis Roads (USA) teaches electronic music composition at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His synthesis program Cloud Generator is widely distributed. Together with Alberto de Campo, he recently developed a new program for particle synthesis called PulsarGenerator. They also developed the Creatovox, a new digital synthesizer for expressive performance of particle synthesis. His music appears on CDs produced by the MIT Media Lab, OR, WDR, Mode, and Wergo. Curtis Roads served as Editor of the Computer Music Journal from 1978 to 1989, and Associate Editor 1990-2000. A co-founder of the International Computer Music Association in 1979, Roads´ writings include over a hundred monographs, research articles, reports, and reviews.