Dobro Improv (2026)
Dobro, amplification, and electronics
“Dobro improv” (2026) is a quick video demonstrating an ongoing project of mine, where I augment and amplify my dobro with circuits, a laptop running Pure Data, and guitar equipment, in an effort to join my interest in noise with my passion for traditional United States music. There will be more to come in the future!
“Composition for Minim😈😈g M😈del 🅱️” (2025)
Computer music
“Composition for Minim😈😈g M😈del 🅱️” (2025) showcases a Pure Data Minimoog Emulator that I coded. Imagine a digital octopus playing a synthesizer; I created many tentacles to control the synth’s knobs, and suggested certain musical nudges by mathematically weighting the tentacles’ random decision-making process. Since I have no pets, sometimes this synthesizer substitutes for one when my apartment feels too quiet. Its playful company cheers my ears and makes me smile. I hope you enjoy this computer-generated music as much as I enjoyed building the instrument and coding the performer!
“Planctus Æquinoctialis (To Plant Tears)” (2021)
Viola, piano, and electronics
“Planctus Æquinoctialis” means equinoctial lament. It’s inspired by bouncing noises, crashing noises, the small hard tears and the dark brown tears in Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “Sestina,” Skrillex, living through pain, and maintaining hope.
Accordion and electronics
Directly under the recital studio (in UT’s music school) lies the largest, strangest, and most terrifying room in The Butler School of Music: the MRH basement. Officially, it’s off limits. A cavernous, reverberant space, full of hums, grinds, and whirs, it spans the entirety of MRH, hosts the building’s gigantic HVAC infrastructure, surely breaks asbestos regulation codes, and contains a small lake-like reservoir. During the pandemic, as I wandered, masked, through the silent and lonesome corridors of my school, I realized that the basement, which I had visited once as a freshman (someone forgot to shut off access to it via the freight elevator), was unlocked and accessible via the stairwells. I probably spent more time there in spring of 2021 than I should have.
I started playing accordion in 2020, and I started playing mixer feedback in 2021, so I wrote “HVAC Song” for the two instruments and played both parts. I tried at first to make a tab for performing the mixer part, but mixer’s unpredictability led me to record the mixer part and put it in a sampler.
In the live version, I play accordion and an accompanist plays the samples. At the end, the audience comes on stage, a beat is introduced, the accompanist and I improvise, a small and enjoyable party ensues, and the end is cued by cutting speaker power.
Epic Dualism Moment (2021)
Cello, bass, piano, and dobro with singing and amplification
At the house I lived in as a young kid, a towering, knobbly oak tree that loomed over the front yard terrified my little sister Miranda, who thought it had a face, and would watch her. The tree didn’t bother me as much as it did Miranda, but it captured my imagination, and I always felt something lurking in it. And when I learned about ghosts from my big sister, Rebekah, I imagined upright, humanoid, knotty logs with big, lizard-like black eyes, wearing long, dark, velvet robes, silently floating around. The tree must have inspired my young mind’s notion of a ghost. Even though my brain is now saturated with ghost media (the Halloween store, Jane Eyre, Ghostbusters, the scary ghost car commercials popular on Youtube in 2010…), if I close my eyes and think about ghosts, I still see the arborescent ones I made up when I was four. Since ghosts are some of the weirdest and most potent products of peoples’ imaginations, I wanted the performers of my piece to become their own realizations of ghosts. The title is inspired by Matt Abajian’s joke in the Devils Tower National Monument visitors’ center. A shirt for sale read, “my feet are tired, but my soul is happy,” and he pointed at it and wryly spoke the now-eponymous words. Substance dualism is funny to me; I cracked up for at least 2 minutes. Ghosts, although they are often portrayed as manifesting physical forms, are in essence spirit without body, so I thought it would be appropriate to call my ghost piece “Epic Dualism Moment.”